Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (4 page)

T
o Kelly, Wyatt wasn’t strange, and he certainly wasn’t sick. He was just “different”—that’s how she explained it to friends and family, and to Wayne. She knew most others didn’t understand, especially Wayne. She’d seen her husband sitting reading the newspaper while Wyatt skipped around in his tutu, a hand-me-down from his friend Leah. Wayne pretended not to see him. He didn’t look up. He didn’t want to look up.

Kelly was learning to do things pretty much on her own for both boys, but especially Wyatt. He clamored to wear the same colorful clothes as Leah, and rather than wear the flannel shirt his mother bought him to match Jonas’s, he would go bare chested. Kelly felt it was cruel to keep dressing Wyatt in clothes he hated, so she made the decision, without Wayne’s input, to shop every now and then for something less masculine for Wyatt to wear.

The first time Kelly walked into the girls’ clothing section of Target she felt weird. Anyone who knew the family knew she often bought the twins their clothes there. And here she was, shopping for one of her sons in the girls’ department. She forged ahead anyway. The children weren’t yet in school; who did it hurt for Wyatt to wear pink and purple? It was hard enough just getting him to wear shirts and pants. She looked for a girl’s shirt that wasn’t too frilly and not too feminine, but preferably pink, and when she found it she knew it would be a lot easier to dress Wyatt in the morning. She’d have to get over what other people might think or say when they saw Wyatt in his pink shirt. She decided it was their problem, not hers. And it certainly wasn’t Wyatt’s.

Wayne didn’t approve, but he also didn’t stop Kelly—not that she’d have listened to him anyway.

“Why do you have to indulge him?” Wayne would ask.

“He’s trying to tell us something,” Kelly would say. “He’s showing us who he is, and we’ve got to help him figure it out.”

All Wayne wanted was to have a “normal” family, just like everyone else. Everyone else doesn’t have a normal family, Kelly told him. She hadn’t had one, and maybe that’s why she wasn’t crushed, like Wayne, when Wyatt turned out to be different. Kelly didn’t know what a perfect family looked like, so she had no expectations. She had no threshold for disappointment, no picture in her mind or her heart that Wyatt wasn’t living up to. But Wayne did have a picture from his own happy childhood, and as far as he was concerned, every time Wyatt dressed up in girls’ clothes he made a mockery of it.

“Wyatt, you don’t want to wear those shoes,” Wayne would say when Wyatt appeared in a pair of Kelly’s heels.

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t really want to be a girl.”

“Yes, I do.”

That’s how the conversations—if you could call them that—went. Wyatt wearing a dress; Wayne wanting Wyatt to act more like a boy. Around and around they went, with Wyatt just as stubborn and determined and convinced he was correct as Wayne was. And each time her husband and child had one of these back-and-forth exchanges, Kelly knew Wayne was fighting reality.

One evening, when the twins were about three years old and had been tucked in for the night, Kelly sat down at the computer in the living room and typed five words into the search engine:

“Boys who like girls’ toys.”

It was both a question and a statement of fact. For Kelly, it was also a beginning. She scrolled through science articles, online forums, and medical sites. She read about homosexuality, transsexualism—wasn’t that what drag queens were?—and something called transgender. She read for hours. Her first thought was, well, maybe the girls’ toys and clothes and behavior meant Wyatt was gay. But sexual orientation was the same thing as attraction, and that seemed almost crazy to imagine, at least in a three-year-old. Transsexualism certainly wasn’t right, either, since that seemed mostly about adults who undergo surgery to change from being male to female or vice versa. As for being transgender, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defined it as “of or relating to people who have a sexual identity that is not clearly male or clearly female.”

Well, that was sort of like Wyatt. One of his best friends in pre-K was Cassandra, and she taught him all the girly things he wanted to know. For instance, a girl doesn’t dry her hands at the sink in the back of the classroom with brown paper towels. Oh no, Cassandra told him, a girl gracefully shakes her hands, fast, like they’re on fire. Cassandra was the girliest girl Wyatt knew. She had long hair that fell all the way down her lower back. She even had long nails and wore nail polish. It was true Wyatt loved to play with dolls, but he was also very physical. He could throw a ball even better than Jonas, and he often wrestled around on the ground with his brother.

Gender, Kelly read, was the belief that you’re male or female. It was something innate, not something you had to think about or tell other people about, unless those other people treated you like one gender when you felt you were the other. Kelly didn’t remember ever having such self-conscious thoughts when she was a child.

The articles flew by, she took notes, and she kept searching, that night and the next and the next night after that, until the words she was using in her searches got downright ridiculous: “Boys who like pink,” “Boys who have bowl haircuts and wear shirts on their heads, but have male toys and like wrestling.”

She kept coming back to that one word, “transgender.” Gender is about having the physical characteristics of a male or female. Gender identity, she read, is something else—and it has nothing to do with having a penis or a vagina, and everything to do with how a person
feels.
Did Wyatt feel like he was female? Most people who are born with the anatomy of a male also identify as male, and most born with the anatomy of a female identify as female. But not everyone. Some people grow up feeling like the gender opposite of the one they were born into. Others have physical characteristics of both genders. Kelly didn’t pretend to understand it all, not by a long shot, but “transgender” sounded more like Wyatt than anything else.

She kept reading. Although a sense of self is innate and established by the age of four, some children express dissatisfaction with their birth gender as early as two years old. Those who do, and in whom the dissatisfaction persists, are said to have gender identity disorder. The diagnosis was changed to gender dysphoria in 2013 in the fifth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
or DSM-V, maintained by the American Psychiatric Association. Gender dysphoria is the state of unease that results when a person’s sexual anatomy doesn’t match up with his or her inner sense of gender. This was more than just a shift in language by the APA, it was a watershed moment akin to the elimination of homosexuality from the DSM-II in 1973.

