Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  All Wayne wanted was to have a “normal” family, just like everyone else. Everyone else doesn’t have a normal family, Kelly told him. She hadn’t had one, and maybe that’s why she wasn’t crushed, like Wayne, when Wyatt turned out to be different. Kelly didn’t know what a perfect family looked like, so she had no expectations. She had no threshold for disappointment, no picture in her mind or her heart that Wyatt wasn’t living up to. But Wayne did have a picture from his own happy childhood, and as far as he was concerned, every time Wyatt dressed up in girls’ clothes he made a mockery of it.

  “Wyatt, you don’t want to wear those shoes,” Wayne would say when Wyatt appeared in a pair of Kelly’s heels.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “You don’t really want to be a girl.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  That’s how the conversations—if you could call them that—went. Wyatt wearing a dress; Wayne wanting Wyatt to act more like a boy. Around and around they went, with Wyatt just as stubborn and determined and convinced he was correct as Wayne was. And each time her husband and child had one of these back-and-forth exchanges, Kelly knew Wayne was fighting reality.

  One evening, when the twins were about three years old and had been tucked in for the night, Kelly sat down at the computer in the living room and typed five words into the search engine:

  “Boys who like girls’ toys.”

  It was both a question and a statement of fact. For Kelly, it was also a beginning. She scrolled through science articles, online forums, and medical sites. She read about homosexuality, transsexualism—wasn’t that what drag queens were?—and something called transgender. She read for hours. Her first thought was, well, maybe the girls’ toys and clothes and behavior meant Wyatt was gay. But sexual orientation was the same thing as attraction, and that seemed almost crazy to imagine, at least in a three-year-old. Transsexualism certainly wasn’t right, either, since that seemed mostly about adults who undergo surgery to change from being male to female or vice versa. As for being transgender, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defined it as “of or relating to people who have a sexual identity that is not clearly male or clearly female.”

  Well, that was sort of like Wyatt. One of his best friends in pre-K was Cassandra, and she taught him all the girly things he wanted to know. For instance, a girl doesn’t dry her hands at the sink in the back of the classroom with brown paper towels. Oh no, Cassandra told him, a girl gracefully shakes her hands, fast, like they’re on fire. Cassandra was the girliest girl Wyatt knew. She had long hair that fell all the way down her lower back. She even had long nails and wore nail polish. It was true Wyatt loved to play with dolls, but he was also very physical. He could throw a ball even better than Jonas, and he often wrestled around on the ground with his brother.

  Gender, Kelly read, was the belief that you’re male or female. It was something innate, not something you had to think about or tell other people about, unless those other people treated you like one gender when you felt you were the other. Kelly didn’t remember ever having such self-conscious thoughts when she was a child.

  The articles flew by, she took notes, and she kept searching, that night and the next and the next night after that, until the words she was using in her searches got downright ridiculous: “Boys who like pink,” “Boys who have bowl haircuts and wear shirts on their heads, but have male toys and like wrestling.”

  She kept coming back to that one word, “transgender.” Gender is about having the physical characteristics of a male or female. Gender identity, she read, is something else—and it has nothing to do with having a penis or a vagina, and everything to do with how a person feels. Did Wyatt feel like he was female? Most people who are born with the anatomy of a male also identify as male, and most born with the anatomy of a female identify as female. But not everyone. Some people grow up feeling like the gender opposite of the one they were born into. Others have physical characteristics of both genders. Kelly didn’t pretend to understand it all, not by a long shot, but “transgender” sounded more like Wyatt than anything else.

  She kept reading. Although a sense of self is innate and established by the age of four, some children express dissatisfaction with their birth gender as early as two years old. Those who do, and in whom the dissatisfaction persists, are said to have gender identity disorder. The diagnosis was changed to gender dysphoria in 2013 in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-V, maintained by the American Psychiatric Association. Gender dysphoria is the state of unease that results when a person’s sexual anatomy doesn’t match up with his or her inner sense of gender. This was more than just a shift in language by the APA, it was a watershed moment akin to the elimination of homosexuality from the DSM-II in 1973.

