A Call for Grief, Courage, and Justice
On July 13, 2025, we lost a beloved member of our community — Nikita Engibaryan, a trans activist, a kind and sensitive soul, a friend to many of our team members, and one of the most active visitors of our youth center. Nikita was also one of our beneficiaries as a conscript — a young person assigned male at birth, navigating Armenia’s militarized systems while living as a trans woman. She was actively participating to the most essential events, which were organized by our team. It was important for her to be involved, heard and visible.
She should have been safe.
She should have been supported.
Instead, she was surrounded by violence, rejection, and silence.
Nikita was found dead in her home. The official cause of death is not yet confirmed, but suicide is considered a leading possibility. Like so many other trans people in Armenia and beyond, Nikita carried the unbearable weight of discrimination, marginalization, poverty, and trauma. Her last note — now circulating across social media — reveals the depth of her pain:
“Imagine going to another hell when you are already there.”
In her own words, Nikita described the feeling of being hated, rejected, and exhausted simply for being a trans girl. She shared the daily toll of survival — doing sex work, escaping into fantasies to endure reality, dreaming of love and joy she never felt allowed to reach. And she asked, in her final words, whether there could be a place — a world — where trans people like her could truly exist.
We grieve not only Nikita’s passing, but the society that failed another trans life.
The policies, the silence, the public indifference, and widespread transphobia that denied her a dignified life — they created the hell she described.
As a community, we are devastated. But we are not broken.
We carry her memory forward — and we rise stronger.
We will continue to build the world that Nikita dreamed of:
a world where no trans person feels that death is their only escape. Trans people worthy of joy, love, and life.
May Nikita rest in power.
May we turn our grief into resistance.
May we never forget her name.
#DiverCityNGO #ԲազմազանությունՀԿ #ДайверСитиНПО #DCNGO #ԲՍՄԻՀԿ #Diversity #Բազմազանություն #LGBT #HumanRights #LGBTRights
