Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  When Oprah asked Boylan about the origin of her condition, she said, “No one really knows. I think there has to be a medical component. It’s something you have from the age of two or three. Some people think that it has to do with the secretion of hormones in the mother’s womb around the sixth week of pregnancy.”

  In her heart, Kelly believed this, too, that there was some medical explanation for Wyatt’s behavior and feelings. They were so deep-seated, so seemingly rock solid, that even in her weakest moments, when she worried whether she might share some of the blame by indulging Wyatt in his choice of toys, she quickly dismissed those thoughts. Wyatt wasn’t disturbed, he wasn’t sick, he wasn’t bizarre, and he wasn’t a freak. He was unhappy as a boy—that was the bottom line, and so her job was to make sure he received the kind of help or assurances or whatever it was that he needed in order to be happy.

  Listening to Boylan gave Kelly renewed confidence. Clearly she wasn’t the only mother who’d ever had to figure out why her son wanted to be a daughter. Now Kelly was learning that there was also a protocol for perhaps fixing that cognitive dissonance. Boylan explained to Oprah that when patients transition from one gender to the other, doctors follow a process called the Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, originally developed by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association more than thirty years ago. Basically, they are a set of medical protocols clinicians follow for patients seeking hormonal and surgical transition to the opposite gender of their birth. This was all fascinating and new for Kelly. Now if she could just find someone, some doctor, who could do all that for Wyatt. Kelly went out and picked up a copy of Jenny Boylan’s book.

  “She’d be a great role model for Wyatt,” she said to Wayne one day.

  “Uh-huh.” Wayne had heard Kelly but didn’t want to discuss it.

  Kelly left Boylan’s book on the coffee table for a few days, hoping Wayne might pick it up. He didn’t. Then she moved the book to the bathroom. That seemed to do the trick. The book disappeared, but Wayne didn’t say a thing. Clearly he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.

  For the twins’ seventh birthday, Kelly thought she’d finally found a toy both boys would enjoy. She’d noticed Wyatt engrossed by some action hero cartoon on TV one day and had made a mental note. In October, at the birthday party, Wyatt and Jonas both unwrapped a slew of action figures. Jonas loved them. Wyatt was disconsolate. Kelly couldn’t figure it out. Finally, she asked him, didn’t he like watching the action figure cartoon on television every day? Yes, he said, but what he really liked was the pretty house the action heroes lived in.

  That was it for Kelly. Her last doubt about whether Wyatt might be transgender was gone. When she’d first come across the word in her research she’d put off talking about it too much with Wayne. She hadn’t wanted to label Wyatt, to pigeonhole him, at least not at this stage in his life. How does a child this young know if he’s really a girl? Up until Wyatt’s seventh birthday she’d thought there was always the chance he might outgrow this. And in truth, she didn’t care if he outgrew it. She just wanted to do right by her son. So she’d quickly become an expert in analyzing other parents’ kids, looking for signs of passing phases in their behavior, such as the friend’s child who painted his fingernails, or the one who liked to wear his sister’s slip. But the behavior in those other boys was never really consistent, certainly not in the way it was with Wyatt. He wanted to wear dresses, be a princess, play Wendy in Peter Pan all the time, day and night. Sure, he also liked wrestling and was an athletic kid, but his sense of himself, the toys he played with the longest, the subjects of his fantasies, and the characters he playacted, were always female. Kelly didn’t know any other boy who so consistently thought and acted like he was a girl.

  Most of all, she was upset she’d failed Wyatt on his birthday of all days. Screw this, she said to herself, I will never again buy him something just because Wayne thinks that’s what he should play with. It was all just too mean. The next day she went out and bought Wyatt the Ariel Playset he fervently wanted, and every Wendy, Cinderella, and Dorothy toy she could find.