  In the DSM-V, the general diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria lists eight traits or behaviors a child must manifest for at least six months, including:

  • A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender).

  • In boys (assigned gender), a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire.

  • A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play.

  • A strong preference for the toys, games, or activities stereotypically used or engaged in by the other gender.

  • A strong dislike of one’s sexual anatomy.

  There must also be present “clinically significant distress” or an impairment in functioning. This last indication is important partly because of what it doesn’t say but implies. The distress transgender people feel when their anatomy is in conflict with their gender identity is different from the distress, for example, of a depressed person. In the latter case, the distress is part and parcel of the condition of depression, but that’s just not the case with transgender people. If there is an inner distress it arises from knowing exactly who they are, but at the same time being locked into the wrong body and therefore being treated by others as belonging to one gender when they really feel they are the opposite. The dysfunction arises not from their own confusion, but from being made to feel like freaks or gender misfits. Kelly shuddered when she thought of the torment other kids were capable of inflicting on someone like Wyatt. All in all he was a happy child, but when he wasn’t, it almost always had to do with being a “boy-girl,” which is how he referred to himself.

  Out of the blue, he’d ask Kelly, “When do I get to be a girl?” or “When will my penis fall off?” The questions almost seemed natural, as if it was just a matter of time before he became a girl. If Kelly could only see into Wyatt’s brain. Did he believe he’d emerge as a “she” from this boy chrysalis stage he was in, like a human butterfly? Maybe Wyatt really did believe that some babies were born female, some male, and some could change from male to female when they were still young. He was impatient, though, and that’s where the unhappiness seemed to come from, from wanting to push the process he thought must be as natural as caterpillars transforming into butterflies.

  Wayne wanted to be close to both his sons, but he couldn’t get his mind around Wyatt’s gender-bending behavior, so he retreated—to the woods to cut down trees, to the gym to work out his frustrations, to the pool or the lake to swim until he was exhausted. He wanted to be a good parent, but he didn’t know how to deal with Wyatt’s situation, whatever it was.

  Every holiday season, Wayne mailed a letter along with the family’s Christmas card to friends and relatives. He liked writing the letter. He was proud of his wife and—for the most part—his two boys, and writing the letter gave him time not only to reflect on the past year but to take pleasure in all that he and his family had accomplished and learned. But by Christmas 2000 Wayne was finding it harder to compose the annual missive. How to explain to people—people he loved and admired but who might lack a depth of understand
ing—about his Wyatt. That he was just a little bit different, but in every other way normal.

  2000: Wyatt is still very dramatic. He loves to dress up, play music and wrestle with daddy….For Christmas he wants Yellow Barbie. Jonas is a bit taller than Wyatt. We are not sure why, it is difficult to get him to eat anything but cookies. He still loves his Teletubbies, reading books and helping daddy. For Christmas he wants a fishing game.

  Two years later, not much had changed, except perhaps the intensity of the differences between the five-year-old boys:

  2002: Wyatt is creative, kind and obsessed with girls….He plays “dress-up” and acts out numerous stories….His girlfriend is Leah.

  It was easier to describe Jonas:

  Jonas is very analytical. He also never stops talking or moving. His favorite things are action figures, puzzles, the computer and of course pirates.

  Wyatt’s favorite things? Coloring, dolls, computer games and puzzles. His favorite story was Ariel.

