Obama had transgender nanny in Jakarta: report

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As a child, President Barack Obama once had a nanny in Jakarta who was a little different from other female caretakers: she was actually a he, who discovered at a young age that she was simply born the wrong gender.

Her name is Evie, now 66-years-old, according to The Associated Press, which published a lengthy profile of her on Monday morning.

She met Ann Dunham, the president’s mother, in 1969, when Barack was just 8-years-old. Evie was reportedly working with the kitchen staff at a local official’s cocktail party when the two struck up a conversation about her recipe for beef steak and fried rice, and soon Evie was working in Dunham’s home.

“[Barack] was so young,” Evie reportedly said. “And I never let him see me wearing women’s clothes. But he did see me trying on his mother’s lipstick, sometimes. That used to really crack him up.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if Dunham knew that Evie was a trans person, but the AP report notes that she was seen leaving Dunham’s home many times dressed as a female. Then, about two years after Dunham and Barack left Indonesia, she became a sex worker after being repeatedly denied chances to become a maid.

One of an often hated minority in Indonesia, Evie said she gave up her cross dressing two decades ago after one of her trans friends was found dead in a sewage canal. She claims to have lived in fear ever since, surviving in a culture that reviles trans people.

“I don’t have a future anymore,” she reportedly said.

As president, Obama has made a point of standing up for LGBT rights, although he has not endorsed outright marriage equality. Obama did, however, make history in 2010 by hiring Amanda Simpson, the first openly trans person to ever receive a presidential appointment, as a technical adviser to the U.S. Commerce Dept.

The Obama administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well, has adopted rules banning discrimination against LGBT people, and his jobs plan was praised by LGBT groups for offering tax credits to employers who take on the long-term unemployed, many of whom are trans people who’ve faced endless employment discrimination.