Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (20 page)

A
few weeks after the start of eighth grade, Nicole learned a celebrity was coming to Portland to speak out against the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. At five in the afternoon thousands of Mainers, including Nicole and Wayne, stood shoulder to shoulder in a downtown park to hear pop music icon and political activist Lady Gaga. She was there to sing and speak at a rally organized by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

“My name is Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta. I am an American citizen,” she told the crowd, before urging Maine’s lawmakers to pressure the Obama administration to repeal DADT. She offered a new law she called “If you don’t like it, go home,” which would remove homophobic straight soldiers from the military instead of gay soldiers.

At one point, the singer recited the oath of enlistment, words spoken by every member of every branch of the military when they pledge their service to their country. Wayne had spoken these words some thirty years earlier when he entered the air force at a time when the military was very unpopular in the United States.

I,
_____
, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic….

As a brand-new recruit, Wayne had been both scared and proud when he swore the oath to his country. He and Kelly had raised their children to respect the military.

Lady Gaga, of course, was there to make a point, and so at the end of the oath, she added three words: “Unless you’re gay.” For a moment Wayne felt anger toward the military, but mostly the politicians who had allowed the military, for so long, to dismiss honorable men and women from its ranks because of their sexual orientation. All that hiding and the secrecy, the lying and the shame—it was corrosive. The Maineses probably knew that better than most. Wayne hoped a time would come soon that all four of them could stand up and declare themselves. But until then, they’d continue living undercover.

Wayne and Kelly constantly worried that Nicole or Jonas would slip up, or that the news from Orono would somehow catch up with them, but it didn’t. In fact, after two years in Portland, few people other than schoolteachers and staff knew that Nicole was transgender. They’d all stayed closeted, until suddenly, in April 2011, toward the end of the eighth grade, something happened that made the whole family question whether they could continue to live in hiding.

Wayne and Kelly learned the Maine legislature was considering a new bill, LD 1046: An Act to Amend the Application of the Maine Human Rights Act Regarding Public Accommodations. If passed, the new law would allow the owners of any business to decide who could use their restrooms. Furthermore, if someone was denied access to the facility of their gender identification, they would be unable to claim discrimination under Maine’s Human Rights Act.

Kelly, Wayne, Jonas, and Nicole all felt disgusted. They’d moved their primary residence, given up friends and jobs, spent their savings, and lived in secret, all because of harassment and discrimination over Nicole’s use of the gender-appropriate restroom. Now the state of Maine was looking to roll back civil rights even more, to codify discrimination. Wayne boiled over inside. For so long it had been just Kelly fighting for Nicole. He knew his wife must have felt exquisitely alone. He understood that better—albeit in a different way—now that he was forced to live away from his family. For the past two years, from the outside, they’d looked and acted like any average American family, except that they weren’t. Something needed to change. Something had changed. And Wayne knew exactly what it was.

A
middle-aged man wearing reading glasses stood silently at the microphone before the House Judiciary Committee of the 124th Maine legislature. Then he cleared his throat and began:

My name is Wayne Maines, I live in Old Town. I have a thirteen-year-old transgender daughter. In the beginning, I was not on board with this reality. Like many of you I doubted transgender children could exist, I doubted my wife, and I doubted our counselors and doctors. However, I never doubted my love for my child. It was only through observing her pain and her suffering and examining my lack of knowledge about these issues did I begin to question my behavior and my conservative values….

When my daughter lost her privileges at school and both children and adults targeted her, I knew I had to change and I have never looked back….When she was told she could no longer use the appropriate bathroom her confidence and self-esteem took a major hit. Prior to this my daughter often said, “Dad, being transgender is no big deal, my friends and I have it under control.” I was very proud of her. It was only when adults became involved with their unfounded fears that her world would be turned upside down….This bill tells my daughter that she does not have the same rights as her classmates and reinforces her opinion that she has no future. Help me give her the future she deserves. Do not pass this bill.

Trembling, Wayne wiped away the tears streaming down his face. It was Tuesday, April 12, 2011, and he felt like he’d just come out of his own closet. He had spoken openly and honestly about his transgender daughter, about himself and his family, and now there was no turning back.

State representative Ken Fredette was the conservative legislator sponsoring the bill with the support of the Republican governor, Paul LePage. The Maine Civil Liberties Union and several other organizations had gone on record opposing it. The hearing before the Judiciary Committee was a chance for the public to speak, and it was an overflow crowd. Before Wayne addressed the committee, Jennifer Levi, one of the Maineses’ lawyers in their suit against the Orono school district, spoke:

The only way a business could enforce LD 1046 in a consistent and nondiscriminatory fashion without resorting to gender profiling would be through physical inspections, which raises serious privacy and medical confidentiality concerns and, again, risk of litigation. Not to mention that a person’s anatomy is personal, private information that nobody would want to be required to disclose (or worse, viewed) before being given access to a public facility.

Levi set out not only the reasons why transgender people should be allowed to use the bathroom of their gender identity, but logically, pragmatically, and legally why enforcing a biological-sex accommodation rule would not work. Everything Nicole, Kelly, Wayne, and Jonas had fought for, sued for, been harassed for, was suddenly at stake, and not just for Nicole, but for every transgender person in the state of Maine. Before he spoke, Wayne wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, or even if he could. Now he knew there had never been any other option. For years Kelly had quietly borne the family burden of protector and provider for Nicole’s needs. Now it was Wayne’s turn to step up and speak out. He was oddly ebullient, as if he’d finally rid himself of some suffocating weight, and it was all he could do to keep himself tethered to the ground. All those values he’d been taught growing up—defending the defenseless, helping the downtrodden—he’d always thought they meant standing up for a friend or a neighbor or a stranger in need, not his own child.

No one, however, was confident LD 1046 would be defeated. In fact, Wayne was worried enough it might pass that just days after he spoke at the hearing he called Kelly from work and said he’d been thinking about the state legislators and the upcoming vote.

“I think they have to meet Nicole,” he told his wife. “We can’t lose.”

Wayne liked to write things down. Partly it was an organizational habit. He had many thoughts running through his mind. In a way, he talked more to himself than to Kelly, but it was how he worked things out. When he first began to do his own searches on the Internet he was stunned to find so little information for fathers of transgender children. Being the self-starter he was, he realized that maybe he could fill the void. It wasn’t that he knew any better than anyone else how to raise a transgender child; he just thought it could help other fathers if he shared his own questions and experiences. Maybe he’d even hear back from someone. Every few months he wrote a piece for the Huffington Post blog called
Gay Voices.
At first he posted anonymously, but, encouraged by responses from other bloggers and readers, he began to write more personally. The responses were often a means for further discussion, such as the column he wrote about allowing Nicole to wear dresses. After reading the post, one person wrote:

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?”

N
ICOLE 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.