Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (8 page)

A
s Wyatt continued to try to assert his femininity, his fights with Jonas became more frequent. At a session with his brother and Dr. Holmes in July 2006, Wyatt told the psychologist he worried that his brother wouldn’t accept him as a girl the more he dressed and looked like one, especially in school. He also felt like Jonas wasn’t as interested in playing with him, and maybe that was because he was embarrassed by Wyatt.

When Holmes turned to Jonas and asked him what he thought, Jonas was clear. He said he didn’t mind at all that Wyatt dressed and acted like a girl. In fact, he felt protective of his brother and at times worried about how to defend him if other kids picked on him. But mainly he said he just wasn’t that interested in playing with dolls anymore. He’d rather be outside with his friends.

“I’m growing out of those things,” Jonas said.

In school Wyatt contributed seven poems to the class poetry anthology, including one titled “Alone with the Music.”

You can breathe in

to be alone

So now

no one is with me

SO IF I WANNA RUN

OUTA HERE

But now I know

my heart

Because I’ve freed

my mind

S
OME OF THE HARDEST
times for Wyatt involved sports, especially swimming, because it required changing clothes and showering. Because sports were after-school activities, Wayne sometimes would oversee the boys’ locker room, where Wyatt had to change. It was a locker room with an open shower and twelve shower heads. No walls, no privacy, just a lot of high-pressure water and steam. The boys would come in slipping and sliding around, shouting, and slapping each other with towels. Jonas and Wyatt were often the last to get dressed since their father was mostly corralling the other kids. One time Wyatt was still in the shower area when one of the older boys said something to him. Wyatt didn’t hesitate. He got up close to the kid’s face.

“You got a problem with me?” he asked.

The other boy was at least a foot and a half taller than Wyatt and looked ready to push him to the ground when he saw Wayne headed their way.

“Hey!” Wayne yelled at the kid, who turned and walked away.

Wayne motioned to Wyatt.

“What the heck is going on?”

“Nothing,” Wyatt replied.

“Are you nuts, Wy? If I hadn’t been here he could have really hurt you.”

“I can handle it,” Wyatt said.

“No, you can’t. Next time someone says something to you, you need to walk away and tell me or Mom what’s going on, okay?”

Wyatt had never lacked chutzpah. He stood up for himself when he needed to. This was one thing Wayne admired about his son. He remembered when the twins were in second grade, for one of the class’s frequent writing assignments, Wyatt, who had drawn himself with long curly hair, had made up a story about a girl pirate who beats up the bad boy pirates. At least Wyatt portrayed himself as a strong leader, Wayne thought.

Sometimes, though, the insults weren’t even meant to be insults. That became clear when Wayne and Kelly signed the boys up for Cub Scouts. Wayne had a dream of his twins someday reaching the rank of Eagle Scout, the organization’s highest honor. Duty to country, to others, to oneself; respect, honor, leadership—Wayne fervently believed in Scouting’s core principles. But at the Cub Scout level, in a room full of unruly boys, Scouting’s principles were not always in evidence. At Cub Scout events, older kids sometimes targeted Wyatt, commenting on his feminine behavior. Most of the parents weren’t paying attention, but those who were did nothing to discipline their children, which deeply troubled Wayne. He and Kelly had thought Scouting was a good way to integrate into the community and a good opportunity for their kids to make friends, but how long could they expose their twins to words that might wound them and tear down their self-esteem?

During one den meeting, a mother asked Wayne and Kelly, in front of everyone, “Is Wyatt a boy or a girl?” Kelly quickly pulled the woman aside to explain that Wyatt was a girl in a boy’s body and that if she wanted to know more, all she had to do was ask and she’d be happy to tell her about being transgender. Wayne still wasn’t there yet, mentally. He wasn’t convinced Wyatt was transgender, or maybe he just wasn’t ready to accept it. In either case, Kelly knew she had to be the one to explain to others, to be the go-between for Wyatt and those who didn’t, or couldn’t, understand what he was all about.

