CONTENT WARNING: VIOLENCE, SEXUAL ASSAULT, RAPE, ATTEMPTED SUICIDE
By Ovileya Myrah
I don’t know where or how to start. Writing about myself drives me back to the past, and that's a scary road for me. I’m a 28-year-old trans woman and have been living in Greece since December 2016. I left Bangladesh in order to survive. I had no other choice. I’ve been away from home for a long time… I miss my family.
Since as far back as I can remember, I felt trapped in the wrong body. My childhood was never normal; I never felt like the other kids around me. It was filled with physical violence, bullying, and cruelty. I was molested by a relative and a priest.
It was at school that other kids told me for the first time that I was neither a boy nor a girl—and they didn’t allow me to sit with them because of it. They made fun of me, pulled down my pants in the classroom to “check my genital area.” How can things like this just happen?
Another student called me a “half lady,” insinuating that half my body is male and the other half female. These comments were hurtful and bothered me. They made me feel worthless. I can’t recall a single moment of joy in those days. I’d lock myself in my room, just me, myself, and I. I wanted to be invisible. The only time I was at peace with myself was when I’d play with my dolls. I could wear lipstick—which I had stolen from my sister—and that is the only precious moment I can remember.
Growing up surrounded by pain and being abused by the people around me made me feel like I didn’t exist, didn’t have a place in society. Every single day was a burden to get through. Quite often I asked myself why I was born the way I was.
Since as far back as I can remember, I felt trapped in the wrong body.
One morning, when I was 13 years old, some students in my class hit me hard with the class bench, and I had to be sent to the hospital. My father then accused me of being “girlish” and having provoked the boys to attack me. He started to beat and slap me often after that.
All I could think of at that point was how to end this, and I started planning how I would end my life. Every thought I had felt so scary I didn’t dare move forward with it, but one day I was beaten so badly that I just couldn’t take it anymore. So I went to the bathroom, grabbed the chlorine, and drank it all. The next day I found myself at the hospital. It was the worst day of my life.
My first kiss was with a neighbor. We were playing in the street, and when I looked into his eyes, he said, “I’ve got you. Everything will be okay.” When he said he understood how I felt, it was hard for me to know how to react. I burst into tears—it felt like all my pain was coming out at once. He held me tight, and after that, I would think about him constantly. We were spending more and more time together, and when one evening he asked me to watch a movie at his house, my excitement soared. It was one of the best nights of my life. It felt right, and it was the beginning of my dreaming of my womanhood.
But it wouldn’t have been possible for him and me to love each other freely, outside those four walls. In Bangladesh, our love wasn’t valid. It’s illegal for two men to fall in love, and I was a man in other people’s eyes. Once again, I started to hate myself for my existence. Can you blame me?
I was so busy loving him that I forgot about my own problems. Trans people always have to compromise. I was so young then, and I had no sense of my own identity, no self-worth. I had to live with so many struggles just because of my gender.
When I went back to school a couple of months after my attempted suicide, two girls in my class were very friendly to me, and we started spending time together. It was my first girl gang. It felt good to have friends.
