Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  “I never had a brother,” he once said to Nicole. “You were always a sister to me.”

  IV

  Breaking Barriers

  Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks….Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now?…They mark the turning points of our lives.

  —DANI SHAPIRO

  CHAPTER 41

  Commencement

  In March 2015, seven years after Kelly and Wayne had urged Orono Middle School to do the right thing, a school board in Millinocket, Maine, about an hour north of Orono, announced the creation of a transgender student policy. The Maines case had forced school systems all over the state, indeed all over the country, to examine their rules and regulations to ensure they wouldn’t be legally liable in the way the Orono school district had been found to be. The four pages of new policy recommendations were written in direct response to the court order that enjoined the Orono School Department from discriminating against transgender students.

  Under “Purpose,” the document stated that the new guidelines were meant to “foster a learning environment that is safe and free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying” and “to assist the educational and social integration of transgender students” in the schools. Two important items were also addressed in the Millinocket memorandum:

  Restrooms:

  A student who has been identified as transgender under these guidelines should be permitted to use the restroom assigned to the gender which the student consistently asserts at school.

  Locker rooms:

  The use of locker rooms requires schools to consider a number of factors, including but not necessarily limited to the safety and comfort of students; the transgender student’s preference; student privacy; the ages of students; and available facilities. As a general rule, transgender students will be permitted to use the locker room assigned to the gender which the student consistently asserts at school. A transgender student will not be required to use a locker room that conflicts with the gender identity consistently asserted at school.

  When the Bangor Daily News ran the story about Millinocket’s response to the Maineses’ state Supreme Court victory, many of the online comments were surprisingly unsympathetic.

  They didn’t discriminate in Orono. They said they didn’t know what to do…so they provided a faculty bathroom. Those poor administrators in Orono getting a bad rap over this.

  This is oh so wrong.

  My kids better never have an opposite sex in their restroom. I’ve told my daughter if you see an Adam’s apple, scream and keep screaming. She knows how.

  At nearly the same time as the Millinocket debate, Boston University School of Medicine released the results of the first comprehensive review of the scientific evidence regarding gender identity as a biological phenomenon, and concluded, according to one of the authors of the report, that it provides:

  one of the most convincing arguments to date for all medical providers to gain the transgender medicine skills necessary to provide good care for these individuals….Clinical experience with treatment of transgender persons has clearly demonstrated that the best outcomes for these individuals are achieved with their requested hormone therapy and surgical sexual transition as opposed to psychiatric intervention alone.

  In a March letter to Nicole, the University of Maine, whose insurance is managed by Cigna, begged to differ.

  After reviewing the information we have, we determined we cannot approve this request….We found the service requested is not a covered benefit.

  In other words, Nicole’s sex reassignment surgery was considered cosmetic, and therefore not a medical or health necessity. Wayne and Kelly were not entirely surprised. Cigna had approved sex reassignment surgery and other transgender medical procedures in December 2014, but the University of Maine’s health management system had not adopted them. Still, after all they’d been through, to be told that Nicole’s final transition was cosmetic was laughable. Wayne and GLAD talked to the University of Maine management team, and Wayne submitted a second appeal. It worked. A little more than two months later, the University of Maine made a complete reversal—and not just for Nicole, but for all its health insurance beneficiaries. It was yet another battle won by the Maineses, and in the process they smoothed the way for others who would follow. That night Wayne wrote to Jennifer Levi about the family’s sense of relief. “I don’t know about you, but we needed a break from the battlefield.”

  —

  IN THE SPRING OF 2015, high school was coming to an end for both Nicole and Jonas. They’d been accepted into colleges, with Jonas opting to study theater and psychology at the University of Maine in Farmington and Nicole pursuing theater and art at the University of Maine in Orono. Wayne and Kelly would get a break on tuition because Nicole and Jonas were the children of a university staff member. Instead of the $10,000 in-state tuition for each, for the year, the family would pay half that.

  By the time the twins graduated from Waynflete, Wayne and Kelly had laid out nearly $120,000 dollars for their four years at the private academy. Without scholarships from the school, it would have been twice that much. To save more money, for the twins’ senior year Wayne once again downsized his living situation, moving from his graduate student housing to Orono’s Wilson Center, a nondenominational church, which, much like a mini YMCA, provided rooms for renters. At $450 a month, it nearly cut in half Wayne’s rent for his student apartment. He also had the advantage of belonging to a community. On Wednesday evenings, dinner was free and everyone pitched in to cook. On Monday there was meditation and yoga; on Tuesdays the Quakers held services. Wayne took pleasure in being an all-around handyman and was quick to befriend the two students with whom he shared close living quarters, an engineer from China and a sociology major from New Jersey. Wayne had enough room for a sectional couch, a bed, and a small refrigerator. There were shared shower facilities. “It’s like living in a tiny frat house,” he told visitors. “A co-ed frat house.”

