Becoming Nicole Read online

  Erhardt was twenty-six in 2003, when she took the counseling job at Asa Adams. She saw herself as someone whose role was to level the playing field, to make school accessible for all students no matter their background or academic standing. She saw herself chiefly as an advocate for kids, whose goal was to figure out how the school could “grow” the whole child, how to help students identify their feelings and how to cope with whatever troubled them. “Conflict resolution specialist,” was how she described it, but she was also fine with the simple title of school counselor.

  —

  ERHARDT HADN’T NOTICED WYATT right away when he and Jonas enrolled at Asa Adams. After all, he wasn’t the first boy she’d seen who liked to wear pink sneakers and carry a pink backpack. At that age, a boy can be just as easily attracted to typically feminine things as masculine things and still be “all boy.” Orono was a fairly liberal college town, where children were encouraged to be independent.

  Not until Kelly had stopped by Erhardt’s office about a month after Jonas and Wyatt began first grade in 2003 had the name “Wyatt Maines” come to her attention. Like any other concerned parent, Kelly had wanted to share her child’s story with Erhardt—fill her in on her son’s idiosyncrasies, so that maybe she could keep an eye on him.

  “I don’t know if you’ve met my kids yet,” Kelly began. “They’re twins and one of them, Wyatt, he really likes sparkly stuff. My husband isn’t really happy with that, but I’m just trying to do the right things for him. So I was wondering, do you know anything about this?”

  “I don’t, not really, but I think I’ve heard of it.”

  Erhardt got up from her desk, pulled the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders down from her bookshelf, and combed through the index. There it was: “Gender Identity Disorder.” Kelly already had read about this in her research online and from Virginia Holmes, but she’d never seen the whole description in the DSM, the bible of psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors. Erhardt read out loud:

  There are two components of Gender Identity Disorder, both of which must be present to make the diagnosis. There must be evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification….There must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex….In boys, the cross-gender identification is manifested by a marked preoccupation with traditionally feminine activities. They may have a preference for dressing in girls’ or women’s clothes or may improvise such items from available materials when genuine articles are unavailable. Towels, aprons and scarves are often used to represent long hair or skirts….They may express a wish to be a girl and assert that they will grow up to be a woman….More rarely, boys with Gender Identity Disorder may state that they find their penis or testes disgusting….

  Kelly listened carefully. It all sounded a great deal like Wyatt. She and Erhardt talked a bit more, and by the time Kelly left twenty minutes later she felt she’d made an important connection. For her part, Erhardt knew she had a lot of catching up to do. Wyatt was going to be at Asa Adams through the fifth grade, and as the school counselor Erhardt knew she’d have to learn much, much more about gender identity disorder. She also knew she’d done the wrong thing by grabbing the DSM in front of Kelly instead of first talking to her about Wyatt. It was like she’d pathologized the child right off the bat, suggesting there was something wrong with him. That wasn’t it at all, actually. The instinct to grab a book was simply because Erhardt didn’t have the vocabulary yet to talk to Kelly about Wyatt. She needed to put a name to what the two of them were discussing, and almost as soon as Kelly closed the door to the office, Erhardt hoped the child’s mother hadn’t taken offense.

  Erhardt told her clinical supervisor, who was not associated with the school, about the incident with Kelly and reading to her from the DSM and how mortified she’d felt.

  “What do you think you should have done?” the supervisor asked.

  “Well, I need to learn more about it.”

  Erhardt said she’d scoured the Internet but that she couldn’t find much, certainly nothing of substance related to transgender children.

  “Well, you know, you have this whole university here in Orono. Why don’t you start by contacting its LGBT center?”

  On a snowy February day, Erhardt walked over to the university, which was practically in her backyard, made her way up to the second floor of Memorial Union, the center of the university community, and stepped into the Rainbow Resource Center. It was just a single room, with a smattering of students mostly just hanging out, and they immediately jumped in to help her, pulling books off the shelves of the resource center’s library and fielding all of Erhardt’s questions. Forty-five minutes later, she left laden with information, suggestions, and contact numbers. She also couldn’t quite believe the generosity and friendliness shown her by these students; it was a feeling she would never forget.