  CHAPTER 8

  A Boy-Girl

  Halfway through Jonas and Wyatt’s first-grade year at Asa C. Adams Elementary School, the family was throttled by bad news. A lingering cold in January 2004 had finally pushed Kelly to make an appointment with her primary care doctor. During the physical examination the doctor felt a small lump or nodule on Kelly’s thyroid. Typically these are tumor-shaped collections of benign cells, the doctor told her, but Kelly, who was forty-three, knew enough to be deeply frightened. At the time, she was helping a friend deal with a second bout of thyroid cancer. The woman had only just recovered from her first go-round the year before; now she faced deeply invasive surgery that would gouge out part of her neck.

  The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland located in the lower front portion of the neck. Its job is to secrete hormones into the blood to help the body’s brain, heart, muscles, and other organs stay warm and functioning. Between 85 and 90 percent of people who are found to have thyroid nodules do not have cancer, which is why Kelly’s doctor had tried to reassure her. Tests needed to be done before there was any cause for worry. A chest X-ray, neck ultrasound, and thyroid function and blood tests followed. At last, a fine needle aspiration biopsy was performed. Then came the confirmation Kelly had feared all along: She had papillary thyroid cancer. Two surgeries in Boston followed, including a thyroidectomy, where doctors cut a three-inch-long incision in the front of Kelly’s neck and pulled out the diseased gland. The cancer appeared to be contained, but just to be sure, doctors suggested radioactive iodine therapy, or radioiodine treatment, which they hoped would kill any remaining metastatic cells. The thyroid is the only tissue in the body that takes up and holds on to iodine. But radioactive iodine therapy is a punishing treatment, requiring patients to be isolated in a single room for several days, because after they ingest the iodine they remain slightly radioactive, evidenced in their sweat and urine. Patients undergoing the treatment are asked to flush the toilet twice after relieving themselves to rinse away as much of the leftover radioactive fluid as possible, and nursing staff change the sheets on patients’ beds every day. A kind of medical Geiger counter is used to keep track of a person’s radioactivity, and when it is finally low enough the patient is discharged.

  After the iodine treatment, there were checkups and follow-up scans at the Dana Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston. Sometimes Kelly’s friend, the one fighting her own second battle with thyroid cancer, would drive her to the hospital—a 240-mile trek straight down I-95 from Orono to Boston. But often Kelly drove herself, once or twice in the middle of a snowstorm. When she did, her mantra was always the same: “I need to live ten more years, just ten more years. If I can make it to ten years, Wyatt and Jonas will have a chance.” It wasn’t that she didn’t think Wayne loved both boys, but if she died and he had to raise the kids alone, he would likely continue to struggle to understand Wyatt and not know what to do for him, and she dreaded the thought of Wyatt being alone, without his mother to tell him that everything would be okay.

  Occasionally the whole family packed into the car for the trip to Boston. Kelly had told the boys matter-of-factly that she was sick, but that she was getting medicine in Boston to make it all better. She was petrified, of course, but there was no way she was going to frighten Wyatt and Jonas. She had to stay calm for both boys.

  When the family made the trip with her they stayed at a Holiday Inn, where the kids could swim. Kelly and Wayne would sit and watch them, all the while talking about how the twins were doing in school, or Wayne’s job—anything but cancer. They were having a hard time not feeling sorry for themselves, when one day a young boy, not more than thirteen, shuffled by them wearing a kind of housecoat. He had no hair, his face was thin, and his eyes seemed lost. His parents walked alongside him, and they were just as pale and wor
ried looking as their son. Kelly and Wayne watched the small family walk from the pool, down the hall, and back into their room. Then they looked at each other and without saying a word gave thanks for their own good fortune. No matter how much they were being tested, they knew their children were safe and well. When the months of treatment were finally over, doctors gave Kelly a clean bill of health. Her cancer scare was over, and Kelly was more determined than ever to be there for her family.

