When Ella Nik Bayan, a 40-year-old transgender Iranian woman, set herself on fire in Berlin’s iconic Alexanderplatz square in September last year, her death came as a shock to her closest friends and colleagues.
Six months later, only the charred remains on the cobblestones attest to what happened. The story sparked a debate in the German media for a time, raising many questions but finding few answers.
Public interest may have waned since then, but the confusion and sadness of those who knew Ella well has not changed.
Some people in the wider trans community saw Ella’s act of public self-immolation as a protest, but she left no message or explanation and some of her closest friends feel there was no political motive.
So what drove Ella to such a desperate act? What had happened to her since she left Iran that could explain her decision to end her life? Clues can be found in the challenges she faced on the journey that ended at Alexanderplatz.
“He was a very kind and shy person. He was always smiling,” remembers Edna Pevestorf.
Edna is a social work coordinator who met Ella when she first arrived in Magdeburg, a city in the former East Germany where the anti-immigrant Alternative fuer Deutschland (Alternative for Germany) party won strong support in the last election.
She was transgender: her gender identity differed from the one assigned to her at birth. She arrived in Germany in 2015 and her journey, like that of many other queer refugees, was fraught with difficulties.
He had fled Iran illegally four years earlier and arrived in Germany via Turkey, a common route for Iranian refugees because they can enter without a visa.
At first, Ella did not reveal her gender identity and it took almost a year for her to start asking her caseworker some questions.
“She came to a German class I was teaching,” recalls Edna, “and asked if it was legal to live here as a gay person, if it was okay. That was the first time I thought to myself that I was dealing with something. “
But she wasn’t gay. Like many other members of the LGBTQ+ community in Iran, she had learned to repress who she was and how she felt about herself for fear of being persecuted and prosecuted.
She had been raised in a conservative religious family in southern Iran with almost no access to information about gender identities and sexual orientations. For Ella, coming out as transgender was not easy, and Edna recalls one particular conversation on a day in the fall of 2016.
“He came to my office and said he needed to talk about something. He told me: I’m not gay but I want to be a woman!” The two talked for a couple of hours in which Ella mainly wondered how she could live as a trans woman.
A few months later, in December 2016, Ella paid another visit to Edna’s office.
“There was nothing on her that was new except the nail polish, just on one finger of her left hand.” That was the first of Ella’s many small steps toward transformation.
Little by little, Ella began to reveal her gender identity to those with whom she felt safe, people like Edna or Lisa Schulz, who became close friends while working with refugees at a community center in Magdeburg.
Lisa remembers Ella as a smiling and outgoing person who made friends easily.
“I met Ella at the center. At first she was there to improve her German. But after a while she was a great help to us by acting as a translator. She spoke five languages: English, German, Arabic, Turkish and Farsi. She was a very friendly person. helpful.”
About her gender expression, Lisa says, “She was always Ella, but at first she didn’t look like the Ella we know now. It was a process.”
A process that took more than a year to reach its full swing.
She also helped out in a community garden, as Lisa recalls: “She was always out there in the field planting potatoes or whatever, dressed in a short skirt and heels.”
But the reality is that not all places were safe for Ella. Lisa and Edna tell that she was harassed and intimidated in the streets.
“Wherever she went, people talked about her and sometimes even verbally attacked her,” says Lisa. “She just wanted to be accepted as the woman that she was and people didn’t accept that.”
Michael, another friend of Ella’s in Magdeburg, remembers the day a gang of young men attacked her on a train.
“The attackers did not care that other passengers were witnesses. She had to defend herself with pepper spray,” he recalls. Michael says that he couldn’t understand what the attackers were shouting as they were speaking in Farsi, but Ella told him that they were threatening to rape her.
Life as a minority trans woman was not easy for Ella in Magdeburg, where she moved five times. According to Michael, her last residence in that city was a women’s shelter, which she left because some of her did not want her there.
In the fall of 2019, Ella decided to move to Berlin in the hope of being more accepted.
Berlin is known for having many safe queer spaces and a more liberal approach to the LGBTQ community.
But Kaveh Kermanshahi, who works with queer refugees for LesMigraS, an organization that helps trans and queer people in Berlin, says that many of these spaces are not accessible to refugees for various reasons.
“Asylum seekers and refugees depend on government financial support, which isn’t much,” he says, “so it’s not affordable for them to go to bars, cafes and clubs that are known as queer spaces.”
“Another problem is that most of these spaces are designed for white cisgender gay men and not for trans women ‘of color’, for example. Also, there is the language barrier,” explains Kermanshahi.