  —

  ERHARDT AND KELLY HAD spoken many times in the three years since their first meeting. Often Kelly called Erhardt to ask a question, and sometimes Erhardt came across information or an outside resource she thought might help Kelly. It was all about making sure Wyatt was comfortable at school, and it was a mission both women shared.

  During the twins’ third-grade year, Erhardt’s office had been adjacent to the classroom, so after escorting the kids to school, Kelly often stopped by to chat, and it was something the two women continued to do when Wyatt and Jonas were in the fourth grade. The two women talked about what they were reading and exchanged things they’d recently learned. Other times they tried to anticipate what problems might arise for Wyatt in the coming weeks and months. Erhardt liked Kelly’s commonsense approach to parenting. She never asked for special treatment for Wyatt. She was a problem solver, like Erhardt, and the two women, though fifteen years apart in age, shared a mutual understanding and respect.

  When Kelly picked up the phone that afternoon in September 2006, Erhardt explained Mrs. Kreutz’s dilemma about Wyatt’s self-portrait. She told Kelly the portrait was quite beautiful, but the teacher wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. Should she post the picture in the hallway or not? She didn’t want to hurt Wyatt, but she didn’t think he understood that it might cause problems for him. Kelly laughed.

  “I’ve seen a lot of those pictures.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Erhardt asked.

  “Well, what was the actual assignment?”

  Erhardt put her hand over the receiver and asked Kreutz the same thing.

  “It was ‘What do you see when you look in the mirror?’ ” Kreutz said.

  Erhardt repeated the teacher’s answer to Kelly.

  “Well, he didn’t follow the directions. Tell him to bring it home and that he has to do another picture.”

  Erhardt did, and the drawing that was finally hung in the hallway looked much more like Wyatt on the outside than the previous picture. That person, the person he felt himself to be, wasn’t quite ready yet for public display.

  Did Wyatt really, truly see a woman with eye shadow and long hair and a sexy figure in the mirror when he looked at himself? If there is no one place in the brain that provides a sense of self, then perhaps there’s no one place in the brain that provides us with a picture of that sense of self. After all, the feeling we have of being a body arises from several disparate places in the brain. There are a hundred million cells in the eye responsible for picking up visual information from the world, but they are connected to just a million neurons, the cells responsible for signaling the brain about what is being seen. In other words, the brain discards more visual information than it lets in. Which means the message from perception is constantly being massaged. There is no simple act of perception. What there is, is expectation. Coins appear larger to poor children than to those who are well off. Food-related words are clearer and appear brighter on the page to people who are hungry. Everything in our environment influences who we are and
how we see ourselves—even our own bodies. Scientists have conducted experiments that show that people who deliberately take on classic poses of dominance and stand, for instance, with their legs apart and hands on their hips, even for just a few minutes, substantially increase their self-confidence. Ask someone to hunch over or curl up, and they will lose that confidence.

  What is the mirror image seen by children who believe themselves to be the other gender? The body tells a story, but the story can change what a body sees. And a body can change a person’s mind.

  On another day, when the twins were still in the fourth grade, Kelly picked up the phone again. It was Kreutz.

  “Wyatt is telling everyone to use female pronouns. Is that right?”

  Kelly was surprised, but not shocked. Wyatt had never wavered in identifying as a girl, or at the very least as a boy-girl. It was so deeply embedded in his sense of himself that it made perfect sense to Kelly that he would want his classmates to treat him as such.

  “If the kids are comfortable, I don’t think it’s a problem,” Kelly said.

  For Wyatt’s classmates it made sense. The only thing still “boyish” about him was his name. If other kids at school who didn’t know him well referred to him as “he,” that was okay by Wyatt, too. Kelly’s ability to accept Wyatt for who he was had helped instill a kind of confidence in him so that anything he said about himself to others seemed, in his mind, perfectly normal and ordinary.

