Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  Only gradually, but especially in the past decade, has gender come to be regarded as a spectrum, and people as not wholly masculine or wholly female, but often a mixture of the two: tomboyish girls, for instance, and feminine boys. Recently, Facebook and the dating website OkCupid have added a third “custom” tab beside the boxes for male and female, with a drop-down menu containing dozens of options, including “agender,” “bigender,” “pangender,” “genderqueer,” and “androgyne.”

  The first institutions to adopt nonbinary gender classifications have been mostly academic. Scores of universities across the country have added gender-neutral options to their in-house information systems, and when they distribute class lists to professors they include the personal pronouns a student prefers, including “he,” “she,” “they,” and the third-person, gender-neutral pronouns of “xe” (pronounced “zee”), “xyr,” and “xem.”

  But for those whose sexual anatomy is truly discordant with their mental identity, there is no such thing as psychosexual neutrality. They may agree that gender is a spectrum, but they also know exactly where they fall on it. A study out of Stony Brook University in New York confirmed as much in 2015. Researchers questioned thirty-two children, ages five to twelve, who were all transgender and all came from supportive families. None had yet entered puberty. After asking the children a series of questions widely regarded as being accurate measures of gender identity—the implicit association test measures the speed with which subjects associate male and female genders with concepts of “me” and “not me”—the scientists found there was no difference in the responses of the transgender group, which included males to females as well as females to males, from the control group of cisgender children—that is, those whose sexual anatomy matches their gender identity.

  It is that incongruity between body and mind that is the source of a tortuous physical alienation. As much as cisgender persons may like or dislike their bodies, and engage in altering or enhancing them, they don’t deny their bodies are their own. It’s a knowledge so intimate that it remains largely subconscious. When it comes to that physical self, for a transgender person every waking moment, every conscious breath, is a denial of who they truly are. For these people their bodies are at odds with their ideas of themselves, or their ideas of who they should be. They are estranged from the very thing that sustains them in the world, and there is no way to reconcile this conflict through psychological counseling or behavioral conditioning. There is only one way out of the alienation, and that’s to make the body congruent with the mind.

  In Germany in 2008, Kim Petras was just sixteen when she underwent sex reassignment surgery. Just like Wyatt, she’d been male at birth, but preferred playing with Barbie dolls and wearing dresses as early as two years of age. Over time both parents realized their son was right when he insisted he was a girl. The father seemed to echo something Kelly thought about Wyatt right from the beginning: “We saw Kim as a girl, but not as a problem.”

  Much of the rest of the world, including parents and many in the medical profession, have long disagreed with that last part. In the past (and often still), parents would take their female-identified male child to doctor after doctor, only to be told the child needed intensive therapy or should be delivered to a psychiatric hospital. Others, however, realized that forcing their children to go through puberty in a body they had essentially disowned would be deeply damaging.

  It was with this in mind that Kim Petras’s parents finally found a doctor who said he could help. Bernd Meyenburg, the head of the Psychiatric Special Outpatient Clinic for Children and Adolescents with Identity Disorders at the University of Frankfurt Hospital, told them few pediatricians understand gender dysphoria. He also asked them to imagine what it must be like for a girl to grow facial hair and have her voice deepen or a boy to suddenly grow breasts and menstruate. Kim Petras began female hormone therapy at the age of twelve. In Germany, sex reassignment surgery can’t take place until a person is eighteen, but Kim was given special dispensation, and at sixteen successfully underwent the procedure. Later, her father told the press, “I suppose it took me longer than my wife to accept it, but Kim is a very persuasive girl, she knows what she wants and how to get it. I am very proud of what she has achieved, how she has managed to get there and how she sticks to her dreams no matter how hard and painful they are to follow.”

  Prior to the beginning of the twenty-first century, transgender children could not forestall puberty, could not push it off to gain a few precious months or years before their bodies fully settled into being male or female. And prior to the twenty-first century, all sex reassignment surgeries were performed on fully developed men and women. The deep-seated desire to look on the outside the way a person feels on the inside impels many transgender people to undergo sex reassignment surgery, but the psychological consequences of trying to transform a fully developed male into a female or vice versa can be devastating if the results do not meet a person’s expectations. And often they don’t.

  On April 26, 2007, fifty-year-old Mike Penner, a veteran sports journalist at the Los Angeles Times, published his usual Thursday column under a most unusual headline: “Old Mike, New Christine.” The first four paragraphs were startling, even unprecedented:

  During my 23 years with The Times’ sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer. Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist. Recent keeper of the Morning Briefing flame.

  Today I leave for a few weeks’ vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation.

  As Christine.

  I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.