  At the beginning of the year, Wayne received an email from a transgender staff person at the Los Angeles offices of GLAAD, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (and distinct from GLAD, the organization that had represented the family in their legal battle). The GLAAD staff person had an offer for Nicole: Would she be interested in auditioning for the guest role of a transgender teen in an upcoming episode of Royal Pains, an hour-long series on the USA Network? The show follows the character of Hank Lawson, a reluctant “doctor for hire” to the rich and famous of Long Island’s Hamptons. In May, after her second callback, Nicole was offered the part.

  The following month, Wayne drove his daughter down to New York for a week of rehearsals and taping. USA Network provided a limo every day to take them from their Manhattan hotel to the set. On the second day of shooting, their driver chatted about how he’d twice voted for Obama as president but was now a Republican. When Wayne asked why, he said, “They’re even screwing up college mascots.” Wayne asked what he was referring to and the driver told him that he’d just heard that Rutgers University in New Jersey announced it was going to try and create different versions of its mascot: the Scarlet Knight.

  “They want a transgender mascot!” the driver said.

  Wayne and Nicole immediately turned to each other and smiled. When they got back to the hotel room, they said, “What the hell was that all about? And what’s a transgender scarlet knight, anyway?” Transgender was the theme of the day. Toward the end of the week the driver asked Nicole about her role on the show. When she told him she was playing the part of a transgender student and that she herself was transgender, the driver seemed surprised and embarrassed, but Wayne engaged him in more discussion. He told the man that being transgender was a medical condition and that transgender rights weren’t about being a Democrat or a Republican. They were about being true to yourself.

  Sometime after the sixth grade, Nicole wrote a poem called “Disequality.” It
expressed sadness, frustration—and defiance.

  What do you call a girl with a head

  who regrets what she heard that equality said?

  That you deserve the same

  as your peers without blame?

  Feeling the townspeople’s stares can’t even compare

  to being watched by the dogs whose eyes are aflair.

  Waiting for you to slip

  for you to make one wrong move,

  when their brains may flip

  and their screams disapprove.

  They have you sit alone,

  away from friends

  in hopes that your difference will come to an end.

  What do you call a girl with a head

  who regrets what she heard that equality said?

  That you deserve the same as your peers without blame?

  You call her Nicole.

  And her difference makes her whole.

  Before Nicole could express herself, before she was able to claim her own identity, Kelly had to do it for her. Wayne liked to say that the most important thing parents can do is make sure they have confidence in themselves. Only then can they give their children what they need without fear of what others might think. It had taken Wayne a long time to attain that confidence. For some reason, Kelly had always had it. There were self-doubts, of course—how could there not have been, especially when she had to piece together her own lesson plan on how to raise a transgender child? She and Wayne had sacrificed so much just to keep their kids safe. It was never easy. It was often painful. Kelly had set aside so much in her life. She’d pushed her love of painting into the background to raise two kids virtually alone. Wayne had missed much of the twins’ childhoods. And yet he’d be the first to say it had all been worth it.

  Kelly knew that, too, although she sometimes felt she had to apologize to Jonas and Nicole. With all the worries, the planning, and the self-educating, she hadn’t had much time to actually play with her children as they were growing up. “I’m sorry if it hasn’t been much fun,” she sometimes said to the twins, but Jonas and Nicole would have none of it. This was how it was supposed to be. Jonas told his mother and father it would be cool if someday someone said, “Hey, have you heard about the transgender person?” and the response would simply be, “Yeah, so what?” It should just be a normal thing, he said, the way it had always been for him growing up. He’d always seen his brother as his sister. It just took a while for everyone else.

  In the first week of June 2015, Nicole and Jonas took part in their last high school prom. Nicole’s date was Alex, a boy she’d met at an anime convention in Portland the year before, and with whom she’d been keeping in touch mostly through email since his home was about an hour away. He was a year ahead of Nicole in school, a rising sophomore at the University of Maine in Orono, where he was studying computer science. Jonas was between girlfriends, so his date was a close friend of both his and Nicole’s.

  It was a warm night under a full June strawberry moon. Nicole wore a formal black gown and four-inch high heels, and along with Jonas and his date and their friend Austin and his boyfriend, they all piled into a rented limo for the trip to the Falmouth Country Club, ten miles north of Portland. It was a big step up from their freshman year prom, held at a local church. At the country club, the Waynflete seniors danced under white tents and colorful strobe lights to the music of a DJ. It was romantic, much like a wedding, and nearly perfect. When the limo dropped them all off at Austin’s house at the end of the night everyone was so exhausted they collapsed on various couches, fully dressed, and didn’t stir till dawn.