  But Kelly certainly knew how far society, not to mention her husband, still needed to go. Transgender issues were rarely raised in public at the time. Gay marriage was still being argued—and defeated—in courts around the country. On Election Day, November 7, 2006, eight states voted on amendments to ban same-sex marriage. All but one (Arizona) passed those measures. Inroads in transgender rights were few and far between. On January 1, 2006, however, the state of California became the most protective state in America for transgender people when gender identity was included in the state’s nondiscrimination laws with respect to education, employment, housing, foster care, and health insurance. At the time, only three other states (Minnesota, New Mexico, and Rhode Island) had any laws on the books preventing gender identity discrimination in employment and housing. Those states also outlawed discrimination when it came to public accommodation—that is, restrooms. As liberal minded as California was, it wouldn’t add public accommodation to its nondiscrimination laws until 2011.

  Around the same time California passed its first gender identity law, twenty-seven-year-old Eric Buffong began to endure what would turn out to be months of mocking asides, insults, and outright harassment as a line cook at upscale Equus restaurant in Tarrytown, New York. A kitchen co-worker had discovered a 1998 White Plains High School yearbook with a senior-year portrait of Buffong—when he was Erica, not Eric. A trans man, Buffong was born female but for nearly a decade had lived as a man, worked as a man, and presented himself as a man. As soon as he was “outed” by a nine-year-old photograph, Buffong became the object of ridicule. His name was changed to Erica on the work schedule, his work hours were reduced, and four months later he was fired.

  Buffong filed a $3 million lawsuit claiming his dismissal was based not on job performance but gender identity discrimination. The restaurant asked the court to throw out the case. “We are good people and we wouldn’t do anything that is unscrupulous like that,” the executive chef told the New York Daily News in August 2006 after the restaurant lost its bid to have the lawsuit dismissed. Although at the time the New York State Human Rights Law banned discrimination on the basis of sex and sexual orientation, it made no mention of gender identity. Nonetheless, a Westchester County judge hearing the case ruled “transgendered persons” were protected from workplace discrimination by the sex discrimination provision in the law.

  The judge’s decision was not universally praised. A New York law blogger, writing about the case, wondered if the decision might be overturned on appeal: “Is the alleged discrimination that occurred in this case based upon the plaintiff’s gender or the fact that the plaintiff chose to dress in a way that was not consistent with her gender? How different is the alleged harassment in this case from that one would encounter if one chose to wear a clown suit at all times?”

  In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the national debate on transgender rights was still mostly sotto voce, and advocacy centered on legal documents. At the time, the U.S. Department of State requested proof of sex reassignment surgery for passports issued to transgender people, and forty-seven states made evidence of sex reassignment a requirement for new birth certificates. Three states (Idaho, Ohio, and Tennessee) barred all changes to birth certificates even with proof of sex reassignment. No one really knew how many people in the United States identified as transgender. Research was plentiful on lesbian, gay, and bisexual people, but not on those identifying as transgender. In fact, getting someone to admit to being transgender, even anonymously, was extremely difficult, which made research nearly impossible.

  To a child such as Wyatt, however, saying he was really a girl was as natural as saying he was right-handed. Wayne was still ceding nearly all the decisions about clothing and pronouns to Kelly, but the degree to which Wyatt’s own schoolmates and teachers accepted his feminine nature was slowly making Wayne realize not only that his son’s beliefs and behavior were not going away, but that most everyone else in Wyatt’s orbit accepted him for who he was. It still frustrated Kelly, of course, that Wayne never seemed quite able to accept her opinion about Wyatt until it was validated by someone else. What was clear was that Wyatt’s transition, if that’s what it was, needed to be nurtured.

