Alternative Regimes of Truth: Anti-Gender Politics, Digital Platforms and Epistemic Struggles in Turkey

Abstract

In the current landscape where anti-gender ideology is gaining momentum, opposition to LGBTQI+ rights and visibility is becoming entrenched in public discourse. In Turkey, digital platforms have emerged as critical sites for the dissemination of anti-gender rhetoric. This manuscript focuses on two X (formerly Twitter) accounts, Mesele LGBT and Aile Apartmanı, which emerged after 2022 in Turkey, to analyse how globally circulating anti-gender narratives are rearticulated in a local authoritarian-populist setting. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study shows that these platforms function not only as channels of communication but as producers of 'counterknowledge' that challenge and seek to replace rights-based and scientific epistemic frameworks. Drawing on a dataset of 1394 tweets (2022-2025), the manuscript demonstrates, first, how scientific discourse is selectively distorted to pathologise LGBTQI+ identities, and second, how nationalist-securitized narratives construct LGBTQI+ activism as a foreign threat, legitimizing state-led authoritarian intervention in matters of knowledge and rights. The study contends that anti-gender digital discourse in Turkey functions as an epistemological struggle, employing digital infrastructures to construct alternative truth regimes in line with nationalist, heteronormative, and authoritarian agendas.