Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  When they asked Wyatt what name he’d like, he said “Raven,” a character on one of his favorite television shows.

  “That’s a not a real name,” Wayne complained. “That’s a TV name.”

  But TV names were the ones with which Wyatt was most familiar. He considered Quinn, a character on the Nickelodeon teen comedy/drama Zoey 101, but he kept stumbling over the spelling. Finally, he settled on Nicole, or Nikki for short, one of Zoey’s sidekicks.

  Whether “Nicole,” or “Nikki,” it was difficult for Wayne to get the name out, so he tried to avoid using either. Once again, still feeling ambivalent, he left it to Kelly to sort out the details. When she called the family lawyer she quickly discovered legally changing a name wasn’t nearly as simple as filling out a form. In Maine, by law, name changes are announced in the newspaper. If the Maineses wanted to keep this out of the public eye, they’d have to petition the court to make an exception. The last thing Kelly and Wayne wanted was to make some public announcement, no matter how small, that their son was now their daughter.

  It wasn’t simply a matter of strangers knowing their personal business; it was about keeping their child out of the crosshairs of the right-wing religious community. Both of them knew that the Christian Civic League of Maine was not only vehemently anti-gay and anti-transgender, they were politically active and media savvy. The organization frequently published articles on its website decrying the “gay agenda” and wrote letters to the editor of the Bangor Daily News. The Christian Civic League had recently created controversy when it publicly objected to Maine intellectual and author Jennifer Finney Boylan playing the role of a transgender therapist on the ABC soap opera All My Children. The league warned parents about the program in an article titled “All My Tranny Children,” using a common slur to refer to transgender people. A few months later, the league again took to its online news site to disparage the production of a play called Hidden: A Gender, written by a trans woman, and performed at the First Universalist Church of Auburn, Maine. Kelly and Wayne had every right to feel like their family would be targeted next if word of Wyatt’s name change was made public.

  Before any petition would be granted, however, the parents had to appear in person at the county courthouse. The family’s attorney reassured Kelly and Wayne it was just a formality. They’d stand before a judge, with counsel, and it would take only a few minutes.

  The day of the court appearance, the lawyer’s office called to say he wasn’t able to attend, but his wife, a real estate attorney, would fill in for him. Seated in the small courtroom on a hot summer day, Kelly and Wayne fidgeted nervously waiting for the judge. When he finally entered, their hearts sank just a bit—he was an elderly gentleman, probably over seventy, with white hair, and a pair of sneakers peeking out from under his black robe. Uh-oh, here we go, they both thought. The judge sat down without so much as glancing at the couple in the front row, read through the file a clerk placed in front of him, then finally looked up.

  “Why are you changing your son’s name to a girl’s name?” he asked.

  Kelly’s back arched slightly. Their lawyer, or rather the real estate attorney filling in for their lawyer, answered, “Their daughter is a transgender child, your honor, and has been presenting as a girl for a number of years. The parents, doctors, and counselors agree this is the right thing to do at this time.”

  “Why are you petitioning to keep this out of the paper?”

  “Due to the recent protests…by the Christian Civic League, they are requesting this be kept private,” the attorney answered.

  “Maybe the Christian Civic League should appear in court to have their say,” the judge said.

  What the hell is going on? Wayne thought. Kelly’s eyes welled and Wayne shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Neither could believe they were being put through this, and not even for the name change, just to keep the name change out of the newspaper. Thank God Wyatt wasn’t there. Wayne knew he needed to do something. He raised his hand and asked if he could say something. The judge looked down at him for a moment.

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the father of this child.”

  “Step forward.”

  Wayne approached the judge and began to speak, but the judge motioned for him to stop.

  “Take the stand.”

  The judge wanted Wayne to testify under oath. Then he asked him his profession and his level of education.

  “I’m a safety director at the University of Maine and I have a master’s degree and doctorate in safety management with a minor in adult education.”

  Wayne explained that his son Wyatt had been expressing feelings he was a girl from the age of two, and that his insistence he was born in the wrong body had made it difficult for him in school. They were convinced, and Wyatt’s doctors agreed, that he should be allowed to transition to being a girl.

