What it’s really like to live as a transgender child

Evie Macdonald was just two years old when she realised she was a girl who had been assigned male at birth.

By the age of nine, she wanted to end her own life, Nine News reports.

“I wanted to die,” says Evie, now aged 13. “I would’ve rather gone to heaven and been a girl than live here as a boy.”

Originally born as Ethan, Evie is one of an estimated 45,000 trans children living in Australia. She remembers feeling very different at school from everyone else.

“I had this feeling I was a girl and something was wrong with me,” she said.

“It was really confusing. I wanted to be a princess and I wanted to play with Barbie dolls. I always felt as though I was a girl.”

Evie’s family thought she was going through a phase, until Evie revealed to her mother that she was having suicidal thoughts.

“Mum then said she’d rather have a daughter that is alive than a son who is dead,” she said.

The family turned to the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne for help.

“It was me who had the problem,” Meagan said. “If I didn’t support Evie, I know she wouldn’t be here today. She would’ve at least attempted suicide multiple times or even worse, completed it.”

Evie is currently in stage one of gender reassignment, which begins with taking hormone blockers.

“What kids have to go through if they’re trans is not an easy thing,” Meagan said. “Evie’s had psychiatric care since she was nine. She’s had fertility specialist appointments. Evie has a paediatrician and now that she’s on hormone blockers, she has to do that every three months.

“If Evie doesn’t do the medical transition she wants and has asked for, what’s the other side of that? The other side is I don’t have a child who will even make it to adulthood.”

Meagan and her friend, Karyn Walker, set up Parents of Gender Diverse Children to provide peer support and connect families across Australia.