CHILD CARE

UPDATE: Barack Obama’s Childhood Nanny A Trans Woman Living In Indonesia

NOTE: Since this post was first published, a number of readers have expressed their outrage over the original headline, “Now It Can Be Revealed. Barack Obama‘s Nanny Is a Tranny Ho!”,

The original headline was intended to be a satire of the Daily Mail, the British tabloid that initially reported the story, and the kind of sensationalistic and disrespectful language it often employs. (The original piece refers to Evie, strangely, as a “gay transgender man.”)

After reading the responses, though, I realize that the satire may not have come across clearly.  Acceptable terminology is something the LGBT community continues to debate (even the term “LGBT” is contentious) and what is parody to one person can be a hurtful insult to another.  So, in the interest of clarity, I’ve rewritten the headline.

The body of the story itself, I believe, was always respectful to Edie and her plight. —DA


England’s towering icon of journalistic integrity, the Daily Mail, has unearthed the latest scandal about President Obama’s origins: His onetime nanny is a trans woman who later turned to prostitution.

Barack Obama’s former nanny has been revealed as a gay transgender [woman] who made the future president laugh by trying on his mother’s lipstick.

“Evie” cared for the boy she called Barry when his mother Ann Dunham moved to the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in the late 1960s.

Openly gay, she would leave the house dressed in full drag – but was very careful that Barack never saw her.

In 1969, two years after Obama’s family moved to Indonesia, Evie met Ann Dunham at a party in 1969 and began caring for  8-year-old Barack. But after the family left Jakarta in the early 1970s, Evie was unable to get work as a domestic and turned to sex work. Beatings and raids became an everyday part of her life but, after Evie discovered the swollen dead body of a fellow working girl, she decided to live as a man:

“I knew in my heart I was a woman, but I didn’t want to die like that. So I decided to just accept it. I’ve been living like this, a man, ever since.”

Her story has been verified by residents of Menteng, the neighborhood Obama grew up in.

Sadly, the paper reports she now lives in a “hovel” in east Jakarta, where she earns pennies as a laundress. Apparently Evie didn’t know her former charge was elected President of the United States until some time after the election, when she saw a photo of the family on TV.

“Now when people call me scum,” she says, “I can just say: ‘But I was the nanny for the President of the United States!”

The worst part of this sad saga is we’re sure the Republicans will declare this poor woman was the ringleader of some international communist conspiracy dedicated to indoctrinating young Obama during naptime.

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