Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  You may be correct. However, is it not a parent’s job to show a kid some direction in life and not just giving in to what they say? Sorry, I would never let my son wear a dress at five because I would not have given up on him so early in the process, but that is the manly side of me talking. Whatever he develops into later, I would accept, but it wouldn’t be because I decided to throw him over the fence to the other side at an early age.

  Wayne and Kelly had heard all this before. It had taken them both time to realize that it didn’t matter how much they’d encouraged or discouraged Nicole’s feminine behavior. The truth was going to win out no matter what. Wayne was reminded of something Kelly had said when a friend “kindly” suggested that perhaps Nicole was transgender because her parents had given her dolls at such a young age.

  “Are you kidding?” Kelly asked. “So what you’re saying is, every man is just one doll away from being a woman?”

  —

  NICOLE NEVER FLINCHED. For two days, along with her father, she walked around the statehouse, a thirteen-year-old kid, knocking on doors and stopping representatives in the hallways.

  “Hi, my name is Nicole Maines, and I really want your support to defeat this bill,” she’d tell each person she met.

  A few walked away when they saw her coming, but most were polite and listened. Of the 151 state representatives, she spoke with 60 or 70. What bothered Nicole wasn’t simply the injustice of the bill; it was the stupidity of it. She asked the politicians, “How are you going to know if a person is transgender in order to stop them from using the bathroom of their choice?” For the past two years, she’d been just another teenage girl at Helen King Middle School. No one knew her story, no one knew she was transgender, and so no one thought twice about her using the girls’ restroom.

  Accompanying Nicole to the statehouse, Wayne made his own personal pleas, distributing leaflets that began with a single, simple declaration:

  Today I am announcing I am the proud father of identical twins. One is a boy and one is a girl.

  Included in the handouts were photographs of Nicole in her sparkly tutus, with scarves over her head or wearing her princess costume.

  Wayne went on to describe how, as a child, when Nicole first began talking she tried to tell her parents she was a girl, not a boy. He asked others to imagine how painfully hard that must have been for a toddler.

  We have tried to live our lives privately, but the stakes are now too high to sit on the sidelines….Nicole is not alone. Children as young as age four will experience severe consequences [if the bill is passed]….These children deserve better. They deserve unconditional love and support….Transgender children deserve the same level of safety and same basic human rights that their friends and their parents often take for granted. If each of us does our part, other children, like Nicole, will not have to say, “Daddy, what did I do wrong?”

  Kelly was proud of both her husband and her daughter. Public speaking was not something she was comfortable doing, and she didn’t like her family’s life suddenly being pried open, but it was all worth it if they could help defeat the proposed restrictions on public accommodation.

  There was one positive development for both Jonas and Nicole, and that was the prospect of starting over at a new school in ninth grade. The experience of going stealth at King had drained them both, and Kelly and Wayne knew they couldn’t keep it up. They still needed to be protected, but they also needed to be in an environment where they could be themselves, freely and without reservation. Casco Bay, a public high school in Portland, appeared to be a good fit. Kelly met with the principal and found the school was both progressive and welcoming. But because there were never enough slots for the number of kids who wanted to attend, a lottery was held every year. Jonas and Nicole put their names in, but only Jonas was offered a slot. Kelly and Wayne had assumed the twins were entered into the lottery together, as a family unit, but when they contacted the school and asked them how they could accept one and not the other, they were told those were the rules. The options were dwindling. There was another public school in Portland as well as a Catholic school, but the former did not have as good a reputation as Casco Bay, and neither Kelly nor Wayne was particularly religious, so their last best hope was Waynflete, a private school, pre-K through twelfth grade, of fewer than six hundred total students. Nicole and Jonas passed the entrance tests easily and were accepted as ninth graders for the 2010–11 school year.

  Waynflete, named by its two female founders after a British educator, opened in 1898 with forty-nine students. The curriculum was based on the progressive educational ideals of American philosopher John Dewey, who emphasized the need for a balance of physical, social, emotional, and intellectual development in young people. Its mission, according to the school’s website, is to “engage the imagination and intellect of our students, to guide them toward self-governance and self-knowledge, and to encourage their responsible and caring participation in the world.”

  Waynflete’s mission embodied ideals that had become the family’s watchwords. At King, Jonas and Nicole had arrived as strangers and, for the most part, stayed that way for the next two years. But they arrived at Waynflete on the first day of classes having already made friends during Wilderness Week, an outing held every year for incoming students. Chewonki is an environmental education camp on a 400-acre peninsula in Wiscasset, fifty miles north of Portland. The incoming ninth graders canoed, kayaked, played games, and hiked for miles.

  “Hi, how are you?” more than one person asked Jonas as he walked down the path to the campsite with a book under his arm. One kid even stopped to ask him what he was reading. It took Jonas a moment to compute what had just happened. At King no one went out of their way to talk to you, unless it was to make fun of you. Jonas had nearly forgotten how to socialize. There had been the harassment in the fifth and sixth grades, then the depression of the seventh and eighth grades, when he and Nicole couldn’t tell their friends why they’d moved to Portland. It was tiring keeping secrets, and it had exhausted everyone in the family. Sometimes it had been so hard Jonas didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Now, all that seemed to vanish. Life didn’t feel like a battle anymore.