The Scouting experiment was over before it barely began, and it was one more reminder to Wayne that his family was different from everyone else’s. Unfortunately, his way of dealing with it all—or not dealing with it—was just to shut down, or, lately, to go swimming in a nearby lake.

After dinner and helping the kids with their homework, Wayne often didn’t have much time left for exercising, but one night he was determined to go for a long swim. When he departed for the lake it was nearly ten o’clock and pitch-black. It was a short drive, and there were plenty of parking spaces when he got there. The distance across the lake was a quarter mile, far enough for him to tie a life preserver around his foot and drag it behind him just in case he needed it.

Barely a whisper of wind ruffled the lake’s surface. Wayne pushed off from the shore and began to swim, back and forth, at a slow but steady pace. He used the streetlights from a nearby bridge to guide him in one direction, and the illumination from a campsite to guide him in the other. He must have made eight crossings, close to two miles, when he finally walked out of the water an hour or two later. And when he did, he was startled to find two police officers waiting for him, wanting to know what he was doing in the lake at midnight.

“I’m training for a race,” he told them. “A triathlon.” It was true, but not the whole story, not by a long shot.

“Well, could you maybe train during the daylight?” one of the policemen asked.

Wayne explained that he actually couldn’t, that this was the only free time of the day for him to work out. The officers told Wayne that if it was up to them, they didn’t mind, since he wasn’t breaking any laws, but they had responded to a call from an elderly woman, someone who lived by the lake, who swore she saw a man trying to commit suicide. Wayne laughed, perhaps a bit too strenuously, then assured the men he had no such intention. They shrugged and headed back to their patrol car.

Wayne knew the exercising, the triathlons, the huge pile of firewood that kept reaching higher, were all about not wanting to deal with Wyatt. Actually, that wasn’t quite right. It was more about not wanting to deal with his feelings about Wyatt. He had handed everything over to Kelly in terms of decision making, and even when he objected to letting Wyatt dress more like a girl, he ultimately let Kelly be the arbiter. With two kids, of course, it was impossible for Wayne not to be involved in ferrying them to their various extracurricular activities or being shanghaied into chaperoning parties. He probably took the most pleasure in doing “boy” things with Jonas, such as Little League. Wayne spent hours teaching him the art of hitting. Standing with his back to the garage door, Jonas would wait for his father to reach into a bucket of twenty or thirty Wiffle balls at his feet and pitch them underhand. Jonas did not come by his baseball skills naturally, though. After watching Jonas struggle one day, Wyatt sauntered up wearing a sparkly dress and heels.

“Let me try it,” he said.

Wyatt then proceeded to hit four solid line drives, one after the other. Wayne laughed. Jonas did not. Sports for Jonas were never easy. He wanted to play, he was competitive, but as he grew older he appreciated what sports would
not
do for him—they would never be the way he’d feel good about himself. In a school essay he later wrote, Jonas concluded he didn’t have the temperament, or the physical acumen, to be a stand-out athlete:

Athletics are not for everyone to enjoy, but there are obviously those who are avid followers of many different sports….To care for something with such passion is not a trait everybody has.

Jonas’s passion was his imagination. He reveled in acting out stories in which he sometimes played a knight, fighting off enemies with sword and shield. Wyatt liked the weapons, too, but rather than play a knight or a pirate or Robin Hood, he’d rather be a sword-wielding princess.

Still, it hurt Jonas that he could struggle with a game as simple as Wiffle ball, while Wyatt, in high heels and a dress, could step up and whack the ball. For one thing, sports was a proven road to social success in school, and Jonas wanted to play a sport if for no other reason than to be part of a team.

Wyatt was never one to doubt his interests or himself. He knew what he liked, who he liked, and what he wanted to be. Jonas was so unlike him. He knew he was a boy, of course, but that was about it. He didn’t seem to fit the mold of other boys his age, and the more he retreated into himself, the less confident he became. He was curious, a questioner, dissatisfied with simple explanations and therefore more comfortable being alone.