  —

  ONE OF WYATT AND Jonas’s favorite times of the day was when Kelly read them a story before going to sleep. Between the boys’ twin beds was a wooden chair whose seat Kelly had painted yellow on the right side (Wyatt’s choice) and purple on the left (Jonas’s). A red stripe down the middle indicated where mom sat. Here she’d read to the boys, one son squeezed in on each side. Wyatt’s favorite story was Garrison Keillor’s “Cat, You Better Come Home,” about a certain feline who felt underappreciated. The cat wanted to be special, to stand out, and so one day she ran away from home in order to become rich and famous. Soon there were parties and yachts and unending food, but it turned out to be an empty life. After a while, all she wanted was to be normal again, to be one of the crowd, and so the prodigal cat finally returned home, welcomed back by her owners without a question.

  If other cats could only know

  To hang their hats on the status quo,

  And make the best of what they’ve got,

  And be who you are and not what you’re not.

  Both boys were just beginning to figure out who and what they were. They each gravitated to the fictional characters they imagined they’d most like to be. For Wyatt, if it wasn’t a princess, it was the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz with long green hair and fingernails—and attitude—or Dorothy with braids and shiny ruby slippers. For Jonas it was the Tin Man—with an ax—or a pirate, like in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean. But for now, Wyatt was happy that his parents allowed him to skip off to the first grade dressed in pants and a shirt, but with pink sneakers, a pink backpack, and a pink Kim Possible lunchbox.

  After school, the first thing Wyatt did when he got home was to throw off his pants and shirt and put on a skirt or dress—more hand-me-downs from Leah. The halfway dressing for school had been Kelly and Wayne’s decision, a compromise that they weren’t at all sure about. Somehow, they believed it was better to take a middle road for now, to set limits. Wyatt clearly wasn’t happy with the decision, which made Kelly realize maybe it was finally time for him to see a therapist on a regular basis. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy trying to hold Wyatt back, or even that she should hold him back, and knowing he was seeing a professional would make her feel more comfortable about whatever might come next.

  Kelly combed through lists looking for doctors who treated kids for sexual issues. The first psychologist they visited in Bangor told them she worked with children who had been sexually abused, not children with sexual identity issues. Wyatt needed a gender specialist, she told them.

  The next therapist asked Kelly and Wayne, “What kind of underwear does Wyatt use? Does he urinate standing up or sitting down?”

  “Well, he pees standing up,” Wayne answered.

  “Well, then, he’s not transgender,” the shrink said.

  Wayne and Kelly looked at each other and were glad Wyatt wasn’t there. Wayne was nowhere near ready to accept that his son was really his daughter, but he thought the psychiatrist’s questions and reasoning were simpleminded and ludicrous. He and Kelly stood up and thanked the therapist. On his way out the door, Wayne couldn’t help himself.

  “By the way, I pee sitting down, you know.”

  What Wyatt understood about himself, whether he felt different or odd or broken, neither Kelly nor Wayne really knew, until one day Wyatt looked up at his parents and said, “You know, I can have an operation that will fix me.”

  Wyatt didn’t know the word “transgender” and he certainly didn’t know anything about sex reassignment surgery. But somehow he did understand the concept of plastic surgery and that women were able to have their breasts enlarged and their faces made to look younger. If a doctor could give a woman bigger breasts than why couldn’t a doctor give Wyatt little ones? Wyatt was an optimist, mainly because Kelly made a point to never instill doubt in him. She might have been holding him back, but she never discouraged or tried to dissuade him from becoming a girl if that’s what he really wanted. From Wyatt’s perspective, he just somehow knew it would all eventually work out. But an operation?

  “Where did he learn that?” asked an incredulous Wayne.

  Kelly said, “I have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Wild in the Dark

  UnnHappy, sad, mad, Unnspeakable blue red Unnsunshining and hot and cool and red hot and ice cold.

  —Wyatt Maines, diary, May 4, 2005

  Beginning around age seven, Wyatt’s moods seemed to fluctuate daily. On the cover of his second-grade “Secret Notebook,” he drew three suns, three clouds, and three smiling girls, all with long red hair, standing on a green hill that sprouted pink and yellow flowers. On the second page he drew a picture of himself with long hair standing beside his brother. Neither was smiling:

  Dear Notebook,

  Sometimes when my brother does something bad to me, I punch him right in the guts!

