Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (21 page)

W
hen 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 an 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.

T
wo 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 over 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.

J
ust when Nicole seemed to be finding her footing, Jonas appeared to be losing his. If he was not entirely failing, he was certainly floundering. He’d already dropped jazz band, so he picked up lacrosse, but mostly as a bench warmer. He was a strong science student, but he also enjoyed writing poetry and song lyrics. He couldn’t exactly put his finger on why he felt angry and depressed, he just knew he felt less and less in control of his emotions. Kelly took him to see a therapist, and over the summer he improved. But with the start of sophomore year, depression and anxiety seemed to paralyze him.

It was hard being Jonas, hard being Nicole’s brother—the other child, the other twin, the one without the unusual story.
The Boston Globe
had made Nicole a minor celebrity, and the article was now framed and hanging in Wayne’s office at work. In fact, Nicole had received more than a dozen letters from public officials, including Olympia Snowe, U.S. senator from Maine, all congratulating her on her effort to educate the public and advance transgender rights. Sometimes, when the kids came home from school, there was a camera crew or a reporter waiting outside the house wanting to talk to Nicole. It wasn’t that Jonas was jealous of his sister. He was proud of her. It’s just that an awful lot of the time he felt like a bit player in the theater of his own life. He didn’t have his own story—his own narrative. His life revolved around Nicole’s.

Wayne and Kelly started to receive invitations to give talks. Kelly, as usual, had no interest in public speaking, but Wayne embraced the role, perhaps in part to make up for all the time he’d spent ashamed, embarrassed, and confused about having a transgender daughter. When Jonas occasionally attended one of his father’s talks, he’d watch Wayne get emotional when he spoke about Nicole; as a result, Jonas felt sort of invisible. There was nothing special about his life. No singular talent or achievement. My biggest role, he sometimes said to himself, is being someone else’s brother. When things were at their worst, when his thoughts got the better of him, they tended to be a lot more negative, like, If I was gone, everything would still go on without me, as if I’d never existed.

Sometimes Jonas found solace in music, like the Icelandic band called Of Monsters and Men and its song “Little Talks.” It was the story of a girl losing her mind and a boy who’s known her all his life and who tries to take care of her:

Your mind is playing tricks on you, my dear….

Though the truth may vary…

Other times, Jonas tried to channel his despair into his own poetry:

There’s an evening haze settling over town,

That nest in the old maple tree…

None of them are special when looked at from across the plain,

That will never be repeated….

It wasn’t easy for Jonas to talk to either of his parents, but he was more like his mother than his father. Neither he nor Kelly were as verbal as Wayne and Nicole, and both were more on the introverted side. Like Jonas, Kelly didn’t need or want to be in the limelight. And like Kelly, Jonas was steadfast and loyal to a fault. He had his sister’s back, and he wanted—needed—to be a part of her life. He just didn’t want to always be known as the twin brother of a transgender sister.

Sometimes, of course, it was more than okay being Nicole’s brother. In June 2012, Wayne and the twins joined dozens of other activists at the White House to help the Obama administration celebrate LGBT Pride Month. Only Wayne and Nicole had been invited, and when Wayne called to see if he could arrange for two extra tickets, only one was available. There was no way Kelly was going to let Jonas miss out on the experience, so though the whole family went to Washington, D.C., Kelly stayed behind in the hotel the afternoon of the White House event. They’d already toured the city and Kelly had been part of the family’s visit to Capitol Hill where they met with officials at the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to talk about transgender issues.

For the twins, the White House event was exhilarating, standing with their father, shoulder to shoulder with other path breakers in the East Room, listening to President Obama:

After decades of inaction and indifference, you have every reason and right to push, loudly and forcefully, for equality….So we still have a long way to go, but we will get there. We’ll get there because of all of you. We’ll get there because of all of the ordinary Americans who every day show extraordinary courage. We’ll get there because of every man and woman and activist and ally who is moving us forward by the force of their moral arguments, but more importantly, by the force of their example.

All of them were overwhelmed by the event, by seeing and hearing the president in the flesh, and by being invited into one of America’s most sacred places. Wayne wished Kelly could have been there, too, but he knew how proud she was—how proud they both were—of their children. Nicole, in particular, was awed by the circumstances. Here she was, barely a teenager, being treated like a celebrity, and really all because she was transgender. She’d lobbied hard for the defeat of the restrictive public accommodation bill, but no harder than many others had. The invitation to the White House would always be part of her personal story, but it was also part of the country’s story. She felt as if she were standing in for all transgender kids seeking, and speaking out about, their rights.

When it was time to leave the White House grounds Nicole lingered to take one more photograph. Jonas said, “Dad, should I go get her?” It was always his instinct to shepherd his sister. Wayne and Kelly had asked a lot of their only son, and sometimes they forgot the sacrifices he’d had to make being Nicole’s brother. Wayne hugged him and told him how proud he was of him for looking out for Nicole all these years, for worrying about her, and for stepping up whenever and wherever he was needed.