  Nicole’s biggest worry was no longer about keeping a secret, but about how to finally share it, now that she and Jonas were in a small, progressive school. She’d forgotten how to talk about herself, something that had always come naturally to her, growing up as an effusive, self-confident child who thought there was nothing unusual about saying she was a boy-girl. But as a teenager, especially after two years of burying her identity, she didn’t know how to resurrect it, to let people back in. Nicole desperately wanted to, but she bottled it in, looking for an opening that didn’t come until the class was on its way back to Portland. She’d bonded with another girl on one of the first nights at Chewonki when they both broke out in song, singing Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” So the two sat next to each other for the hour-long bus ride home. Nicole was feeling comfortable; her worries about being at a new school were slowly melting away. There was just this one last hurdle. That was when her new friend told her she was pansexual. Yes! Nicole thought to herself. She smiled and nodded and told the other girl she was transgender.

  “Cool.”

  And that was it. Relief, joy—every good feeling she’d ever had about herself, poured right back in. When classes began the following week, Nicole came out to someone nearly every day. No one had an issue; no one turned away. One classmate did ask her if that meant she was now going to start dressing like a boy. Nicole laughed so hard she almost cried.

  CHAPTER 35

  First Kiss

  When the ninth grade had barely begun, Nicole made her first scripted public remarks at the 2011 GLAD Spirit of Justice Award Dinner, where she introduced her father. Standing on a step stool behind a lectern, she wore a sleeveless lavender-patterned chiffon dress with matching scarf around her neck. Confidently, if still a bit shyly, she began to speak to a
n audience numbering in the hundreds.

  My name is Nicole Maines. I am fourteen years old. I would like to introduce you to my amazing family. My twin brother, Jonas, is kind, funny, and one of my strongest supporters. My mom has always encouraged me through everything. And my dad has lobbied with me at the statehouse in Maine and given speeches on my behalf. And we’re not even through high school yet, people.

  The crowd chuckled. Nicole smiled bashfully.

  I am a transgender girl. I was born a boy but I’ve always known I was a girl. I changed my name and wore my first dress to school in the fifth grade. I was a little worried what my friends would say, but they said it was about time.

  It was an emotional moment, and while the main honorees that night were the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, his wife, and two daughters, Wayne and Nicole were recognized for their recent activism. The accolades were appreciated, but the family knew they weren’t close to finishing the job. For better or worse, they were all now part of a public story, one they wouldn’t always be able to control. Nicole enjoyed the attention, but she squirmed at the loss of privacy, and that loss was connected to her discomfort over dating. How would she know now, when she met a boy, if he knew her as just Nicole, or as Nicole the transgender teenager in the news? A romance was something she desperately wanted for herself, but how do you tell a boy you’re a girl, and yet different from other girls? That challenge became very real in the middle of the ninth grade.

  The sheriff’s office periodically conducted training exercises for law enforcement in how to respond to a school shooting. For the purposes of verisimilitude, the Active Shooter program, as it was called, liked to have teenagers play the parts of school shooting victims. It was a chance to act. Nicole, of course, volunteered. She’d have preferred to play someone injured so she could at least scream and cry a bit, but a part was a part, so she was determined to play the best dead body ever.

  A few teenagers at the school where the exercise was taking place also volunteered to be victims. One of them was a boy who attended the school. When he and Nicole found themselves lying close to each other, supposedly dead, they couldn’t help whispering during the long exercise. He was cute, Nicole thought. He had romantic eyes, dirty brown hair, and was very attentive. At one point, they touched hands. Toward the end of the training, when they were all picking up spent gun cartridges—the ammunition was blank—the boy leaned into Nicole and gave her a quick kiss. She was surprised, embarrassed, and delighted all at the same time, and she probably blushed to her roots. It was thrilling.

  Afterward, at a reception for the volunteers, he sought out Nicole. She knew he had no idea she was transgender, and she panicked at the thought of him finding out. She just wanted to go home. While they waited for their rides, they stood with the other student actors outside, chatting. As Kelly pulled up to the school, she noticed Nicole being very animated with a young boy. A sheriff’s deputy, whom Kelly knew well, sidled up to the car and told her he’d seen Nicole and a boy exchange a quick kiss.

  “They were so cute!” he said.

  Kelly frowned. She knew Nicole badly wanted a boyfriend. But any romantic relationships before she made her full physical transition were complicated—especially if it was someone Nicole had just met. All he saw was a beautiful girl.

  “What’s wrong?” the deputy asked Kelly.

  “She’s transgender.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

  Just then, Kelly spotted Nicole in the distance, still talking to the young boy, who was snuggling up to her. Nicole looked up and caught Kelly’s eye. Her face fell. Both knew what the other was thinking. This boy had no idea who Nicole was and maybe didn’t even know what it meant to be transgender. This brief romance wasn’t going anywhere.

