In this starseries, we ask people from all walks of life what it means to them to be a woman or a man, to live as a trans person or to not feel like they belong to any gender. We set out to find what shapes our sense of gender. This time with author Dinçer Güçyeter.
His mother worked in a factory, in a pub and in the fields, while his father pursued his own plans, mostly loss-making ventures: Dinçer Güçyeter, 45, grew up as the son of Turkish guest workers in Nettetal in the Lower Rhine region. After school he completed an apprenticeship as a tool mechanic. In 2011, Dinçer Güçyeter founded the EILIF publishing house, worked as a forklift driver and published his poems, of which the volume “My Prince, I am the Ghetto” was awarded the Peter Huchel Prize in 2021. In autumn 2022 he published his first novel: “Our Germany Fairy Tale”, published by mikrotext Verlag. In it he tells the story of his family, about growing up between different cultures and his longing for freedom, using different forms of language. For this he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Dinçer Güçyeter lives with his Woman and the two children still in Nettetal.
Even as a child I was rather feminine and that meant I had to fight. At school, in sports class anyway and later in my training as a tool mechanic. I grew up in a Muslim family where the structures were masculine. But even though I consider myself feminine, I don’t judge men who appear masculine. They are influenced by their families. They are boys who start attending the mosque at the age of five. Who are pumped up by their mothers because it conforms to traditional expectations.