  Wayne had finally said, out loud, in a courtroom no less, that he agreed with Kelly, that Wyatt should be allowed to make a full transition and in as safe a place as they could make it.

  The judge asked Kelly if she wanted to say something and she was sworn in, too. It wasn’t in her nature, but she’d be damned if she was going to sit there silently and not defend her child. Afterward, neither Wayne nor Kelly could remember what she said, but the judge appeared mollified and a lot less hostile. Perhaps it had to do with hearing that Wayne and Kelly weren’t some screwed-up parents who really wanted a girl and so were pressuring one of their twins into being transgender. They weren’t. They were a white-collar middle-class couple. Upstanding citizens. Regular Maine folks.

  The judge told Kelly she could step down, then stared at the papers in front of him for what seemed like several minutes. Finally he looked up.

  “I see no reason to deny your request,” he said. “You are obviously very concerned about your child’s safety.”

  Kelly and Wayne breathed a huge sigh of relief. They’d been wrong about the judge. When he walked in all they’d seen was his white hair and his age, and they did what most people do and what they themselves wished others wouldn’t do with Nicole: They made an assumption based on appearances. How could an elderly man, who was surely set in his ways, understand, or be sympathetic to, their transgender child? But he was.

  For Wayne, this was the first time he’d shown any kind of public support for Wyatt being transgender. His instincts as a father had been tested without his even realizing it, and he’d responded to the challenge. The petition was granted, and in a matter of days Wyatt Benjamin Maines would officially and legally become Nicole Amber Maines. The middle name was Kelly’s idea. She just liked the sound of it.

  CHAPTER 19

  A New Adversary

  Jonas was unruffled by the name change. When a neighbor’s son, Logan, came over to hang out with the twins, Jonas asked him if he wanted to play ninjas, then said. “Oh, and Wyatt’s new name is Nikki.”

  “Okay,” Logan answered. “Nikki, can I have that sword?”

  Listening to this back-and-forth between Jonas and his friend, Wayne laughed to himself, but he knew he now needed to explain the situation to Logan’s parents, something he didn’t exactly relish. The parents were conservative Republicans and the father former military, just like Wayne, only a bit younger. To Wayne’s complete relief, Logan’s parents said they weren’t surprised. No judgments. No rejections. Wayne almost cried.

  Just before the start of the fifth grade, Kelly and Wayne and the kids visited Wayne’s parents in upstate New York. Bill and Betty Maines had been supportive all along; they’d seen how Wyatt behaved, practically from birth, so they knew this wasn’t some passing impulse on the child’s part or something Wayne and Kelly had encouraged. Still, it was going to be strange, calling Wyatt Nicole after all this time. Eventually, what everyone was dreading finally happened. There was a slipup.

  “Wyatt, do you want some ice cream?” Grandpa Bill said.

  Before Nicole had a chance to even answer, Bill realized what he’
d just done.

  “I’m so sorry. I meant Nicole. I’m so sorry.”

  Nicole walked right over to her grandfather and gave him a hug.

  “It’s okay, Grandpa. I know it’s hard. I love you.”

  Nicole and Jonas adored their grandfather. He gave them “whisker kisses” when he pecked them on their cheeks, and reveled in holding them in his lap. Once, when the kids were about four years old, Grandpa and Grandma came back from a trip to Hawaii with tiny grass skirts and shell necklaces for the boys. Their grandparents’ house was only five minutes away when they lived in Northville. The twins had spent the earliest part of their childhoods romping around the little house on the lake where their grandfather had built a wooden raft and where he’d often take them swimming or canoeing. After they moved, the twins always looked forward to get-togethers at their grandparents’ place every Fourth of July. Aunts and uncles played Yahtzee at the picnic tables while a swarm of cousins cannonballed into the water.