But one thing Jonas was sure about was Wyatt.

After one back-and-forth between Wayne and Wyatt regarding feminine clothing, Jonas came up to his father and said, “Face it, Dad, you have a son
and
a daughter.”

T
hroughout the third and fourth grades other students in his class referred to Wyatt using male pronouns. In their minds he was a “boy-girl” as he’d told them on more than one occasion. Older kids might occasionally tease Wyatt, but if there were parents who weren’t quite sure what it all meant, they kept it to themselves. Anxiety about how others saw him sometimes caused Wyatt to act out and his tics to flare up, but there was also a growing sense of self-esteem. Increasingly he was looking more feminine, and while keeping in mind Virginia Holmes’s guidance about going slow, Kelly was increasingly allowing Wyatt to wear more girlish clothes both at home and in public. He still begged his mother to let him wear skirts and dresses to school, but without success.

Early in the fourth grade, Wyatt’s teacher, Mrs. Kreutz, gave the class an assignment to go home and draw a self-portrait that she would then hang in the school’s hallway. A couple of days later, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, Sara Kreutz scurried into the office of the school counselor, Lisa Erhardt, and closed the door.

“Lisa, I need your help.” Kreutz held up a piece of paper. It was a drawing of a girl with long curly hair, purple eye shadow, and jewelry—actually it was a drawing of a bombshell of a girl, Erhardt thought.

“I don’t get it,” Erhardt said to Kreutz.

“This is what Wyatt drew for the school’s open house—his self-portrait—the drawings I told the class we’d use to decorate the hallways. It doesn’t look anything like him, but I want to honor his vision and I don’t know what to do.”

“I think we should call Kelly,” said Kreutz.

Asa C. Adams Elementary was small, with only about 260 students in pre-K through fifth grade, so Lisa Erhardt knew all the students and was comfortable and confident in her job. She had grown up in a small town in Maine. In high school she’d made money by babysitting and was everybody’s go-to friend whenever advice was needed. More than that, though, she just liked listening to kids. They had interesting minds, she thought. So did she. In the course of four years at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, she went from majoring in biology to art history to psychology. The skipping around wasn’t so much a reflection of indecision as it was of her ever-widening interests.

In the spring of her junior year, Erhardt signed up for her first class in the psychology department. It was a course in educational psychology, and part of the requirements included spending time observing children at one of the local public schools. She was struck by how relaxed kids seemed around her, how easy it was for them to open up and tell her what was on their minds. Maybe it was because she always treated children like people, with their own ideas and their own points of view. At the school in Lewiston where she was an observer, however, it seemed as though the teachers were too busy managing students and had little time for conversations with them.

“Is there someone else the kids can talk to?” she asked one of the teachers one day.

“A lot of other schools have counselors, but we don’t,” the teacher told her.

That did it. Erhardt devoted her remaining time in college to learning as much as she could about educational psychology with the idea in mind of becoming a school counselor. After graduation, she picked up a master’s degree in the subject through an accelerated program at the University of Maine in Orono.

Erhardt was twenty-six in 2003, when she took the counseling job at Asa Adams. She saw herself as someone whose role was to level the playing field, to make school accessible for all students no matter their background or academic standing. She saw herself chiefly as an advocate for kids, whose goal was to figure out how the school could “grow” the whole child, how to help students identify their feelings and how to cope with whatever troubled them. “Conflict resolution specialist,” was how she described it, but she was also fine with the simple title of school counselor.

E
RHARDT HADN’T NOTICED
W
YATT
right away when he and Jonas enrolled at Asa Adams. After all, he wasn’t the first boy she’d seen who liked to wear pink sneakers and carry a pink backpack. At that age, a boy can be just as easily attracted to typically feminine things as masculine things and still be “all boy.” Orono was a fairly liberal college town, where children were encouraged to be independent.