  They were, but Penner was resolute. He had chosen the name “Christine Daniels” as his new byline. “Christine” was in honor of transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen. “Daniel” had been Penner’s middle name. What followed was thirty-one months of euphoria, public acclaim, private challenges, depression, and ultimately a second transition back to being male. At six feet three inches tall, the broad-shouldered, deep-voiced Penner had hidden his gender dysphoria from nearly everyone in his life, including his wife. Although his public self-declaration was psychologically liberating, the loss of his marriage and the adoption of a life lived fully as a woman were difficult. One of the first signs came just weeks after his announcement, at a press conference in Los Angeles for British soccer star David Beckham. For Penner, who was now writing as Daniels, this was her first professional appearance at a sporting event in her new identity. Later, she wrote about the experience on her personal blog:

  [Beckham] arrived wearing a silver-gray Burberry suit, surrounded by a phalanx of assistants and yes-people. I arrived wearing a golden-hued top from Ross and a multicolored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed tan heels from Aerosoles, surrounded by nobody.

  One other journalist at the press conference decided to mention Christine in his own blog:

  I hate to be judgmental about these things, but Christine is not an attractive woman. She looks like a guy in a dress, pretty much. Except anyone paying any attention isn’t going to be fooled—as some people are by veteran transvestites. Maybe this is cruel, but there were women in that room who were born women in body, as well as soul. And the difference between them and Christine was, in my mind, fairly stark. It seemed almost as if we’re all going along with someone’s dress-up role-playing.

  It was cruel and it was devastating to Daniels, who was taking female hormones and wearing makeup, feminine wigs, and clothes, but who in many ways still looked, unfortunately, too much like Mike Penner. Daniels agreed to be interviewed for a story about her transition by Vanity Fair magazine and a photo shoot was set up. Later, the photographer tried to explain the disaster the shoot turne
d into. He said he’d been trying to say the right things during the photo session, but that it hadn’t been easy. “How do you tell someone who looks like a man, ‘You’re a beautiful woman’?” he told The New York Times. The reporter for the story backed up the photographer’s account and said that because he feared Daniels was suicidal after the photo shoot debacle, he pulled the plug on the story.

  Daniels’s wife filed for divorce, a number of friends disappeared, and, though she gained new friends and untold admirers as Christine Daniels, when the publicity died down she found herself alone, in a small apartment, without the companionship of the one person with whom she’d spent most of her adult life.

  Mired in depression, Daniels stopped taking female hormones and distanced herself from both old and new friends. She felt a failure as a woman and so, tortured by loneliness, decided to revert to being male, including using the old Penner byline on his L.A. Times column. So it was as Mike, dressed in a blue shirt, black jeans, and black-and-white Adidas sneakers, that Penner took his life on November 27, 2009, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning inside his 1997 Toyota Camry in the underground parking garage of his apartment complex.

  CHAPTER 15

  Perpetrating Gender

  The need to define ourselves as individuals is a peculiarly modern obsession, but the importance of personhood to self-definition had its beginnings in the Enlightenment. The British empiricists declared experience, not reason, to be the central constituent of being human, which meant individuals had certain legal rights but also moral responsibilities. By the nineteenth century, urbanization, mechanization, and population growth meant the state needed to keep better track of all these individuals. Categorization and classification weren’t intellectual tools. They served the social, economic, and political status quo. Individuals have identities, but identities can be arranged systematically any way we want, by religion, by class, by trade, by sex, making it easier for the government to control its citizens.

  “We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,” writes Peter Brooks in his book Enigmas of Identity. “And it seems to be the case that the individual search to know the self is matched by society’s concern to know, to classify, and to order the range of selves that are out there.” Those divisions aren’t just racial or religious or economic. They can also be sexual.

  Brooks claims the trial of author, intellectual, and general bon vivant Oscar Wilde on charges of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century illustrates “the increasingly rigid classifications of sexual identity,” where one was either heterosexual or homosexual. For most of human history, gender classifications were just as rigid. They were integral to the creation of economies that depended on a division of labor, inheritance laws, even religious rites.

  Gender boundaries were maintained by various rituals and practices, even at the highest levels of the Catholic Church. Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, who was elected pope in 1492, was said to have been required to sit on a portable throne with an area cut out on the seat so that Vatican officials, in full view of the college of cardinals, could grope the genitals of the future Pope Alexander VI. When everything appeared to be in order, Vatican officials announced to the cardinals, Habet duos testiculos et bene pendentes, “He has two well-hung testicles.”