  Under a picture of Wyatt hitting Jonas, Wyatt wrote:

  Sometimes I punch my brother right in the center of his face with my fist.

  The notebooks and diaries Wyatt and Jonas created at Asa C. Adams Elementary School usually included only sporadic entries, but in this one there were also drawings—of Wyatt throwing off his covers in the middle of the night, getting up, and going “wild in the dark,” doing noisy gymnastics and pretending to be a vampire lady “and I bite my brother and scare his underpants right off!”

  On page seven:

  I mean this. I hit things. I kick things. I trip on things. And I throw things. This is how I practice my karate.

  The final drawing in the notebook was actually a series of faces:

  Sometimes I like to dress up as Daphany and Velma. My brother likes to dress up as Shaggy and his friends like to dress up as Scooby-Doo and Fred! I’d like to tell you more, but if I do, my brother might get mad and punch me!

  The notebook was a second-grade assignment that Wyatt had to show not only his teacher but his parents. All of them then wrote comments on the back page:

  Wyatt’s teacher: “Wyatt, I used to do the same kinds of things with my three sisters!”

  Kelly: “Wyatt, Your stories are getting so interesting. They’re like reading store-bought books! Love, Mom.”

  Wayne: “Wyatt, What a great story! I am glad you like karate. I hope you continue to work on your black belt!!! Love, Dad.”

  In truth, Kelly and Wayne were both concerned. Because Jonas was the more passive of the twins, he was used to absorbing the blows, both physical and verbal. Fighting was to be expected between siblings, especially at that age, and identical twins were no different in that regard. But when they were physical, Wyatt sometimes seemed like he wanted to pummel his brother. Both parents gave them time-outs, tried to teach them they needed to talk instead of yelling and fighting, and told them that if they couldn’t agree about something, they needed to come to them. Around this time Wyatt’s anger also turned inward. The first sign of worry for Kelly were little tics she saw him develop. She noticed that when Wyatt was lying on the couch watching TV or doing his homework, he would absentmindedly pull at his eyelashes and eyebrows, trying to pluck them out.

  “Wyatt, why are you doing that?” Kelly said one day.

  “I have to.”

  “What do you mean you have to?”

  “I mean I can’t stop.”

  On April 13, 2006, nine-year-old Wyatt had his first appointment with child psychologist Virginia Holmes. Her office was in Ellsworth, about thirty-five miles southeast of Orono. Holmes had come highly recommended by the twins’ pediatrici
an when Kelly told the doctor she thought Wyatt needed counseling. The weekly sessions were structured so that Kelly would talk to Holmes first and update the therapist about what was going on at home and at school. At first, Kelly and Wayne thought maybe Wyatt had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, because he never seemed able to keep still. But his fidgeting, his constant restlessness, also seemed to point to a deeper anxiety, something perhaps even Wyatt couldn’t explain.

  Virginia Holmes wrote in her clinician’s journal:

  Met Wyatt for the first time. He is very feminine. He is wearing his hair long, and had a blue flowery barrette in it….Wyatt displayed no anxiety or worries about wanting to be a girl. His eyes sparked with interest when I said my usual about knowing lots of boys who feel this way, but his main anxiety is not about that.

  Wyatt’s main concern is his overwhelming automatic desire to choke himself….He does not feel able to stop himself from doing so, most of the time. He wanted to know did I know other kids who felt THIS? I talked a little about OCD, and he understood that: “Oh!” he said. “Like Tourette’s Syndrome!” Right.

  CHAPTER 10

  Girls with Magical Powers

  Virginia Holmes counseled Kelly to go slow with Wyatt, to not necessarily give in every time Wyatt pushed her to allow him to be more like a girl. Holmes still thought Wyatt might be gay, not transgender, so until that could be determined, she thought it best to keep his feminine behaviors a bit more in check, at least in public, so Kelly insisted Wyatt continue to wear “boy” clothes to school.