  When Nicole got in the car, she slumped down in the front seat.

  Kelly knew it wasn’t the right time to ask her anything, so they drove home in silence. Eventually, though, she knocked on Nicole’s bedroom door and said she wanted to talk.

  “What happened?”

  “There was a boy there, and I think he really liked me.”

  She started to cry.

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Honey, you’re not going to do anything,” Kelly said. “You’re not going to marry him. But you did just get your first kiss!”

  As a child, Nicole wanted more than anything to be seen as a girl and accepted as a girl; it was enough at that age. But all through adolescence, her greatest fear hadn’t been about others knowing who she was; it had been about someone not loving her for what she was. Could any boy truly want her, knowing she was transgender? She looked like a girl, she felt like a girl, and she yearned to be kissed like the girl she really was, but what would a boy say if he knew that technically she was not 100 percent female?

  A few days later the boy from the training exercise tried to reach Nicole through Facebook. She wasn’t at all sure she was ready to share her innermost secrets. With Nicole’s agreement, Wayne blocked him.

  CHAPTER 36

  Small Victories

  Two weeks after Nicole lobbied hard against LD 1046, which would have amended Maine’s Human Rights Act to remove protections for transgender people, the bill was defeated in both the state senate and house, where more than a dozen Republicans joined the Democrats in voting down the measure. It was a significant victory for Maine but also for the Maines family. So it felt like a kind of bonus when, the following day, a new bill was introduced to the Maine legislature seeking to strengthen the state’s anti-bullying laws. At the time, most schools in the state relied on their own individual student conduct policies when it came to harassing behavior. The new legislation sought to turn those policies into one statewide standard. Less than a year later, Paul LePage, Maine’s conservative governor, signed the bill into law with overwhelming bipartisan support. Broadly but explicitly defined, bullying was strictly prohibited in every school in the state. Had the law been in place when Jacob, at the insistence of his grandfather, harassed Nicole in the fifth grade, the administrators at Asa C. Adams Elementary School might well have reacted differently.

  With the defeat of the proposed public accommodation restrictions and the adoption of stricter standards regarding bullying, the Maines family felt a small sense of vindication. They’d given up their privacy for the cause. They’d been written about in the local press and interviewed on the Maine Public Broadcasting Network, and now LD 1046 was soundly rejected by the state legislature. A transgender blogger announced the victory this way: “Score one for Nicole and the Maine trans community.”

  The two years of living “stealth” at King had done a lot of harm. Nicole had withdrawn from many social activities, and one of them was sleepovers. She hadn’t been on one, or invited kids over for one, since she was eleven years old. From the age of seven, the issue of sleepovers, with girls in pajamas and nightgowns, had been fraught with anxiety for Nicole.

  As Wyatt, his girlfriends wanted him to be a part of all their activities, in and out of school, but Kelly and Wayne had known that the parents of those kids might not all be on board. As each sleepover approached, they’d carefully inquire about the parents of the hosting friend. What were their politics, their religion, their values? How open-minded were they? Once Kelly explained the situation—that Wyatt considered himself a girl with boy parts he felt didn’t belong to him and never wanted anyone else to see—the majority of parents were fine with it.

  Sleepovers may have seemed a minor detail of growing up—games, movies, s’mores, and very little sleep—but Kelly and Wayne had come to realize they were deeply validating for their child. Having to go stealth in middle school essentially ended the sleepovers. They were too risky, and their loss for Nicole further underscored her sense that she was living a lie. Being a girl wasn’t just something she was in isolation and at home. It was who she was with others all the time.

  So it was a big step in December when Nicole invited a group of girls o
ver to the house and they ate, watched movies, and chattered all night long. Kelly and Wayne didn’t mind the lack of sleep because of all the noise. It was happy noise, and as they lay in bed, exhausted and awake, they were happy, too. The next day, as parents arrived to pick up their children, the Maineses quietly thanked them for helping to make the sleepover such a success for Nicole.

  A couple of months later, a reporter from The Boston Globe contacted the family. She wanted to write a feature about them and everything they’d been through. A page-one article in the Sunday Boston Globe meant a whole lot more publicity, but they all agreed the time was right to tell their story. Kelly had had so few resources when she first began trying to figure out what to do for her child. In those early years, she’d had to grope along, finding help and support where she could. There was so much more that other people needed to know. This was a chance to show them what it means to have a transgender child.

  The article appeared two weeks before Christmas, 2011, with a huge photograph of Nicole and Jonas sitting side-by-side on the front page, above the fold. The headline read “Led by the Child Who Simply Knew.”

  It was an unprecedented story for a major American newspaper, and the Globe was flooded with calls and emails, the large majority from people moved by the details of the Maineses’ journey. Then came a tsunami of media requests. Kelly didn’t want her family’s life to become a circus. She just needed to buy them some time, she thought to herself, time for both her children to experience life as average teenagers, with all the normal obligations, expectations, dreams, and problems. She wanted to keep them as close to her as possible and give them as much of their childhood as she could, before the world took them away. She’d waited for these children. If she could just hold on to them a little bit longer.