A young transgender woman is presumed dead after what appears to be a suicide note accusing her family of forcing her to detransition was posted online.
Eden Knight, a 23-year-old Saudi woman living in the United States, claims her family hired “fixers” and a lawyer in Washington DC to get her returned to Saudi Arabia.
In the Middle Eastern country, transgender people face severe repression.
Eden’s scheduled Twitter post began, “If you’re reading this, I’ve already killed myself.”
She went on to say she was forced to return to Saudi Arabia and then denied access to her hormone medication.
Another tweet, this time from an account that appears to be her family’s, announced the death of a “young man” with the same legal name as Knight.
Friends say they haven’t heard from her in over a day and a half and believe she’s died.
“I don’t have a doubt in my mind that she’s dead,” Bailee Daws, 27, a close friend of Ms Knight’s, said.
“It’s horrible to say, but it’s not speculative at this point.”
Daws is now part of a group of friends collecting evidence about Eden’s fate.
Before studying computer science at George Mason University, Knight attended an American high school in the Washington DC suburbs and then an international school in Riyadh.
She was reportedly on an international scholarship that expired before she could graduate, resulting in the expiration of her visa.
She was “extremely terrified” of being deported back to Saudi Arabia because of her transgender identity and hoped to seek asylum in the United States.
In 2022, she began hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
This had improved her mental health, and she became very active on American social media in LGBT+ and left-wing circles.
Around August, Knight was allegedly contacted by two Americans who offered to mediate her disagreements with her parents, whom she described as “strict conservative Muslims” in her final message.
The fixers, according to the message, introduced her to a Saudi lawyer who gave her food and shelter while pressuring her to stop HRT and live as a man.
She wrote: “At a certain point, I realised I was entirely dependent on Bader for food and shelter, and that if I ran away, he could easily find my location, and since I was illegal, I would have just been deported to Saudi. I subconsciously gave up, I was too tired.”
She flew back to Saudi Arabia where she claimed her parents regularly searched her belongings and electronic devices while calling her a “failure” and an “abomination”, and she tried to stay on HRT by hiding her drugs but was found out twice.
The message closes: “I wanted to be a leader for people like me, but that wasn’t written to happen. I hope that the world gets better for us. I hope our people get old. I hope we get to see our kids grow up to fight for us. I hope for trans rights world wide.
