Lilit Martirosyan
Lilit Martirosyan is an Armenian LGBTQ+ rights activist and the founder of the Right Side NGO, an Armenian transgender rights group.[1][2]
Biography
After facing intense bullying and family conflicts as a child, she moved out of her parents' home to live on her own at the age of 13. Despite working both as a waitress and a cook, she was eventually forced to do sex work to earn enough money to survive and to be able to afford hormone therapy.[3]
In 2015, she became the first trans woman in Armenian history to legally change her name in her passport.[4]
In 2016, she co-founded the Right Side NGO.[5]
In April 2019, she gave a speech to the National Assembly of Armenia, becoming the first openly trans woman to do so. In her speech, she described the violence and discrimination faced by the trans community in Armenia, saying that they were left "unemployed, poor and morally abandoned," and talked about the influence of the LGBT+ community in the 2018 Armenian revolution in the hopes for better rights.[6] Her speech faced a significant backlash, including multiple death threats and local press publicizing her home address.[7] Naira Zohrabyan, the representative of the chair of the Assembly's Human Rights Committee and a member of the Prosperous Armenia party, accused her of having "violated our agenda," despite having been the MP who gave the floor to Martirosyan, and with Prosperous Armenia MP Vartan Ghukasyan calling for trans people to be "expelled from the country".[8] Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan accused Zohrabyan of staging the speech as a "political provocation."[9]
In 2020, she was awarded the Human Rights Tulip by the government of the Netherlands.[10]
See also
References
- ^ "Lilit Martirosyan". 10 April 2019.
- ^ "Can transgender people speak in Armenia?".
- ^ "Armenia: "I Was Born in a Body That Was Not Mine"".
- ^ Martirosyan, Lucy (20 June 2022). "Armenian activist won't stop fight for trans rights – despite the threats". openDemocracy. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
- ^ "General information".
- ^ Dehghan, Saeed Kamali (26 April 2019). "Armenian MPs call for trans activist to be burned alive after historic speech". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 April 2019.
- ^ "Trans activist faces calls to be burned alive by parliamentarians after historic speech". 26 April 2019.
- ^ Karasz, Palko (26 April 2019). "A Trans Woman Got 3 Minutes to Speak in Armenia's Parliament. Threats Followed". The New York Times. Retrieved 26 April 2019.
- ^ "Ruling Bloc, Opposition Spar over LGBT Rights in Armenia".
- ^ Zaken, Ministerie van Buitenlandse (2020-12-10). "Lilit Martirosyan receives Human Rights Tulip 2020 - News item - Government.nl". www.government.nl. Retrieved 2021-12-07.