From Abuse to Advocacy: Christina Evers’s Journey of Self-Acceptance

She has been raped. Beaten by her own brother. Stripped and mocked in a police station. Rejected by a mother who chose silence over her child, twice, three times, more times than anyone should have to count. And yet Christina Evers laughs often — the kind of laugh that carries everything she has survived.

Now 46, Evers is a Rex Karmaveer Award recipient and a volunteer who has spent years sitting with people the rest of Mumbai looks away from, the homeless, the abandoned, the sick. She was born Christopher. She has known herself as Christina for as long as she can remember, knowing anything at all. This is the story of what she survived to get here — and what she built when no one was coming to save her.

“That door closed that night and has not opened since”

Evers says the abuse began when she was very young — a relative, someone trusted by her family, someone who came to the house. When she was seven, she found the courage to tell her mother. Her mother’s response wasn’t anger at the man. It was the dismissal of her daughter. “That was perhaps the last time I approached my mother about what was troubling me,” Evers said. “That door closed that night and has not opened since.” It didn’t stop there. She says the abuse continued for years, from neighborhood boys, from seniors at school, and in one harrowing instance, from the police themselves, who asked her to undress before laughing at her. “Anyone can get raped,” she said. “A dog can get raped. A two-month-old baby can get raped. What does the police understand about rape?”

A childhood spent being told she was wrong.

Long before she had a name for what she was feeling, Evers knew she wasn’t a boy. Not for a single day. But she grew up in an Anglo-Indian Christian household where the church called her a sin and the neighborhood agreed. “It took me twenty years to accept myself,” she said. “If it took me that long, how can I expect others to accept me overnight?”

500 rupees and a train out

At 23, with nowhere left to turn, Evers boarded a train from Kolkata to Delhi with 500 rupees in her pocket, chasing a job ad from GE Capital during India’s BPO boom. It was, she says, her only ticket out of everything that had hurt her.

She built her life from scratch — finishing her degree while working, starting hormone therapy, beginning her transition — entirely alone.

“I forgot fear when I got raped,” she said. “After that, what else could happen to me?”

Read More: Top 5 LGBTQIA+ Events In Delhi NCR To Attend This Pride Month 2026

Rebuilt and rejected all over again

After gender-affirming surgery in 2010, Evers returned to Kolkata, where relatives burned her educational and medical documents rather than accept who she had become.

She kept going. She found work with an NGO, sitting with abandoned elders and children who’d never seen the inside of a classroom — the people everyone else had given up on.

“I know what it is to be abandoned,” she said. “I know what it is to have no one sit with you.”

A prestigious award — and a slur from the crowd

Evers received the Rex Karmaveer Award, one of India’s most respected civil society honors, for that work. Even on stage that night, she overheard someone in the audience call transgender people a disease. She stood there anyway. “I am living life on my terms now”

Today, Evers works in learning and development and continues to volunteer, using her own story to support other transgender people still fighting to be seen. Asked if she has any regrets, she paused — the only real pause in the conversation. “I have no regrets. I am living life on my terms now,” she said. Then, quieter: “But I do wish that home had been something different.” She laughed. “You don’t get everything

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