  There are various theories for why this strange ritual was supposedly performed—and some Vatican insiders protest that it was not—but chief among them was reassurance that the man who was about to become the next leader of the Catholic Church was not, in fact, a woman. This particular theory rests on accepting the disputed claim that in the ninth century, upon Pope Leo IV’s death, a monk he’d made a cardinal became the next pope, and this monk was actually an Englishwoman. The reign of this papacy (John VIII or “Pope Joan”) lasted just two years and four months, allegedly ending the day she collapsed during a church procession and gave birth. For her act of papal impersonation she was summarily stoned to death, according to popular legend.

  Gender “frauds” have more frequently been perpetrated in the world of sports. In the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Nazi officials forced high jumper Hermann Ratjen to compete as Dora Ratjen in order to ensure the Third Reich would garner more gold medals. Unfortunately, even as Dora, Hermann couldn’t make the podium, finishing out of the medals in fourth place. The impersonation went undetected until two years later when a sports fan happened to notice an unusual five o’clock shadow on the face of a particular German female athlete at a track event. When medical personnel confirmed Dora was really a man, Ratjen was barred from international competition.

  At those same Berlin Olympics, Helen Stephens, a female sprinter from St. Louis, was accused by a Polish journalist of being male. The reason was likely the journalist’s support for the Polish runner Stella Walsh. Stephens blew away the competition as well as the previous world record—held by Walsh—with a gold-medal-winning performance in the one-hundred-yard dash. Accusations were made, protests filed, and finally after Olympic officials performed a visual sex test, Stephens was exonerated.

  Oddly, though, the same couldn’t be said of Walsh. In 1980 she was accidentally shot to death in the parking lot of a discount store in Cleveland, the victim of a stray bullet fired during a robbery attempt. When Walsh’s body was autopsied, the coroner discovered she had a nonfunctioning micropenis and mostly, but not entirely, male chromosomes. She likely never knew of her mosaicism, since her competition days had ended long before genetic testing.

  The International Olympic Committee instituted genetic testing in 1968, but officials were faced with difficult decisions when, at the 1996 Olympics, seven of the eight women who tested positive for the presence of male chromosomes were determined to have androgen insensitivity syndrome. The syndrome causes babies to be born with normal-looking female genitals but with undescended or partially descended testes, a short vagina (or none at all), and sometimes no cervix. The gender test confusion was enough to force the IOC to stop gender testing three years later. The bottom line: No one test could confirm that someone was 100 percent male or 100 percent female. In 2004 the IOC did take a radical step in revising its rules to allow transgender athletes to compete as long as they’d already undergone sex reassignment surgery and completed a minimum of two years of postoperative hormone replacement therapy. In 2011, the National Collegiate Athletic Association amended its bylaws to accommodate transgender student-athletes, obligating the male-to-female transgender person to undergo a year of male hormone suppression to qualify to compete.

  In 2014, a transgender woman named Chloie Jönsson sued the fitness company CrossFit after it rejected her application to compete in the women’s division of CrossFit’s annual strength competition. A personal trainer from Los Gatos, California, Jönsson had undergone sex reassignment surgery eight years earlier and had been taking female hormones since then. Nonetheless, the letter explaining the decision, written by the company’s lawyer, spared no insult.

  The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women….Our decision has nothing to do with “ignorance” or being bigots—it has to do with a very real understanding of the human genome, of fundamental biology, that you are either intentionally ignoring or missed in high school.

  Amanda Eller, at the time the marketing manager for the performance underwear start-up called Dear Kate, summed up CrossFit’s ignorance in an article she wrote for the online fitness newsletter Tabata Times: “I can see the horizon, so the world must be flat.” Even the NCAA handbook Inclusion of Transgender Student-Athletes made it clear that CrossFit’s argument was wildly off base:

  According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is no
t supported by evidence.

  Doctors and scientists agree that after a year either on female hormones or male hormone suppressants, any competitive advantage a transgender athlete might have had initially is gone. In fact, because a woman’s ovaries also produce a small amount of testosterone, transgender females (who typically do not have ovaries) may have even less testosterone in their bodies than the average woman born with female reproductive organs.

  In a show of support, Dear Kate invited Jönsson to take part in the company’s Hazel Sport Collection photo shoot in 2014. “This shoot was a celebration of the different forms of fitness and the different shapes of female athletes,” Eller wrote. “And we are so proud to feature her as a face of Dear Kate. Not to mention the fact that she couldn’t be a nicer or cooler person.”

  —

  THE EXPANDING PRESENCE OF transgender athletes in all sports has helped to drive the demand for more medical professionals who understand the special biological, physiological, and psychological needs of the transgender person. In 2007, however, there was basically only one endocrinologist in the United States who specialized in the medical care and treatment of transgender children, and he’d just opened the Gender Management Service, or GeMS, at Boston Children’s Hospital—sixty miles from the southern border of Maine.

  CHAPTER 16