Ella’s asylum application was initially rejected, which is quite common according to Kermanshahi.
She says there is a perception that trans people have access to gender reassignment surgery in Iran and subsequently live ‘freely’, a false assumption that weakens their asylum claim.
In fact, says Kaveh, transgender people in Iran must first undergo compulsory therapy and are at the mercy of counselors’ personal biases. And even those who want an operation can wait years before receiving permission.
“The therapy sessions used to determine if someone needs the operation are not adequate and the counselors and therapists in Iran do not have up-to-date knowledge,” says Kermanshahi. “In many cases, people feel forced to accept hormone therapy and surgery. Under Iranian law, identity cards (with gender other than birth gender) are only issued to people who undergo the operation ( of gender reassignment). This means that many transgender people feel they have no choice.”
Baran is an Iranian trans woman who has lived in Turkey since 2017. She has been granted refugee status but does not have the right to work.
She fled Iran precisely because she did not want to undergo gender reassignment surgery, but her family forced her to undergo hormone therapy which led to depression.
“I was happy with my body and my genitals; I didn’t want to take hormones or have this operation,” says Baran. But her family insisted and the doctors said that if she refused to go under the knife, she simply was not a woman.
Baran says that things in Turkey were not much different. The police officer who was in charge of his asylum case knew nothing about transgender people. “He told me I should have the operation and ‘get it over with’.”
She had similar experiences in Germany, where she complained that her gender identity was often questioned.
Lisa Schulz went to visit Ella in Berlin in July 2021, a few months before she took her own life.
“She had started her hormone therapy and you could see those first signs of transformation in her. She looked great and she had on a wonderful dress,” she recalls. She seemed happy and invited Lisa to her favorite sushi restaurant.
“I knew how much he loved sushi and going there with his closest friends, so it was an honor for me,” recalls Lisa.
At the time, Ella was taking a training course that would allow her to apply for a job at a Tesla production plant. After so many odd jobs in cafes and restaurants, this was her chance to finally find a steady job and income.
“When I left her, she was like wow!” Lisa says. “I was happy for her.”
But Ella was not happy.
Many Iranian LGBTQ refugees hope to be accepted for who they are in Western countries, but too often the reality does not meet their expectations.
In German law, trans asylum seekers are identified by their birth sex and assigned name until they are granted refugee status. This may take several years, meaning Ella would have been identified as a “male” on all of her paperwork.
For Ella, the long and often disappointing struggle for acceptance continued in her new hometown.
“I heard from friends in Berlin that she was harassed in the street there, too,” says Lisa.
Transphobia – prejudice against transgender people – can lead to violence. The 2021 Murdered Trans People Observatory report showed that more than 370 trans and gender-diverse people were murdered last year around the world, 96% of them were trans women.
On September 14, just a couple of months after that happy meeting with Lisa in Berlin, Ella took her own life. The news deeply shocked her friends.
“It didn’t make sense. I thought she was doing well. She was looking forward to a new job and a good life. It was shocking,” says Lisa.
Michael was one of the last people Ella met in September, a few days before her suicide. Ella’s birthday was in November and when Michael asked her what she would like, Ella asked for a winter coat.
He is convinced that at the time they went shopping together, Ella had not made any plans to take her own life.
“She was incredibly careful with money,” he says. “If he had planned suicide at the time, he wouldn’t have let me buy that coat. That just doesn’t make sense.”
The place where Ella Nik Bayan took her own life quickly became a makeshift shrine, where people left flowers, candles and cards.
But the hate has not stopped. In January this year, Ella’s grave, which is in a Berlin cemetery, was vandalized by unknown assailants who left a can of gasoline and a fire extinguisher on the spot.
We will never know why Ella decided to take her own life in such a public way, just that at some point she decided that moving on was no longer an option.
We know that he faced multiple obstacles, often combined with each other: from fleeing his home country to the long bureaucracy of the asylum process and what seemed like a seemingly endless succession of medical, psychiatric and legal appointments and consultations in his effort to finally be herself. Not to mention the discrimination and abuse that never seemed to stop.
She had mostly struggled with a smile on her face but, despite the close and loving friendships she made, there were perhaps many others who did not return her kindness.
The BBC has approached the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees for comment on Ella’s case and a detailed response from a spokesperson. They told us that, although they could not comment on a specific case, asylum procedures are carefully conducted case-by-case assessments based on the principles of the rule of law, and rejected asylum seekers always have the right to appeal.
If you or someone close to you is depressed or in trouble, seek help. You can find support resources at these links based on your region.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-internacional-60982528, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-04-11 09:30:06
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