Not until Kelly had stopped by Erhardt’s office about a month after Jonas and Wyatt began first grade in 2003 had the name “Wyatt Maines” come to her attention. Like any other concerned parent, Kelly had wanted to share her child’s story with Erhardt—fill her in on her son’s idiosyncrasies, so that maybe she could keep an eye on him.

“I don’t know if you’ve met my kids yet,” Kelly began. “They’re twins and one of them, Wyatt, he really likes sparkly stuff. My husband isn’t really happy with that, but I’m just trying to do the right things for him. So I was wondering, do you know anything about this?”

“I don’t, not really, but I think I’ve heard of it.”

Erhardt got up from her desk, pulled the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
down from her bookshelf, and combed through the index. There it was: “Gender Identity Disorder.” Kelly already had read about this in her research online and from Virginia Holmes, but she’d never seen the whole description in the DSM, the bible of psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors. Erhardt read out loud:

There are two components of Gender Identity Disorder, both of which must be present to make the diagnosis. There must be evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification….There must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex….In boys, the cross-gender identification is manifested by a marked preoccupation with traditionally feminine activities. They may have a preference for dressing in girls’ or women’s clothes or may improvise such items from available materials when genuine articles are unavailable. Towels, aprons and scarves are often used to represent long hair or skirts….They may express a wish to be a girl and assert that they will grow up to be a woman….More rarely, boys with Gender Identity Disorder may state that they find their penis or testes disgusting….

Kelly listened carefully. It all sounded a great deal like Wyatt. She and Erhardt talked a bit more, and by the time Kelly left twenty minutes later she felt she’d made an important connection. For her part, Erhardt knew she had a lot of catching up to do. Wyatt was going to be at Asa Adams through the fifth grade, and as the school counselor Erhardt knew she’d have to learn much, much more about gender identity disorder. She also knew she’d done the wrong thing by grabbing the DSM in front of Kelly instead of first talking to her about Wyatt. It was like she’d pathologized the child right off the bat, suggesting there was something wrong with him. That wasn’t it at all, actually. The instinct to grab a book was simply because Erhardt didn’t have the vocabulary yet to talk to Kelly about Wyatt. She needed to put a name to what the two of them were discussing, and almost as soon as Kelly closed the door to the office, Erhardt hoped the child’s mother hadn’t taken offense.

Erhardt told her clinical supervisor, who was not associated with the school, about the incident with Kelly and reading to her from the DSM and how mortified she’d felt.

“What do you think you should have done?” the supervisor asked.

“Well, I need to learn more about it.”

Erhardt said she’d scoured the Internet but that she couldn’t find much, certainly nothing of substance related to transgender children.

“Well, you know, you have this whole university here in Orono. Why don’t you start by contacting its LGBT center?”

On a snowy February day, Erhardt walked over to the university, which was practically in her backyard, made her way up to the second floor of Memorial Union, the center of the university community, and stepped into the Rainbow Resource Center. It was just a single room, with a smattering of students mostly just hanging out, and they immediately jumped in to help her, pulling books off the shelves of the resource center’s library and fielding all of Erhardt’s questions. Forty-five minutes later, she left laden with information, suggestions, and contact numbers. She also couldn’t quite believe the generosity and friendliness shown her by these students; it was a feeling she would never forget.

E
RHARDT AND
K
ELLY HAD
spoken many times in the three years since their first meeting. Often Kelly called Erhardt to ask a question, and sometimes Erhardt came across information or an outside resource she thought might help Kelly. It was all about making sure Wyatt was comfortable at school, and it was a mission both women shared.

During the twins’ third-grade year, Erhardt’s office had been adjacent to the classroom, so after escorting the kids to school, Kelly often stopped by to chat, and it was something the two women continued to do when Wyatt and Jonas were in the fourth grade. The two women talked about what they were reading and exchanged things they’d recently learned. Other times they tried to anticipate what problems might arise for Wyatt in the coming weeks and months. Erhardt liked Kelly’s commonsense approach to parenting. She never asked for special treatment for Wyatt. She was a problem solver, like Erhardt, and the two women, though fifteen years apart in age, shared a mutual understanding and respect.

