There was an edginess to the school that made it hard for the twins to let their guard down. Several times during the seventh grade, brawls broke out. Neither Jonas nor Nicole had ever seen someone their age in a fistfight, much less partaken in one, but that soon changed. Jonas had developed a crush on a girl and, trying to fit in, had made it known to some of the other boys in his class that he was interested in her. Unfortunately, one of the other boys decided he liked this girl, too, and asked her out. Jonas felt betrayed and quietly seethed. Not long afterward, when his class was playing a vigorous game of floor hockey, Jonas singled out the student he was angry at, and was a bit more physical with him than he should have been. Arms and elbows flew, shoulders crunched. Finally Jonas called the other boy a “bitch” and the other boy retaliated. Before he knew what he was doing, Jonas turned around and punched the kid in the face. Immediately he realized he’d done something very wrong. Fighting was something he generally didn’t do, but his anger had gotten the best of him.
Maybe that’s why Jonas withdrew into music and playing the guitar—things he could do on his own. At Asa Adams he’d played the drums in the school band and orchestra. Maybe he’d try that again. He signed up for band class, but on the first day, when he walked into the room, he immediately felt out of place, as if everyone was looking at him. When Jonas began drumming, another student mocked him loudly. Wounded, Jonas simply stood up and walked out.
As attuned as they were to what was happening with Nicole on a day-to-day basis, Kelly and Wayne both knew they needed to be more aware of what was going on with Jonas. He had a tendency to be passive, to step aside and let the world—or Nicole—not only rush by him, but overwhelm him. Their whole lives, Kelly had made sure each child had the same opportunities. What one received the other received, and most of the time the twins were in sync, not only sharing toys and games but most of their friends as well. But where Nicole was impulsive, explosive, and domineering, Jonas was reflective and intellectual. Sometimes indolent, he let others make decisions for him. What worries he had, he usually buried, but every now and then they came surging to the fore, sometimes with disastrous results.
Toward the end of April 2010, almost eight months after Wayne and Kelly and the kids started living apart, Wayne lingered on the phone with his son a bit longer than usual. That’s when Jonas admitted to his father that some kids at school had punched him.
“Why didn’t you say something earlier to your mother?” Wayne asked.
“Because Mom would have gotten upset and she would want to do something.”
“Do something” meant calling the school or the parents of the boy who punched Jonas, and that was the last thing he wanted. What he did want, just like Nicole, was to fit in, to be a normal kid, not the brother of a transgender sister, and especially not the identical twin of a transgender sister. Jonas understood that at King Middle School you didn’t tell anyone anything or you’d be labeled for life. But Jonas’s sense of justice was acute. He told his father that when he heard another student refer to someone as a fag, he couldn’t just stand there, even if it wasn’t directed at his sister. So he’d confronted the kid and the kid threw a punch.
Wayne told him he understood, but he still needed to deal with things differently.
“I don’t want you to fight. You need to look the kid in the eye and tell him not to do it again and if he does, then walk away and tell someone. There are better ways to deal with things.”
Nicole knew this, too. And while she never wanted to respond physically to someone, there were many times she wanted to say exactly how she felt but couldn’t for fear that it would inevitably lead to being outed. Being true to her beliefs, and not just about being transgender, had never felt this dangerous. The hardest times were keeping her mouth shut when she’d hear someone say “Oh, that’s so gay,” which kids often did. She knew if she tried to object, the other person would only say, “Why do you care? Are you gay?” And then she’d be stuck. She had good reason to challenge others’ prejudices, but she couldn’t because they hit too close to home. So she kept her mouth shut, buttoned down her anger, and sealed off her sense of self-righteousness.
