Lilit Martirosyan is an Armenian LGBTQ+ rights activist and the founder of the
Right Side NGO, an Armenian transgender rights group.
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
Hormone therapy or hormonal therapy is the use of hormones in medical treatment. Treatment with hormone antagonists may also be referred to as hormonal therapy or antihormone therapy. The most general classes of hormone therapy are oncologic horm ...
.
In 2015, she became the first trans woman in Armenian history to legally change her name in her passport.
In 2016, she co-founded the
Right Side NGO.
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
The 2018 Armenian Revolution, most commonly known in Armenia as #MerzhirSerzhin ( hy, ՄերժիրՍերժին, meaning "#RejectSerzh"), was a series of anti-government protests in Armenia from April to May 2018 staged by various political and ...
in the hopes for better rights. Her speech faced a significant backlash, including multiple death threats and local press publicizing her home address.
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". Prime Minister
Nikol Pashinyan accused Zohrabyan of staging the speech as a "political provocation."
In 2020, she was awarded the
Human Rights Tulip by the government of the Netherlands.
See also
*
LGBT rights in Armenia
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Martirosyan, Lilit
Living people
Armenian LGBT rights activists
21st-century Armenian people
Year of birth missing (living people)
Transgender women
Armenian LGBT people