  A week later, Waynflete held its 117th commencement. Jonas Zebediah Maines and Nicole Amber Maines were among the sixty-eight graduates who received diplomas and congratulations from the president of the board of trustees, the head of the school, and the director of the upper school. Jonas strode confidently across the stage in a tie and blue blazer that was a half size too small, then promptly bear-hugged each school official in turn, with the audience laughing in approval and the head of the school shrugging his shoulders in amusement. Next, Nicole, in a short white dress and tan high heels, skipped across the stage, curtsied ever so slightly to the three school officials, then, just as she was about to descend the steps of the stage, struck a pose: hands on hips, one leg bent behind her, head tossed back. They were identical twins, they were brother and sister, and they were, each of them, unmistakably their own person.

  Watching from the audience, Kelly couldn’t quite believe any of it. It had taken so long to get here, and yet it had all gone so fast. After all those hours encouraging her kids to study, she still couldn’t believe they’d gotten all their work in on time. If it was possible—and she’d never thought so in the past—she was going to miss the “old times,” but since she was someone who was also always looking ahead, she couldn’t wait to see what her children would do with their futures.

  As usual, Wayne tried not to cry. He kept thinking about the decision to send the kids to Waynflete, the worry over how they were ever going to pay for it, his doubts about why they even needed to attend a private school, a place that seemed so foreign to what he and Kelly had known growing up. If they hadn’t felt pushed into a corner by the dismal experience of King Middle School and the lottery split decision at Casco Bay, or if the decision had been his alone, he’d probably not have opted to send his kids to Waynflete. And he would have been so wrong.

  Wayne knew he could teach Jonas and Nicole only so much—how to skin a moose, track a deer, maybe even play poker. He hoped he’d been able to pass on his and Kelly’s work ethic and their strong survival instincts, maybe even a bit of his own penchant for storytelling. But he knew Waynflete had exposed his kids to much more than he and Kelly had ever experienced as teenagers. A lot of people had helped them to get to this place, from schoolteachers and doctors to lawyers, activists, and politicians, friends, and family. Lisa Erhardt, the school counselor at Asa Adams, even sent the twins graduation presents.

  Jonas and Nicole were ready for college. All on his own, Jonas had even won a major acting scholarship by performing a monologue from Macbeth, a part he’d never played onstage. When Jonas hugged the dean of the school, Wayne finally let the tears flow. It was the old Jonas, the happy, funny, clever child. And Nicole, mincing across the stage and striking that pose—yes, she was sassy, and she’d done exactly what he’d expected her to do, totally engaging in the moment and having fun with it. He hoped he and Kelly had provided the right foundation. He also hoped all the scars wouldn’t impede their ability to flourish. He didn’t think they would, and he knew a lot of the reason was Kelly. They’d learned so much from her, about honesty, the power of self-confidence, and the importance of standing up for their beliefs. As Jonas and Nicole sat back down with their diplomas in hand, Wayne thought again about how much his wife had done to get them to this place, this exact spot. They were all going to be okay.

  The philosopher Charles Taylor once wrote:

  Each of us has an original way of being human: Each person has his or her own “measure.”…There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s life. But this gives a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me.

  No one could accuse the Maines family of missing what it meant to be human. And they were certainly living in imitation of no one. But for Nicole, there was at least one more step, one more task to complete so that she, too, could claim her most authentic self. Wayne had spent most of Nicole’s life trying not to think about the surgery, the final procedure that would take away the last physical reminders of the gender that never belonged to her. He thought about all those male bonding memories from his youth.

  He remembered in particular the black bear hunt on Montague Island off the coast of Alaska he’d made with several of his buddies. One of them had a motor home, and they’d d
riven it four hundred miles from Fairbanks to Valdez, drinking, playing cards, and talking about hunting. Somewhere on a mountain pass outside Valdez they needed a bathroom break, but with no facility for miles, they simply pulled over. There, all six men lined up, a heavy snow falling, to relieve themselves by the side of the road. Wayne actually stepped back and took a quick photo of the scene: five friends, standing in the headlights, in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness, with their “manhood” hanging out. He’d thought of that photo as the ultimate male bonding picture. That was something he’d wanted for Wyatt and he’d given up on for Nicole, and it hadn’t been easy. Then he thought about how far he’d come, how far the world had come, in just a few years. In half a lifetime, really.

  Nicole and Jonas hadn’t even lived a quarter of their own lives yet. It was all still too close for them. The memories they’d already laid away were for events that had barely passed. In the confusion and sometimes chaos of the past few years, none of them had had much time to be reflective, but a year or so earlier they’d all had the chance to do it, together, on a long afternoon.