Jonas, like Nicole, walked to school every day, and nearly every day walked home right afterward and watched TV or played video games. He had a couple of friends, who were also Nicole’s, but neither twin hung out with them much after the school day was over. No one could get too close for fear they’d find out too much. It was strange and stressful, trying to be “half friends” with certain classmates. As for classwork, Jonas found it hard to motivate himself. He was extraordinarily bright, but being around so many other disinterested kids sapped him of his normal curiosity and love of knowledge. King was an expeditionary learning school, modeled on the reforms of Kurt Hahn, the German educator who also founded Outward Bound. The central idea was project-based learning, which involved multidiscipline group activities. The theme that year was invasive species, but as far as Jonas could tell, neither the students nor the teachers seemed all that excited about the project. There was very little joy in learning, on either side of the desk, Jonas thought. By the end of the year he’d sunk into a deep depression and admitted to his mother he felt like cutting himself. Kelly immediately called Wayne. What could he do two hundred miles away? He would talk to Jonas on the phone, but Kelly would have to handle it with the school. She sat down and sent an email to school officials:
Yesterday, Jonas came home and said he felt like cutting himself. My husband and I have decided to pursue counseling for him and I will arrange that today. Meanwhile, we would appreciate all of you keeping a close eye on him while he is in school. I will be giving him a ride to school and walking with him after school until we are sure he is not truly going to hurt himself. Thanks for your help, and any insight you may have would be greatly appreciated.
Wayne and Kelly both realized that hormones were likely playing a big part in Jonas’s life at that moment. Jonas was also a thinker, and sometimes he was just too far inside his head for his own good. Kelly set him up with a therapist, and he appeared to benefit from having someone to talk to outside the family. But Jonas also liked figuring things out for himself, turning them over in his mind until he’d explored every nook and cranny and felt satisfied he understood the issue. It was a tool he had to use frequently at King Middle School because nearly every day something got under his skin. He couldn’t abide meanness in others, or stupidity, but he also knew it was pointless and self-defeating to expend the energy to lash out every time something bothered him.
Jonas knew this acutely because he had that same strange ability his mother had, the capacity to look at himself as if he were floating outside his own body, and when he did, he came to the conclusion that it was unreasonable to respond to every single thing that irritated him. Instead, he needed to keep things at a low simmer, to suppress his frustrations and let them out slowly. It was all about self-control, and Jonas saw himself as immensely self-controlled. So he examined the slights as they came his way, first figuring out why others felt the need to act the way they did. Next he examined how those acts or words made him feel. Then he put them away. Puzzles solved, frustrations defused. It was all very neat and clean—until it wasn’t.
Nicole isolated herself in her own thoughts as well. She read, played video games, and talked online with former classmates in Orono. But the house in Portland was almost too quiet when the kids were home.
Jonas stayed in his room, Nicole in hers. Concentrating on homework was hard for both of them. Jonas, an excellent science and math student, had let his grades slip, and Nicole was flunking Spanish. She brooded about her future, convinced she’d never be loved and never find someone who’d marry her. Nicole was not only afraid of getting close to a person, she was afraid of getting close to the “wrong” person and the secret suddenly becoming very public.
It almost happened twice. The first time it came from outside the school, just after Nicole had joined a club called A
Company of Girls, or ACOG, an organization that seeks to empower teenage girls primarily through theater and the arts. Nicole, who already enjoyed drawing, also wanted to explore acting. At one of the meetings, out of the blue, another student asked her if she was transgender.
“What?” Nicole responded.
Her heart was pounding so loud she was certain everyone in the room could hear it, but she tried to remain low-key and reacted as if she didn’t understand what the girl was talking about. How had she found out? Nicole tried to be as blasé as possible, and prayed the other girl would drop the subject, which she did, but not before Nicole had spent a few anxious moments worrying her cover had been blown. Another time, in the girls’ locker room, a girl asked Nicole why she always dressed and undressed for gym in a stall, not out in the open like the others. Before she could answer, though, another student distracted the girl and she wandered off without waiting for Nicole’s reply.
Eighth grade was not much better than seventh. The twins had each other, and that was about it. Jonas watched TV. Nicole played video games. Sometimes she closed the door at the bottom of the staircase to the attic and curled up on one of the lower steps to read a book. Her favorites were Luna and Almost Perfect, two young adult novels about transgender youth her father had given her.
