Commander in Chips

Five suicide attempts couldn’t kill her. An HIV diagnosis was supposed to finish the job. Instead, she walked into a body modification studio and started cutting away everything that made her human. Both ears. 32 teeth. Her nose. She split her tongue, implanted 18 horns into her skull, and covered every inch of skin in scales. Today she goes by “it” - and says she’s never been happier. Her full name is Eva Tiamat Baphhomet Medusa. The world calls her the Dragon Lady. She calls herself “the world’s most modified transsexual.” Before any of this, she was Richard Hernandez - a vice president at a bank in Texas. She grew up in Bruni, a town of 300 people near the Mexican border. As a freshman in high school, she walked up and down the streets screaming “I’m gay” at the top of her lungs in one of the most machismo regions in the country. “Closets are for clothes and tennis shoes,” she says. At 18, she left for Houston. Fresh from a town with no skyscrapers, she didn’t know you couldn’t trust just anyone. Two men raped her. She doesn’t hate them. “I’m not them,” she says. She became a banker. Built a career. Then came the HIV diagnosis, which later progressed to AIDS. She left the bank to take care of her health and nearly died. That’s when something shifted. “I decided I’m not going to die looking like a human,” she told Soft White Underbelly. “Being human has been such a negative part of life.” She spent over $60,000 on body modifications. Not with doctors - with body modification artists. She was the fifth person in the world to get horns implanted into her cranium. She was the first person ever to have both ears surgically removed for cosmetic reasons. She had her testicles removed and plans a full penectomy. “I will be a genderless dragon,” she says. “That’s what dragons are.” Her son hasn’t spoken to her since the transformation. She did some of the modifications specifically so he could see what his father was becoming. “His weird-looking, strange, used to be a man, is now a woman, is now a reptilian, dad,” she says. She was abandoned in the woods as a child by her birth parents. She denounced them in favor of a snake. She tried to take her own life five times before the transformation gave her a reason to stay. “My transformation is by and large what saved my life after five failed suicide attempts,” she says. “I am truly happy for the first time in my life.” She prefers the pronoun “it.” Just like a snake. She swallows food whole because she only has six teeth left - representing the mouth of a rattlesnake. Sirens drive her crazy because without ears, everything sounds louder. She makes cotton candy for the neighborhood kids, and her neighbors say her energy is “the most gentle and pleasant” they’ve ever been around. In the video below, you can see Tiamat sitting across from the interviewer with her full-face scale tattoos, horn implants, and no ears, calmly describing how she eats, why she removed her teeth, and the moment she decided to stop being human. Some will say she’s mentally ill and needs help, not a body modification studio. Others will say she found the only thing that kept her alive when nothing else could. If removing every trace of your humanity is what finally made you happy - were you ever really human to begin with?