When Kelly picked up the phone that afternoon in September 2006, Erhardt explained Mrs. Kreutz’s dilemma about Wyatt’s self-portrait. She told Kelly the portrait was quite beautiful, but the teacher wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. Should she post the picture in the hallway or not? She didn’t want to hurt Wyatt, but she didn’t think he understood that it might cause problems for him. Kelly laughed.

“I’ve seen a lot of those pictures.”

“What do you want us to do?” Erhardt asked.

“Well, what was the actual assignment?”

Erhardt put her hand over the receiver and asked Kreutz the same thing.

“It was ‘What do you see when you look in the mirror?’ ” Kreutz said.

Erhardt repeated the teacher’s answer to Kelly.

“Well, he didn’t follow the directions. Tell him to bring it home and that he has to do another picture.”

Erhardt did, and the drawing that was finally hung in the hallway looked much more like Wyatt on the outside than the previous picture. That person, the person he felt himself to be, wasn’t quite ready yet for public display.

Did Wyatt really, truly see a woman with eye shadow and long hair and a sexy figure in the mirror when he looked at himself? If there is no one place in the brain that provides a sense of self, then perhaps there’s no one place in the brain that provides us with a picture of that sense of self. After all, the feeling we have of being a body arises from several disparate places in the brain. There are a hundred million cells in the eye responsible for picking up visual information from the world, but they are connected to just a million neurons, the cells responsible for signaling the brain about what is being seen. In other words, the brain discards more visual information than it lets in. Which means the message from perception is constantly being massaged. There is no simple act of perception. What there is, is expectation. Coins appear larger to poor children than to those who are well off. Food-related words are clearer and appear brighter on the page to people who are hungry. Everything in our environment influences who we are and how we see ourselves—even our own bodies. Scientists have conducted experiments that show that people who deliberately take on classic poses of dominance and stand, for instance, with their legs apart and hands on their hips, even for just a few minutes, substantially increase their self-confidence. Ask someone to hunch over or curl up, and they will lose that confidence.

What is the mirror image seen by children who believe themselves to be the other gender? The body tells a story, but the story can change what a body sees. And a body can change a person’s mind.

On another day, when the twins were still in the fourth grade, Kelly picked up the phone again. It was Kreutz.

“Wyatt is telling everyone to use female pronouns. Is that right?”

Kelly was surprised, but not shocked. Wyatt had never wavered in identifying as a girl, or at the very least as a boy-girl. It was so deeply embedded in his sense of himself that it made perfect sense to Kelly that he would want his classmates to treat him as such.

“If the kids are comfortable, I don’t think it’s a problem,” Kelly said.

For Wyatt’s classmates it made sense. The only thing still “boyish” about him was his name. If other kids at school who didn’t know him well referred to him as “he,” that was okay by Wyatt, too. Kelly’s ability to accept Wyatt for who he was had helped instill a kind of confidence in him so that anything he said about himself to others seemed, in his mind, perfectly normal and ordinary.

But Kelly certainly knew how far society, not to mention her husband, still needed to go. Transgender issues were rarely raised in public at the time. Gay marriage was still being argued—and defeated—in courts around the country. On Election Day, November 7, 2006, eight states voted on amendments to ban same-sex marriage. All but one (Arizona) passed those measures. Inroads in transgender rights were few and far between. On January 1, 2006, however, the state of California became the most protective state in America for transgender people when gender identity was included in the state’s nondiscrimination laws with respect to education, employment, housing, foster care, and health insurance. At the time, only three other states (Minnesota, New Mexico, and Rhode Island) had any laws on the books preventing gender identity discrimination in employment and housing. Those states also outlawed discrimination when it came to public accommodation—that is, restrooms. As liberal minded as California was, it wouldn’t add public accommodation to its nondiscrimination laws until 2011.