The founder of Armed Queers SLC, a pro-gun LGBTQ group being investigated by the FBI for possible ties to accused Charlie Kirk sniper Tyler Robinson, has been identified as a radical transgender political organizer with ties to communist politics.
Armed Queers SLC quietly scrubbed its online presence after Kirk was assassinated, but a law enforcement source told The Post that all open-source information on the group was downloaded and handed over to the FBI.
The cache of information includes posts from Ermiya Fanaeian, the child of Iranian immigrants, according to the source familiar with the federal investigation, whose Instagram bio calls for “Revolution + Trans liberation in our lifetime!”
Ermiya Fanaeian, the founder of pro-gun LGBTQ group Armed Queers SLC, is being investigated by the FBI for possible ties to Charlie Kirk assassination suspect Tyler Robinson. SLC Pink Pistols
Tyler Robinson pictured at his arraignment in Provo, Utah on Sept. 16, 2025. Utah State Courts/Handout via REUTERSShe has also advocated violence to achieve the aims of LGBTQ groups, citing the Stonewall Riots as an example in a TV interview on the campus of University of Utah.
“Sometimes violence, protest, and really riots and those kinds of loud rebellions must take place for tangible change,” she said.
The feds are still deciding whether to bring charges against Robinson and working to determine whether anyone else was involved in Kirk’s killing.
However, Fanaeian and Armed Queers SLC are on investigators’ radar as the FBI has widened its probe to include a potential “extended network” that could have aided Robinson in the Sept. 10 sniper attack at Utah Valley University.
Fanaeian founded Armed Queers SLC in 2023. X/@ErmiyaFanaeian
A meeting of Armed Queers SLC in Sept. 2023. X/@ArmedQueersSLC
A poster for Armed Queers SLC. Armed Queers of Salt Lake CityDespite her fringe leftist views, Fanaeian has time and again been welcomed by the political mainstream, and even rewarded for her advocacy.
In 2022, Fanaeian was given a “7 for 17” award for “gender equality” by the Utah Global Diplomacy, a nonprofit that worked with the State Department to “promote citizen diplomacy and international exchange in Utah.”
Fanaeian also joined then-presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) onstage during an April 2019 campaign event in Salt Lake City, an archived picture from Fanaeian’s since-deleted Facebook page shows.
A Warren spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Fanaeian on stage with Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a rally in Salt Lake City in 2019. Ermiya Fanaeian/FacebookIn 2020, Fanaeian, 25, started the Salt Lake City chapter of Pink Pistols, a national organization “whose mission is to arm LGBTQ people,” Utah’s KUER wrote that year in a puff piece heralding Fanaeian’s involvement in the group.
“I used to think that guns were a scary thing,” Fanaeian told the outlet. “Back then, I would have agreed with Joe Biden’s assertion to take everyone’s AR-15s away. And now I own one.”
It was quite a pivot — just a year earlier, she founded the local chapter of March for Our Lives — David Hogg’s group, which campaigns to restrict gun rights.
However, the honeymoon phase with Pink Pistols was short-lived; Fanaeian, then a University of Utah student, and the group parted ways just a year later. Pink Pistols now disavowing any connection to the former chapter leader.
“While initially welcomed, she began using the Pink Pistols name to promote broader political issues, violating our rule that we are a single-issue organization devoted solely to the safe, legal, and responsible use of firearms by the queer community,” Pink Pistols wrote in a statement this week.
Fanaeian founded Armed Queers SLC, which hosted a lecture on “queer resistance” at the University of Utah in September 2023 — about 45 miles from UVU where the 31-year-old Turning Point USA founder was killed.
Flyers promoting the event hosted in partnership with self-described “leftist student organization” Mecha de U of U feature a young woman clad in two ammo belts and clutching an AK-47, with her finger on the trigger.
Fanaeian has previously advocated for violence to achieve the goals of LGBTQ groups. Instagram/@ermiyafanaeianFanaeian also helped launch a student study group for the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), with a curriculum that includes names like Karl Marx and Vladmir Lenin.
Fanaeian’s inspiration to form the group came from “historical communist and socialist revolutionaries of the mid 1900s” including Fidel Castro and the Black Panther Party, according to the university’s student newspaper, the Daily Utah Chronicle.
“The Party for Socialism and Liberation is not a liberal movement — we are a leftist movement,” Fanaeian told the outlet. “We are an anti-capitalist movement. We are a working class revolutionary movement.”
Federal investigators are looking into a potential “expanded network” that may have known about Robinson’s alleged plans.
PSL’s main backer is Neville Singham, a US millionaire tech mogul with extensive ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who bankrolls other radical organizations including National Students for Justice in Palestine, International People’s Assembly, Code Pink and ANSWER Coalition.
The award that Fanaeian received from Utah Global Diplomacy “recognizes young Utahns working to achieve the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while exemplifying Utah Global Diplomacy’s core values of respect, social responsibility, and open dialogue,” an archive of the organization’s website reads.
The Armed Queers SLC founder is described as, “a Trans liberation and Feminist political organizer whose work has included organizing around the abortion struggle, working with the ACLU to secure the rights of Trans youth in the education system, organizing to criminalize conversion therapy in the state of Utah, working on electoral campaigns, and creating research studying the conditions of gender oppressed people at the hands of state institutions.”
Robinson was hit with seven state charges including aggravated murder.
A spokeswoman for Utah Global Democracy, which has locked down its website and removed any public reference to giving Fanaeian the award, did not return a request for comment by The Post.
According to an official breakdown of Utah Global Diplomacy’s revenues shared by noted online data sleuth DataRepublican, $445,000 of its $727,800 income comes from government grants.
It was not immediately clear if the award given to Fanaeian included a cash prize.
A State Department official confirmed to The Post on Wednesday that ties to the organization, which were indirect through “an external implementor,” are being “completely severed and dismantled.”
“We are taking aggressive action to ensure that any implementor that has any relationship whatsoever with this radical organization is completely cut off from any State Department engagement,” the official said.