Nicole had been miserable her final two years at Asa Adams when she was out of the closet, and she was miserable her first two years at King when she was in it. It was all so bewildering and depressing, like never having a sense of balance. How could she, when she and Jonas felt as isolated as they did and were actively hiding a part of their lives from people who might otherwise have become their friends? Friendships, in fact, were more tease than reality. Just when Nicole seemed on the verge of making a good connection with someone, she’d ask her mother, “Can’t I tell anyone?” And every time her mother said, “No.” When Nicole balked once and asked why she couldn’t at least tell just one person, since it was her life after all, Kelly answered her in no uncertain terms.
“It’s not just about you. It’s about the whole family, Nicole. If you tell someone and it all goes downhill, we’ll all have to move again.”
After the ACOG incident, there was really only one other close call, and it came on one of those rare occasions when Nicole invited someone over to the house after school. On the stairway leading up to her bedroom, Nicole had lined the walls with drawings and photos. One of the photographs was a still from The Wizard of Oz, autographed by one of the Munchkins. The twins’ uncle Andy had gotten it for Nicole years earlier, and it was inscribed “To Wyatt.”
“Who’s Wyatt?” the friend from King asked Nicole as she passed the photo on the staircase.
“Oh, that’s my uncle Wyatt. He gave me the picture because he didn’t want it anymore.”
Nicole barely missed a beat, but her heart was pounding. When her classmate left she took the photo down and hid it in a drawer.
The oddest part about being in the closet at King was that anything even remotely related to being transgender felt threatening. One day, Kelly received a call from Nicole’s teacher, who wanted her to know that the following week there was going to be a bullying-awareness day and a film shown to all students that included transgender issues. Nicole might feel uncomfortable during the discussion afterward, the teacher said, so she was being given permission to call in sick that day if she wanted. She did.
Even when things were going well, it wasn’t about the danger of slipping up so much as the sense of always having to hold back. Eventually Nicole and Jonas developed a small, select group of friends, but they were always held at an emotional distance. For Nicole, it wasn’t about shutting people out so much as shutting herself down. It felt especially hard one weekend when she and about five others gathered at a friend’s house and built a campfire in the backyard, then watched movies. Everyone was so relaxed and the conversations often veered toward the intimate. These were people who knew Nicole, and yet didn’t. She knew them well enough to know she could probably trust them, but not saying anything was a promise she’d made to her mother—to her whole family—and she couldn’t break that.
—
IN FEBRUARY 2010 EVERYTHING seemed at a breaking point for Wayne. They were still paying $1,500 a month in mortgage on a house the family no longer lived in, and for which they’d eventually take a $28,000 loss. They were paying another $1,200 in rent for the duplex in Portland. Then there were the utilities for two households, books and clothes for the kids, and the cost of Wayne traveling hundreds of miles every weekend, sometimes by car, often by bus. He estimated that over the course of the first seven years in Portland, the family took on an additional $105,000 in expenses. On top of that he and Kelly also owed $33,800 in lawyer’s fees to their first attorney, whom the family had just dropped. He just didn’t seem to be on top of the case, and it didn’t help that his own teenage son had acted disparagingly toward Nicole. The incident happened outside school when the boy pointed her out to a friend and Nicole heard him say, “There’s that kid my father is representing” in a tone that could only have been called disgust. When Kelly called the attorney that night to complain, he actually seemed irritated.