  Feeling stymied at work and realizing there was limited upward mobility, Wayne began to look around for other jobs. In the spring of 2003, with the children in pre-K, an opportunity presented itself: an offer from the University of Maine in Orono, where he would eventually become the executive director of safety, health services, transportation, and security. It wasn’t a huge bump up in terms of money, but a job at an academic institution was prestigious and appealed to Wayne’s love of learning. It would be hard for him to leave the area where he grew up, but he couldn’t turn down the position. Kelly wasn’t thrilled. She loved living in the village of Northville, with the sun-swept views over the lake. One of her closest friends was Jean Marie, Leah’s mother. Leah also had a brother, Wolfgang, whom they called Wolfie, who was a good friend of Jonas’s. Originally from Long Island, New York, Jean Marie was funny, outgoing, and uninhibited. Even with four kids running around, Kelly felt comfortable and relaxed with her in a way that she did with few others. The kids especially liked to act out the books Kelly and Jean Marie read to them, or pretend they were characters from one of their favorite TV shows. Kelly was usually the one who put together the costumes, and Jean Marie provided the sound effects.

  The move wasn’t going to be easy for the twins, either. Jonas loved playing in the woods behind the house, and Wyatt enjoyed skipping through the big colorful garden with the stepping-stones that bore the imprints of the twins’ tiny hands and etchings of lady bugs and butterflies. Kelly’s mother, Donna, had recently come to live with them, in an apartment attached to the house, but she wouldn’t be going with them to Orono. She and Wyatt had become particularly close. Together they’d dress up Barbie and comb her long locks or watch The Little Mermaid. Sometimes Wyatt would help Grandma Donna water the flowers in the garden. He always felt like a princess there, in his own special kingdom. On the plus side, in Orono the family would be part of a university town, which Kelly hoped would be more inclusive. Maybe it would even help her figure out what she needed to do for Wyatt.

  In the meantime, Kelly continued to think about gender. One night, as she was watching the TV news, a story came on about a couple in New York City who had allowed their young son to go to school dressed as a girl. The parents were reported to the police and arrested, and the child, at least temporarily, was taken away from them. Kelly was a hypervigilant mother, so she was keenly aware of all the ways her children could be wrested away. She’d let Wyatt grow his hair out and occasionally wear a feminine shirt or blouse, which meant that Wayne and Kelly sometimes found themselves getting into awkward conversations with strangers. If they were eating out someone might comment on the twins and ask, “How old are your son and daughter?”

  “Oh, they’re four,” Kelly would say, not bothering to correct the questioner.

  When they were at McDonald’s they usually let the kids tumble around in the play area. When it was time to leave Kelly or Wayne would have to call out, “Wyatt, Jonas, it’s time to go!” That’s when Kelly and Wayne would notice the puzzled looks on other parents’ faces. Kelly ignored them. For Wayne, though, every public encounter with a stranger’s confusion jabbed at him. People weren’t just judging Wyatt; they were judging him and Kelly.

  What does it matter? Kelly would say. It isn’t anyone else’s business, and we don’t have to explain our situation every time we meet someone. Who cares?

  But it did matter, and he did care.

  One night, before the move, the Maineses were invited over by Jean Marie and her husband, Roscoe, to see the improvements they’d made on their house. Wayne and Roscoe were cut from the same cloth—they both grew up loving sports, hunting, and enjoying what they called “rustic carpentry”—building things without the need for absolute precision. Wyatt was playing with Leah when the two of them tumbled downstairs, giddy and flushed and both wearing dresses, heels, earrings, and full makeup. Everyone laughed, even Wayne, but it was a tight laugh, and it caught in his throat. Roscoe invited Wayne out on the porch for a beer.

  “What am I going to do?” he said to Roscoe.

  They both knew what he was talking about.

  Roscoe looked at Wayne, not sure what to say, and took a swig from his beer.

  “I don’t know, Wayne. I don’t know.”

  “Kelly thinks I’m a jerk, but I just don’t know what to do.”