  For the rest of the family vacation, the kids played and swam, the adults went fishing, and they all had cookouts. But Wayne couldn’t stop thinking about his mother and his father and his brother and what they were thinking. Finally, on one of their last days together, Wayne, his brother, Billy, and their father visited the family’s deer-hunting cabin just up the road. It was a typical Adirondack hunting camp, a place where the guys could play cards, drink beer, and tell stories about the big bucks they’d bagged or the ones that got away. Mostly it was a place for the men to relax and be themselves.

  The three men rode up in the truck together. Wayne rehearsed in his head what he wanted to say, and how to bring it up. Finally he just blurted it out.

  “You know, this thing with Wyatt, with Nicole—Kelly and I didn’t make it happen, you know.”

  He talked about the Barbara Walters special on Jazz, the transgender child. He talked about just wanting to make sure Nicole was healthy, happy, and safe. And he explained how Nicole had become jealous of Jonas—that he got to be who he was, that his body was perfect, and hers wasn’t.

  Wayne’s father and brother were mostly quiet, listening, nodding occasionally.

  “We want what’s best for Nicole, too,” said Billy. “If anyone ever lays a hand on her, they’ll have to go through me.”

  Without saying anything, Wayne’s father hugged him. Then Billy chimed in again: “Let’s go get a beer.”

  —

  BACK IN MAINE, WITH the approach of the new school year, Nicole suddenly began to lose weight and complained of stomachaches. Kelly was alarmed and took her to the doctor. She told her pediatrician she sometimes felt like she was going to throw up. Other times, it was pain, she said, but always it was like someone had turned her insides upside down.

  “When I try to talk, my stomach feels weird,” she said.

  “She just lies around moaning,” Kelly told the doctor.

  He suggested an antidepressant, Prozac, which Nicole began taking in August. The medication seemed to help, until one week before school opened, Nicole was again saying her stomach hurt. When she finally began the fifth grade on September 11, 2007, her anxiety seemed to immediately abate. Why had she been so worried? She wore her first skirt on the third day of classes. It had a denim waistband and was long, green, and billowy. Her girlfriends thought it was pretty, and in short order she was elected class vice president, signed up for choir and viola lessons, and joined a team of girls pursuing “Destination Imagination,” a program from a nonprofit national educational organization that encourages students to develop their math, science, and arts skills.

  Everything, miraculously, seemed to be going smoothly. At one point, the mother of another fifth-grade girl phoned Lisa Erhardt, wanting her to know that the idea of Nicole using the girls’ bathroom hadn’t bothered her until she thought about the fact that Nicole was anatomically a boy and her daughter was on the verge of puberty. Erhardt reassured the woman that for a transgender child such as Nicole, the last thing she wanted was anyone to see her “birth genitals.”

  “Oh, I just didn’t know,” the mother responded. “That seems fine then.”

  But it wasn’t fine for someone else. Paul Melanson, the grandfather and guardian of another fifth-grade student named Jacob, had heard talk at the residential facility where he worked that there was a transgender child at his grandson’s school, a boy who said she was a girl and was using the girls’ restroom. If it was true, Melanson, in his late forties, wanted to know about it. For more than a decade he had advocated against extending rights to gays and lesbians, signing petitions and speaking up at public meetings. He was a strict believer in rules, in all the tried-and-true verities with which he’d been raised in rural Maine. Call them laws, call them biblical mandates, Melanson believed men and women were not interchangeable. If people, including children, were allowed to “choose” their own gender, he argued, then why couldn’t he “choose” to rob a bank? It seemed crazy to him. Where was all this talk of rights and privileges going to end?

  A few days later, Jacob reported back to his grandfather. Yes, it was true. There was a student who looked like a girl and dressed like a girl and had a girl’s name, but she was really a boy—and he was using the girls’ restroom. Outraged, Melanson visited the acting principal at Asa Adams, Bob Lucy (who was also the principal of Orono Middle School, next door), then the school administrator Kelly R. Clenchy. Neither man appeared to want to hear Melanson’s complaint. Clenchy’s assistant blocked Melanson from entering the administrator’s office, though he could see him sitting behind his desk. Unable to talk to the man face-to-face, Melanson said in a voice loud enough to be heard by Clenchy and everyone else in the office exactly what he thought. It was wrong, he said, to have a boy using a girls’ restroom and the school needed to stop it, and if it didn’t he would find a lawyer who would. Melanson knew the law, and after fifteen years in the navy he took pride in never backing down from a fight. At home he sat his grandson down.