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
Kelly was worn down with worry, and losing weight, but she was determined not to let Nicole and Jonas see her anxiety. She rarely cried, but she did one night, watching, of all things, an episode of the reality series Cops. The story that night was about a transgender child, male to female, like Nicole, who lived on the streets and worked as a prostitute. In the episode the police were giving her a hard time, even though she wasn’t a runaway. Her parents had thrown her out of the house. The thought of rejecting Nicole had never crossed Kelly’s mind and, as difficult a time as Wayne had understanding their daughter, she was sure it hadn’t crossed his, either. In fact, Kelly was used to telling her mother, her friends—anyone who would listen—that Nicole would always have a home with her. She’d never be abandoned by her family, and she would never be left to be harassed by the police, or anyone else for that matter, as long as Kelly had anything to say about it. If Nicole couldn’t make it in the outside world, she would live with her mother the rest of her life, and that was that.
A bit of good news arrived in March 2010, when Kelly and Wayne received word that attorneys for Boston-based GLAD would represent them in their legal battles, along with Maine private attorney Jodi Nofsinger. The biggest relief: The GLAD lawyers would be paid only if they won the case.
CHAPTER 31
Puberty Begins
Nicole was eleven years old and she wanted breasts. Anyone can grow their hair long and wear makeup and feminine clothing, but if she had breasts, there would be no mistaking her for who she really was. Before she could begin taking estrogen, however, Dr. Spack had to make sure she didn’t enter male puberty. He’d promised her that when the signs were there, they’d begin her on puberty-suppressing drugs.
At Nicole’s appointment in September 2008, Spack had told Kelly and Wayne that he would begin to carefully monitor her gonadal hormone level and that if it started to rise high they would move quickly, because beginning male puberty would be terrifying for her. In early January 2009 he noted that Nicole had not had a growth spurt and had not developed adult body odor or chest hair. Two months later, however, her hormone levels had risen, there was evidence of a bit of coarse pubic hair, and she had experienced some unwanted erections. It was clear she was on the cusp, and Spack didn’t want to miss the window. The puberty-suppressing drug Lupron can sometimes take as long as three to four months to begin working, so the decision was made: Nicole would begin monthly injections right away. She was thrilled.
When Nicole next saw the psychologist at the gender clinic for a periodic checkup, Dr. Laura Edwards-Leeper asked her what it felt like to still have a penis.
“I’d like to cut it off,” she said, before quickly realizing how melodramatic that sounded and added, “Not seriously.”
“Is that how you really feel about your penis?” the therapist pressed.
“I just try not to care about it because there’s nothing I can do about it at this point. Not until I’m older.”
With her friends beginning to bud small breasts, a flat-chested Nicole still looked childlike in many ways. When she pleaded with her parents for a bra and a set of falsies, Wayne left the decision up to Kelly, and Kelly finally relented. But where do you get falsies for a prepubescent trans girl? Kelly was on her own. She began by buying A-cup bras at Target and at a local sewing shop picking up gel packs worn inside a bra to enhance what’s naturally there. What was “there” for Nicole, however, was nothing, so Kelly sewed little pockets into the bras to hold the gel packs in place. The “enhancement” wasn’t very satisfactory. Nicole’s first boobs, as Kelly called them, were just a bit underwhelming. After more Internet searching, Kelly learned she could buy silicone breast prostheses and bras with built-in pockets designed for women who have had mastectomies. That’s how she bought Nicole’s first real set of “falsies,” the smallest ones available, online. Nicole thought they were perfect. They were squishy and felt substantial in her hands and they even had nipples. Nicole threw away the awkward gel packs and slipped the two, teardrop-shaped silicone breasts into the pockets of her new bra. Wearing them was altogether transformative. Nicole walked around school with a newfound confidence. She was even able to be playful about her “breasts” with her friends back in Orono, once tossing them at another girl while they tried on clothes in a dressing room at the mall.
Kelly always looked in on the twins on her way to bed, and in the first few weeks after Nicole received her new breasts, she would find her daughter all tucked in, but still wearing her bra and prostheses under her pajamas. It made Kelly smile, remembering all the times Nicole had felt embarrassed about her body. Once, when Kelly opened the door to the bathroom while Nicole was taking a shower, she realized she was washing herself in the dark, just so she didn’t have to look at herself.
Becoming Nicole Page 18
