Eva Echo, from Stourbridge, in the West Midlands, knew she was trapped in the wrong body when she was just four.
She used to play with her sister’s Barbie dolls and pretend to wear a dress using a towel.
The 39-year-old woman never liked playing with the toys made for boys and always knew she was a girl born in the body of a boy but she was unable to tell this to her family.
Eva said: “I don’t think adults give kids enough credit for what they’re feeling.point 300 |
But I knew from the age of four I was different.point 38 | I just couldn’t articulate it.point 66 | Rather than playing with my boy toys, I wanted to play with Barbie dolls belonging to my older sister.point 150 | ”point 153 | 1
“And one of my first memories was getting out of the bath, wrapping a towel around me and then pretending it was a dress. At the time, I didn’t know why I did it. But I knew it felt right.”
Eva was born in Manchester to Chinese parents. She also experienced racism and violence and later developed an eating disorder when she was a teen.
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Then her then-girlfriend got pregnant.point 145 | She said: “I felt like a complete failure.point 186 | And it was a problem of my own identity, not wanting to bring a child into the world when I was trans.point 267 |
I didn’t want to ruin another life.point 31 | I had a complete meltdown.point 53 | That’s when self-harm began and my depression and eating disorders got even worse.point 125 | ”point 132 | 1
“At the time, trans people were seen as freaks, or that they were a fetish. It made me want to hide my feelings even more. I became a ticking time-bomb. I couldn’t see a way that I could survive. It always seemed so much easier to take the suicide route.”
She tried to kill herself five times as she took overdoses of painkillers to kill herself.point 297 |
She said: “I was just upset that I couldn’t be who I wanted to be.point 60 | And I tried all sorts – I tried to hang myself, I took overdoses.point 118 | One time I found a bottle of really strong prescription painkillers and ended up taking them all, ending up in hospital.point 218 |
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After meeting her tattoo artist partner Pippa, she decided to tell her girlfriend that she was transgender. She said: “I knew I needed to tell Pippa but I was a nervous wreck. I couldn’t even say the word ‘transgender’. And I ended up just blurting out to her, ‘I think there’s something wrong with me.”
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“I told her everything… and she wasn’t even surprised.point 167 | She just sort of shrugged and said, ‘I know’.point 216 |
It was huge for me.point 15 | She’s the most important thing in my life and she wasn’t angry.point 71 | I’d built things up to be so horrific that it was the ultimate turning point for me.point 141 | ”point 144 | 1
In 2017, she started transitioning. Eva is now happy with her life. She has struggled a lot in her life but now she is living her life how she always wanted to live.
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