  “You have female cousins,” Melanson said to Jacob. “How would you like to have them forced to share a bathroom with a boy?”

  Jacob had come to live with his grandparents two years earlier when tensions with his mother, who lived 145 miles west of Orono, grew too much for both of them. He listened intently to his grandfather. No, he wouldn’t like that, he said.

  Melanson answered: “Then there’s only one thing to do about it.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Freak

  “Faggot.”

  It was a word Nicole had never heard before, but she knew it wasn’t good. Just a few weeks into the new school year, she and her friend Emily left class to use the girls’ bathroom. Walking down the hall they heard another friend, Ana Eliza, yell, “Watch out!”

  As the two girls walked into the bathroom, Jacob brushed past them.

  “I didn’t know there was a faggot in my class,” he said.

  He continued walking right into one of the stalls in the girls’ restroom. Nicole and Emily just stood there, frozen, not knowing what to do. They could hear Jacob urinating, then zipping his pants. When he came out of the stall, he walked to the sink to wash his hands. A moment later, Mrs. Elisabeth Molloy, their teacher, rushed in, beet faced and furious.

  What on earth are you doing in here? she demanded, as she pulled Jacob out of the bathroom.

  “This is not acceptable,” she told him.

  “I’m just a boy using the girls’ bathroom,” he singsonged back to the teacher. “If Nicole can go in then I can go in.”

  Melanson had told his grandson that if a boy who said he was a girl was using the girls’ bathroom, then he had every right to use it, too. Melanson wanted his grandson to make a point, and to make it forcefully: It was absurd the school was allowing an anatomically correct male to use a female bathroom.

  Mrs. Molloy marched Jacob into Lisa Erhardt’s office and explained the situation, at which point Erhardt called acting principal Bob Lucy. In his forties and with receding gray hair, Lucy
was still the trim, solidly built athlete who had starred in three sports at Orono High School thirty years earlier. He was a local legend. In 1977 he was an all-state middle linebacker and captain of the undefeated state championship football team. After graduating from the University of Maine in Orono, where he was again a varsity athlete, he took a job coaching football at his high school alma mater, and quickly accumulated a record of eighty wins against seventeen losses. “Intense” and “intimidating” were words often used to describe Lucy. He’d been the principal at the middle school for about six years when he was asked to also take on the same duty at the elementary school while its own principal dealt with a serious health issue.

  After Bob Lucy and Lisa Erhardt spoke, Nicole and her two friends were told to see the school counselor. Erhardt’s office was filled with stress toys and coloring books. The three girls sat at a table and Erhardt asked them to tell her exactly what had happened. Then she wanted to know if anything else had been going on with this boy before the bathroom incident. Emily and Ana Eliza shyly offered that Jacob had been calling Nicole a faggot behind her back. Nicole was used to some kids calling her “it” or “girly boy” but she’d never heard the word “faggot.” Just the way her two friends said it, their voices low and embarrassed, she knew it was an ugly word.

  Twenty minutes later, the three girls were back in their classroom, but there was no sign of Jacob. Jonas, who had heard the earlier ruckus in the hallway, was confused about what had happened. He’d seen Mrs. Molloy practically pulling Jacob from the girls’ bathroom and he’d heard Nicole’s girlfriends screaming, but he didn’t really know what it all meant. Nicole zoned out for most of the rest of the afternoon. Only later at home, when she told her mother what had happened, did she begin to cry. She’d never been so humiliated. For the most part, she’d always been able to handle her differences, and as for those who couldn’t handle them in return, she mostly dismissed them from her life, with few repercussions. But this felt worse. She’d done nothing wrong, and yet she’d been embarrassed in front of her friends. When a teacher got involved she knew it was only a matter of time before the whole school would find out about the incident. For the first time she felt ashamed, and “freakish.”