The sun was not shining in Tbilisi when they laid Keso to rest. It was a gloomy autumn Sunday, and a crowd dressed in black had gathered in a remote hall for the funeral. There were friends, family, activists, the press, some prominent faces, and a few politicians. The president showed up to pay her respects. The mourners stood in silence and disbelief.
It is hard to remember the last time the death of a prominent figure caused such shock and grief in the country. One case that comes to mind is when, early last year, Liza Kistauri, another famous Georgian transgender woman, met her tragic fate in Belgium at the age of 26 after fleeing hostility and violence in her homeland. But it was different when news broke that Kesaria (Keso) Abramidze, Georgia’s first and best-known transgender woman, was brutally murdered the day after the parliament passed an anti-LGBT law.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter writing about the terrible murder that has both united and conflicted Georgians in their grief.
On September 17, the ruling Georgian Dream party adopted the long-advertised anti-queer law. The law, the culmination of Georgian Dream’s hate-filled campaign, includes a ban on gay marriage (it was never legal), censorship of LGBT-themed content, and a ban on gender reassignment surgeries and legal procedures. Nothing big happened on the day of the bill’s passage – at least, nothing big enough to do justice to the act of abolition of basic human rights. A small rally, a few statements, and protest banners hung here and there by activists. The general mood was to wait it out, hoping it would be forgotten soon enough, worrying not to allow the ruling party to make it the central issue of their hate-fueled election campaign. In other words, hitting the snooze button until the right time came to address the issue.
The next day, Georgia’s most famous transgender woman was brutally murdered. Kesaria Abramidze, a 37-year-old model and TV personality, was found dead from 28 stab wounds in her apartment. Police arrested Beka Jaiani, Abramidze’s boyfriend, as part of an investigation into a gender-motivated, premeditated murder committed with extreme cruelty. Prosecutors say Jaiani, 26, lured Abramidze into a meeting by agreeing to publish their photos together a week after the couple broke up following an argument. Abramidze’s friends say the suspect, who has a history of abuse, told the victim he was coming over to propose to her.
In a country with inflamed politically motivated transphobia, this news should have come as no surprise. Transgender women are known to be the most vulnerable to the effects of such hate. In the past decade, Georgia has witnessed at least two other hate-motivated murders of trans women, and another transgender woman was found dead in questionable circumstances. Many have sought asylum in more liberal countries, and those who remain in the country face daily challenges of isolation, violence, disregard by law enforcement, and discrimination in the labor market that often pushes them into sex work. There was even a season of My Wife’s Besties, the country’s most popular TV show, that featured an episode depicting an almost identical brutal hate crime.
And yet, that someone would end Kesaria’s life was something Georgians found hard to believe and hard to process: many knew Keso since they knew themselves and knew her as an integral, inseparable part of Georgia and its struggles to change, grow, and reinvent itself over the past decades. It felt as if Keso had been there since there was an independent Georgia and would be there as long as the country lived.
To know her was to love her
Kesaria came to Tbilisi as a teenager after her mother reportedly thought life wouldn’t be easy for her in the western Georgian province where the family lived. She would later become the first person in Georgia to come out as transgender. In a conservative country like Georgia, coming out meant more hate, more threats, but also more attention. Comfortable in the spotlight, Keso took the risk of becoming a public figure in a danger-filled environment. And so began her pioneering and hard work of gaining public love and acceptance for herself and others like her.
Over the years, Keso’s artistic personality, sincerity, and sense of humor made her a frequent guest on Georgian television, which has long been known for welcoming those it otherwise helps to exclude: viewers were hateful, but they were also curious. Year after year, she became a part of Georgian public life, accepting whatever love others were willing to give her. Some loved her as a joke or a TV sensation, others loved her for her courage, some loved to hate her, many loved her against their convictions, and many loved her against their conscious will. But there were lots of those who loved her for who she was. “Those who know me have a different opinion of me,” she said in one of her interviews, something the rest of us learned as an undeniable truth – but only after her death.
Keso was probably the one who best embodied the classic trait of a Georgian literary hero: someone who brings change through conflict. And there must have been many who she conflicted – many of those who constantly heard from politicians and the church that people like her were against nature, unhuman and unreal, only to turn on their televisions and see that she was more real than anything else they saw on TV and much of what they encountered in their daily lives.
Along with realness, she channeled disarming goodness – kindness and forgiveness that sometimes bordered on naivety. There are her earlier remarks, which went viral, when she, as a contestant in the 2018 Miss Trans Star International beauty pageant, refused to speak about the dire situation in Georgia regarding trans rights in order not to portray her country in a negative light.
Love thy neighbor
All this legacy was why the whole country broke down in tears when they heard of her death. There were, of course, the usual hateful remarks – a small portion, but still more than enough to drive people like Keso out of public life. There was a legitimate and long-standing self-criticism that Georgians admire the dead and that some have to pay with their lives to get the love they deserve.
Yet much of the shock seemed very real, so real that those who support and promote the politics of hate had to scramble for excuses, trying to imply that it was just another case of femicide – something they had learned not to feel guilty about. It was femicide, even if they didn’t say the word out loud – but it looked like they were ready to accept this definition for someone they refused to recognize as a woman while she was alive. They’d accept anything but the fact that the gruesome murder had anything to do with how they had deliberately dehumanized people like Keso for years and how they had outlawed her the day before she was killed.
“Those people saying “mother is a mother and father is a father” must understand that life is not straightforward… it has never been,” Kesaria’s neighbor, a grieving and furious older woman, told the media, alluding to one of the tropes of the anti-queer propaganda by the Georgian Dream.
The neighbor was one of the ladies, one of the “normal people,” one of those people whose demands the political leaders claim to fulfill when they come after queer people ahead of elections. But now they will have to face that something has cracked in the world they thought they controlled. Kesaria cracked the system – she took the media tools designed to degrade her and used them to get the love she deserved.
She brought change, but Georgia has yet to learn how to accept such change without needing human sacrifice.
