Transgender Teen Evie Macdonald Shared Her Transition Story On ‘The Project’

The awesome teen who dragged Scott Morrison over his terrible attitude towards transgender kids has returned to The Project for a moving interview about what it’s like to transition.

13-year-old Evie Macdonald appeared on the program earlier this month after Morrison shared a shitty article in The Daily Telegraph about so-called gender whisperers in schools and insisted that we ought to “let kids be kids”. But Macdonald was not impressed with Morrison’s take, telling The Project that “there are thousands of kids in Australia that are gender diverse” and “we don’t deserve to be disrespected like that through tweets from our Prime minister”.

On Wednesday night, host Carrie Bickmore visited Evie at her home in Melbourne to find out what it’s been like for her growing up as a transgender kid.

“I was loved and everything but I just wasn’t as happy as I could be,” said Evie. “Being called ‘he’ all the time was confusing.”

Evie’s mother Meagan told Bickmore that at first she and her husband tried to encourage Evie to play sport in an attempt to teach her “how to be a boy”.

“Eventually Evie said to me ‘why can’t you accept me for who I am’,” said Meagan. “Then I realised it was me that needed to change and to be educated and figure out what was going on, because there was nothing wrong with her.”

“What was going on in your head during that time?” Bickmore asked Evie.

“Just a lot of confusion, anger and sadness,” she answered. “It was just overwhelming me over the years.”

Evie started living as a girl when she was nine years old but had to switch schools after her teachers were willing to support her. They forced her to use her old name, and arranged counselling for her without her parents’ permission. Her mother also claimed that at one point, a male teacher “dragged her across the room” to separate Evie from a group of girls.

Her new school is much more accepting, with Evie telling Bickmore she got a great response from her schoolmates the last time she appeared on the show.

“I walked into school and all my friends came up, people I didn’t know came up, and they said ‘oh my mum thinks you’re awesome, we think you’re so cool, can we hang out at lunch?’,” she said.

FYI Scott Morrison: that’s what it means to let kids being kids.

You can watch Evie’s interview on The Project below.