  A chance to help that transition presented itself in December 2006. The fourth graders were giving a Christmas concert and Wyatt very much wanted to be a part of it. But onstage, the girls wore black skirts and white blouses and stood on one side, and the boys, in black pants, white shirt, and tie, stood on the other. He pleaded with his parents to be allowed to wear a skirt. Wayne wanted no part of the discussion. Kelly enlisted the help of Lisa Erhardt.

  She suggested a solution, a true compromise: Wyatt could wear culottes, the baggy shorts that looked more like a skirt than pants. On the night of the concert, Wayne, in a rare moment of wanting to please Wyatt, presented him with a bouquet of roses. Wyatt stood in the girls’ section, in his black culottes and white blouse, but whether by design or accident, he also stood right on the seam where the girls’ and boys’ sides met. Wyatt was beside himself, beaming with pride and joy throughout the concert. A transition had begun and no one even seemed to notice.

  CHAPTER 13

  Getting the Anger Out

  Before starting the fifth grade, all fourth graders, including the twins, were asked to fill out a questionnaire about their thoughts, feelings, and goals for the upcoming school year.

  Q: “What do you hope to learn in the fifth grade?”

  Wyatt: “I hope to learn more about history during the History Fair. I want to be Abbie Burgess [an heroic nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper from Maine]. 5th grade will be so cool! I can’t whate I’m gonna rock the 5th grade!”

  Jonas: “I don’t really know. I guess I’m looking forward to everything really. But if I really had to choose one thing I have to say it would probably be the rockets. I mean, I’ve wanted to do it since 3rd grade. And I cannot wait for the history fair. I’ve decided to do my project on president Teddy Roosevelt.”

  Q: “What can you do to help yourself achieve your goals?”

  Wyatt: “I will learn more about Abbie Burgess. I will be nicer, I will wear sweet clothes, and again BE MYSELF!”

  Jonas: “I can always study hard, it’s like the #1 way to ace school. I think working is great for the mind. And it’s really going to come in handy when it’s time for the history fair. But I just don’t know where to find clothes that look like Teddy’s!”

  Q: “If you wrote a book, what kind would it be (mystery, comedy, etc.)? What w
ould the main character be like?”

  Wyatt: “My book would be a mystery, comedy and fantasy. Comedy because I’m a little funny, mystery to expand the comedy and fantasy to open up more doors literally. My main character would be sassy and never afraid. But the co-star would be the exact opposite—except 10 times the sassy.”

  Late in April 2007, Wayne and Kelly sat down with Wyatt one night to watch a Barbara Walters 20/20 special on transgender children. Jonas was in the playroom, occupied with his action figures. Walters profiled a child named “Jazz,” about the same age as Wyatt and Jonas, who was male at birth, but identified as female from a very early age. The Walters special documented all the struggles Jazz’s family was going through, much like the Maineses. Jazz, like Wyatt, wanted to be open and “out” as a girl, but was being held back by his parents’ fears. Jazz’s parents, just like Wayne and Kelly, encouraged a gender-neutral look, especially in preschool: He was allowed to wear a feminine top, but only with pants. And just like Wyatt, this was an arrangement that only frustrated and angered Jazz.

  According to the parents, who were not identified by their real names, their turning point came with a dance recital. They didn’t allow Jazz to wear a tutu, like the rest of the girls in the ballet class. Afterward, it was acutely clear how devastated and out of place Jazz had felt.

  “She just kind of stood there and snapped her fingers and did the tapping thing with the toe, and just looked so sad,” Jazz’s mother recalled. “It was heartbreaking to watch. Really heartbreaking.”

  So on Jazz’s fifth birthday, there was a kind of public coming out at a pool party for friends and family. Jazz wore a girl’s one-piece bathing suit, and “he” was now “she.”

  Wyatt was flooded with relief, knowing there was someone out there just like him. Wayne couldn’t believe it. Wyatt, he realized, had all the same anger issues, and he and Kelly all the same anxieties, but Jazz’s parents were openly discussing them on national TV. Wayne fought back tears for the rest of the hour.