Epress.am News from Armenia
“Have you seen gay people in Armenia in daylight? The answer is yes. What about lesbians? Also yes. But where are the trans individuals? There are none of them.” Lilit Martirosyan,co-founder of Right Side human rights NGO
Martirosyan, along with a group of her LGBT+ activist friends, established Right Side in early 2016 with the aim of protecting the rights of transgender individuals. She says that the non-profit's purpose is to turn Armenia into a safe and prosperous country for transgender people.
Members of Armenia's transgender community, Martirosyan said in conversation with Epress.am, live in near-total isolation; most of them have been rejected by their families, friends as well as the society. According to rough estimates, there are hundreds of transgender people living in Armenia, four of whom have already undergone a sex reassignment surgery (SRS).
The most vulnerable within the LGBT + community
Martirosyan believes that in comparison with other members of the LGBT + community, transgender people are doubly vulnerable. They face challenges in every sphere of life, whether employment, education, access to healthcare and essential police services, and even when renting apartments.
“If a homosexual person decides to get a job, no one will be able to tell based on his or her appearance that this person's gay: they can work in any field, unlike transgender people. Because as much as they try to bring their physical features to the desired state through surgery, they'll never be able to bring their voice into line with their appearance,” the activist stressed.
She added that it's extremely hard for transgender people to rent an apartment; “They never do it on their own, but through a third party. And if the landlord finds out that the tenants are transgender individuals, they are immediately kicked out of the apartment.”
Covert surgeries
Transgender people, according to the interviewee, face numerous difficulties when turning to medical facilities on any matter, and the use of medical services for the purpose of sex change is particularly problematic. “Two years ago I wanted to undergo SRS in Yerevan's Izmirlyan medical center, but the doctors and the security staff beat me up. Because the center belongs to the church, and there's no place for LGBT people there.”
Transgender individuals' sex reassignment surgeries, Martirosyan says, are therefore carried out secretly and by foreign doctors. “Local surgeons are too scared [to perform the surgery]. 5-6 years ago, for example, an Armenian doctor performed a breast surgery on a transsexual person, and when [relevant authorities] found out about it, the doctor was fined 2 million drams. As a result, all surgeries are now carried out in secret. If you a phone a local physician right now and ask if they give trans people hormone treatments, they'll say 'no' due to safety reasons.”
Trans people also encounter major postoperative complications, but according to the LGBT+ rights activist, there is no one who would be willing to treat these. In addition, many transgender individuals do not have the necessary information needed to make the right decision.
“Hormone therapy is a very serious treatment. In other countries, sex reassignment takes 10 years. For two years, the person undergoes psychological counselling to explore his or her identity, then – a hormone replacement therapy, only after which SRS is performed. None of this happens in Armenia, and hormones are openly sold everywhere. People who want to change their sex just take these medications without counselling, which is not recommended since these hormones affect the person's mental world,” Martirosyan noted.
Deprived of the means of living
“I've been knifed, I've been hit with a car… I've filed 27 police reports, but they have done nothing [to help me],” the activist said, adding that many trans people have even turned to the office the Human Rights Ombudsman, but to no avail.
The situation for trans people in Armenia as well as the society's attitude toward them remains bad, or worsens, year after year, according to Martirosyan. “I always say 'thank you' to the [sex workers] in Komaygi (a Yerevan park where trans men gather at night to work as prostitutes) for opening the society's eyes and showing them that a man can wear women's clothes.”
It is widely believed in Armenia's society that transgender individuals mainly engage in prostitution, which Martirosyan does not deny, stressing that it's only a consequence of the public's hatred towards the trans community as well as of employment deprivation.
Internalized homophobia, she continues, has driven dozens of transgender people out of Armenia. “They leave because they can no longer put up with sex work; they don't have access to education or employment; they are unable to integrate into the society. They can't even go to a cafe without fearing that in the next moment homophobes and nationalists sitting at the next table might break their heads open with a chair.”