Obama’s transgender nanny

last updated 8 January 2015

Once, long ago, Evie looked after a boy she called “Barry” Obama, said Niniek Karmini in the Associated Press. Obama grew up to become the world’s most powerful man, but his transgender former nanny now lives in fear on Indonesia’s streets. Life was never kind to Evie. Growing up in Jakarta, she was regularly beaten by her father, who wanted his son “to act like a boy,” she says, “even though I didn’t feel it in my soul.” Bullied and teased, she quit school to become a cook, and in 1969 was employed by Obama’s mother to look after the then 8-year-old Barack. Evie never dressed as a woman around her young charge. “He did see me trying on his mother’s lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up.” When Obama’s family left Indonesia in 1971, Evie couldn’t find another job and turned to prostitution. She stopped dressing as a woman in 1985 after soldiers beat one of her transgender friends to death. “I knew I was a woman, but I didn’t want to die like that.” For Evie, who now barely earns enough money to survive, Obama’s 2008 election victory gave her a rare reason to feel proud. “Now when people call me scum, I can say, ‘I was the nanny for the President of the United States!’”