Some news is just good news. Kristi Pinderi, one of the people who built Albania’s LGBTQ+ movement from nothing, is going to be a dad.

Pinderi announced on social media in early October that he and his partner, Erjon Tela, are expecting a daughter. Her name will be Lili. She is being carried by a surrogate in Canada, where the couple have lived since 2017, and is due around February 21, Albanian outlets Shekulli, Faktor and Fiks reported.

“Now we plan differently, we picture the future differently. We even dream differently!” he wrote, in Shekulli’s report of his post (our translation from Albanian). “And when Lili comes to us, around February 21, we will already be changed. Forever.”

Who Kristi Pinderi is

If you came out in Albania any time in the last 15 years, Pinderi’s work probably touched your life, even if you never knew his name.

  • The first Pride. In May 2012, Pinderi and eight other activists rode bicycles down Dëshmorët e Kombit Boulevard in Tirana, which is remembered as Albania’s first Pride event. He founded the group Pro LGBT that same year, according to Wikipedia’s biography of him.
  • A shelter that didn’t exist. In December 2014 he co-founded STREHA, a residential shelter for homeless LGBTQ+ young people, described as the first of its kind in South East Europe.
  • Talking to the people in charge. With fellow activist Xheni Karaj, he lobbied Albania’s political parties ahead of the 2013 elections, work linked to the country’s 2016 National Action Plan for LGBTI people. (We profiled Karaj and her own fight for her family earlier this year.)
  • A book nobody had written. His 2020 memoir 1997, about growing up in Pogradec, is described as the first memoir by an openly gay man in Albania.

Why he left

Visibility had a price. In a 2017 essay for Xtra, Pinderi wrote that he and Erjon were receiving dozens of death threats a day on social media. After his mother died, he no longer felt his safety could be ensured. They landed in Vancouver on May 30, 2017, with their dog, Velo.

In Canada he retrained as a social worker, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social work at the University of British Columbia, and has worked with LGBTQ+ newcomers. In 2021 he was a finalist in the Top 25 Canadian Immigrant Awards. Tela, for his part, is described as one of Albania’s first LGBTQ+ rights activists.

How surrogacy works in Canada

Canada allows surrogacy, but only if it is altruistic. Under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which became law in 2004, it is a crime to pay a surrogate or to pay someone to arrange a surrogacy. A surrogate can be reimbursed for out-of-pocket costs directly related to the pregnancy, and the agreement follows the law of the province where it is signed, Health Canada explains.

Pinderi’s post is warm about the woman carrying Lili: he wrote that she has awakened in the couple “a sense of responsibility” they had never known before.

Meanwhile, back in Albania

Here’s the part that stings. If Kristi, Erjon and Lili lived in Tirana, the law would not see them as a family.

Albania has no legal recognition of same-sex couples. In 2025 the UN Human Rights Committee regretted that no such framework had been adopted, as we reported when we looked at Albania’s LGBTI Action Plan entering its final year. That plan promised to amend the Family Code with regard to same-sex relationships; it hasn’t happened. Same-sex couples cannot adopt jointly or adopt a partner’s child, and surrogacy is not permitted in Albania for anyone, per Wikipedia’s overview of LGBTQ+ rights in Albania.

There is movement. ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map notes a strategic case challenging the exclusion of same-sex couples from civil marriage, pending before Albania’s Administrative Court of Appeal, and lists recognising and protecting same-sex couples as its first recommendation for the country. And families with two mums or two dads are already raising kids in Albania, which is exactly why the fight over whether the law should say “parent” instead of “mother” and “father” got so heated this summer.

Why this matters

It would be easy to read Pinderi’s story as a sad one: the activist who had to leave. But that’s not how he tells it, and it’s not the whole picture. The bike ride in 2012 was nine people. This May, Tirana Pride held its 13th march, down that same boulevard, under the motto “Together for the Family.” The shelter he helped open gave young people somewhere to go. And now the man who spent years fighting for other people’s futures gets to plan his own, with a baby girl due in February.

For queer Albanians who are still at home, still waiting for the law to catch up, that’s worth celebrating. Mirë se vjen, Lili.