As Ella Nik Bayan was already in flames, a Deutsche Bahn security employee attempted to put the fire out. She is said to have shouted ‘Fuck you’” at him. A few hours later, the trans woman from Iran succumbed to her burns in hospital. ‘Fuck you!’ were probably her last words. ‘Fuck you!’
When Ella Nik Bayan arrived at the completely overcrowded central registration point for asylum seekers in Halberstadt, Saxony-Anhalt, in 2015, she already had a long journey behind her. She had been travelling for over a year. In a short documentary from 2018 that portrays her story, she says: ‘When Mrs Merkel said the refugees were welcome, I wanted to start a new life. I wanted to wear what I want. I wanted to live the way I want. I wanted to be a woman!’ This was not possible for her in her country of origin and in her family. In Iran, she had to live in constant fear of being arrested as a homosexual and murdered by the state. Her involvement in the opposition movement also put her at increasing risk. She gave up her well-paid job and set off on her journey.
In Germany, she encountered authorities who accepted her asylum application but used all the official force at their disposal to turn her into a man. She was not granted political asylum or access to gender-affirming care. She also found herself in an anti-queer environment at the refugee centre. There, too, Ella Nik Bayan was forced to continue hiding. Her application was initially rejected in 2017. As her trans identity had not been considered, she managed to successfully appeal with the support of the Saxony-Anhalt Lesbian and Gay Association. Since 2016, Ella had become more and more visible as a trans woman. She made many friends in Magdeburg, where she lived for a short time, got involved in the queer community, gardened passionately, and learnt German in a very short amount of time. But with her increased visibility also came increased anti-trans and racist hostility in public.
In 2018, shortly after receiving her positive asylum decision, Ella Nik Bayan moved to Berlin. She found even more friends there, jobs to earn a living, yet also experienced even more insecurity and hostility. Added to this was the bureaucracy of the ‘Transsexuals Act’ and its humiliating psychiatric assessments and endless applications to have the costs of gender affirming treatment covered. She had to prove herself again and again. It was never enough. It never ended.
On 14 September 2021, Ella Nik Bayan put an end to all of it. She left no farewell note behind as she made her way to Alexanderplatz. There, she set herself on fire.
The machine of hate and violence has continued without her. Passers-by took videos of the burning woman with their smartphones and posted them online. The comments were equally racist and trans-hostile. It was presumably a hospital employee who photographed her burnt body and circulated the image on the internet. Ella Nik Bayan was given a small grave at the Socialist Cemetery in Friedrichsfelde, where Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are also buried. Very few people know the exact location. In January 2022, unknown persons placed a fire extinguisher and a fuel canister on Ella Nik Bayan’s grave and defaced the small grave marker. In 2022, Ella’s grave was desecrated three times. The last act of destruction took place on 23 July 2022. On that day, Christopher Street Day (CSD) was being celebrated in Berlin, which proudly calls itself the rainbow capital.
Fuck you!