  The two men were quiet, unable to think what more they could say to each other. Wayne’s pain and confusion were palpable, but they were Wayne’s to bear, and as he stood there next to Roscoe he let the cool night air wash over him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Down East

  “Down east” is how many people refer to Maine, although to Mainers, down east is more specifically the coastal sections of rural Hancock and Washington counties, from Penobscot Bay on the west to the Canadian border on the east, with the Atlantic Ocean defining the southern side of the region. Spiritually or culturally, down east means you are never far from the sea, with islands, peninsulas, coves, and bays giving the jagged coast of Maine its distinctive character. The origin of the term “down east” dates to the time of the sailing ships. When traveling from Boston to Maine, in a northeasterly direction, ships were often rewarded with a wind at their backs, which meant they were sailing downwind. Likewise, on their return trip to Boston, these same ships would often be sailing upwind, which is why Mainers often say they’re “going up to Boston,” though geographically Boston is about fifty miles to the south of Maine’s southern border.

  A New England ethos runs deep here. Generations of the same families have refused to be dislodged by bad weather, bad business, or bad fortune. Mainers make do, no matter what, and it’s not hard to understand why. Battered by the push and pull of ancient glaciers, beaten by the wind and weather, the coast of Maine is as ornery and stubborn as the people who settled it. Generations of the same families populate the rural cemeteries and the property records of Maine, where anyone not born in the state, no matter how long they’ve lived here, is referred to as being “from away.”

  With 95 percent of Mainers identifying as Caucasian, only Vermont is whiter, and even though Orono is a college town, it is still 93 percent Caucasian. In other ways, though, Orono is a peculiar hybrid. Straddling both land and water, it lies at the mouth of the Stillwater, a tributary of the Penobscot River. The Stillwater breaks away from the larger river twelve miles to the north and drains back into the Penobscot downstream. Marsh Island was created when it was encircled by the two rivers. Orono occupies part of the island and part of the mainland—the University of Maine is one of the only colleges in the country located entirely on an island that is not also a state or a city—and its founding predates the American Revolution. Orono was named for the chief of the Penobscot Indians, the same Indians the Europeans eventually pushed out of Orono’s rich fishing and hunting grounds. After the Revolution, lumber mills dominated the town, and while they no longer do, Orono is very much a product of pragmatism and reinvention, a place where very little is ever thrown out and ev
erything is capable of being repurposed, including its stores. A sign for the Orono Pharmacy & Ice Cream Parlor hangs from a rusty pole out front, even though the Ice Cream Parlor is long gone. So is the video store that replaced it, as well as the walk-in medical clinic that replaced the video store. Now the front of the pharmacy is inhabited by Layla’s Bazaar, an international grocery store.

  Despite a few urban highlights, including the Sunkissed Tanning Salon, the town has retained a rural character. When the farmers market opens in the warm weather, many customers arrive by canoe or kayak. Part of Marsh Island, where the university sits, is open every year to bow hunters in search of white-tailed deer, and along Orono’s thirty-nine miles of roadway grow a hundred varieties of shade trees, Norway maple, eastern white pine, red oak, green ash, and black locust. American elm trees still line the byways of Orono, as well as serviceberry trees, so named by New England’s first settlers, who planned their funeral services around the timing of the tree’s bloom, because it signaled the ground had thawed enough for graves to be dug.

  The Maineses’ new house in Orono was a four-bedroom with cedar sides, a three-hundred-foot-long driveway, and a one-stall barn. The front yard was heavily wooded with oak, spruce, and hemlock that were so close to the house, Kelly said, she felt she was suffocating. Eventually, Wayne cut a few down, not because of Kelly’s complaints, but because he suddenly decided they were crowding the house.

  With six acres of mostly woodland, there was a lot for the twins to explore. Wayne cut down forty trees to build a one-room log cabin for the kids. Kelly bought a zip line for the backyard and in the winter fashioned a bobsled run that stretched from the back deck down the stairs and across the yard to the edge of the woods. The kids seemed to adjust well, but Kelly wasn’t happy. The house was too boxy. It was too dark inside from all the shade trees; it was overrun by ants, and the water pipe to the well was cracked. But the home wasn’t too far from town or school or Wayne’s new job as safety director at the university, so even though Kelly complained she knew they weren’t going anywhere else anytime soon.