In the DSM-V, the general diagnostic criteria for gender dysphoria lists eight traits or behaviors a child must manifest for at least six months, including:

There must also be present “clinically significant distress” or an impairment in functioning. This last indication is important partly because of what it doesn’t say but implies. The distress transgender people feel when their anatomy is in conflict with their gender identity is different from the distress, for example, of a depressed person. In the latter case, the distress is part and parcel of the condition of depression, but that’s just not the case with transgender people. If there is an inner distress it arises from knowing exactly who they are, but at the same time being locked into the wrong body and therefore being treated by others as belonging to one gender when they really feel they are the opposite. The dysfunction arises not from their own confusion, but from being made to feel like freaks or gender misfits. Kelly shuddered when she thought of the torment other kids were capable of inflicting on someone like Wyatt. All in all he was a happy child, but when he wasn’t, it almost always had to do with being a “boy-girl,” which is how he referred to himself.

Out of the blue, he’d ask Kelly, “When do I get to be a girl?” or “When will my penis fall off?” The questions almost seemed natural, as if it was just a matter of time before he became a girl. If Kelly could only see into Wyatt’s brain. Did he believe he’d emerge as a “she” from this boy chrysalis stage he was in, like a human butterfly? Maybe Wyatt really did believe that some babies were born female, some male, and some could change from male to female when they were still young. He was impatient, though, and that’s where the unhappiness seemed to come from, from wanting to push the process he thought must be as natural as caterpillars transforming into butterflies.

Wayne wanted to be close to both his sons, but he couldn’t get his mind around Wyatt’s gender-bending behavior, so he retreated—to the woods to cut down trees, to the gym to work out his frustrations, to the pool or the lake to swim until he was exhausted. He wanted to be a good parent, but he didn’t know how to deal with Wyatt’s situation, whatever it was.

Every holiday season, Wayne mailed a letter along with the family’s Christmas card to friends and relatives. He liked writing the letter. He was proud of his wife and—for the most part—his two boys, and writing the letter gave him time not only to reflect on the past year but to take pleasure in all that he and his family had accomplished and learned. But by Christmas 2000 Wayne was finding it harder to compose the annual missive. How to explain to people—people he loved and admired but who might lack a depth of understanding—about his Wyatt. That he was just a little bit different, but in every other way normal.

2000: Wyatt is still very dramatic. He loves to dress up, play music and wrestle with daddy….For Christmas he wants Yellow Barbie. Jonas is a bit taller than Wyatt. We are not sure why, it is difficult to get him to eat anything but cookies. He still loves his Teletubbies, reading books and helping daddy. For Christmas he wants a fishing game.

Two years later, not much had changed, except perhaps the intensity of the differences between the five-year-old boys:

2002: Wyatt is creative, kind and obsessed with girls….He plays “dress-up” and acts out numerous stories….His girlfriend is Leah.

It was easier to describe Jonas:

Jonas is very analytical. He also never stops talking or moving. His favorite things are action figures, puzzles, the computer and of course pirates.

Wyatt’s favorite things? Coloring, dolls, computer games and puzzles. His favorite story was Ariel.

Feeling stymied at work and realizing there was limited upward mobility, Wayne began to look around for other jobs. In the spring of 2003, with the children in pre-K, an opportunity presented itself: an offer from the University of Maine in Orono, where he would eventually become the executive director of safety, health services, transportation, and security. It wasn’t a huge bump up in terms of money, but a job at an academic institution was prestigious and appealed to Wayne’s love of learning. It would be hard for him to leave the area where he grew up, but he couldn’t turn down the position. Kelly wasn’t thrilled. She loved living in the village of Northville, with the sun-swept views over the lake. One of her closest friends was Jean Marie, Leah’s mother. Leah also had a brother, Wolfgang, whom they called Wolfie, who was a good friend of Jonas’s. Originally from Long Island, New York, Jean Marie was funny, outgoing, and uninhibited. Even with four kids running around, Kelly felt comfortable and relaxed with her in a way that she did with few others. The kids especially liked to act out the books Kelly and Jean Marie read to them, or pretend they were characters from one of their favorite TV shows. Kelly was usually the one who put together the costumes, and Jean Marie provided the sound effects.

The move wasn’t going to be easy for the twins, either. Jonas loved playing in the woods behind the house, and Wyatt enjoyed skipping through the big colorful garden with the stepping-stones that bore the imprints of the twins’ tiny hands and etchings of lady bugs and butterflies. Kelly’s mother, Donna, had recently come to live with them, in an apartment attached to the house, but she wouldn’t be going with them to Orono. She and Wyatt had become particularly close. Together they’d dress up Barbie and comb her long locks or watch
The Little Mermaid.
Sometimes Wyatt would help Grandma Donna water the flowers in the garden. He always felt like a princess there, in his own special kingdom. On the plus side, in Orono the family would be part of a university town, which Kelly hoped would be more inclusive. Maybe it would even help her figure out what she needed to do for Wyatt.

In the meantime, Kelly continued to think about gender. One night, as she was watching the TV news, a story came on about a couple in New York City who had allowed their young son to go to school dressed as a girl. The parents were reported to the police and arrested, and the child, at least temporarily, was taken away from them. Kelly was a hypervigilant mother, so she was keenly aware of all the ways her children could be wrested away. She’d let Wyatt grow his hair out and occasionally wear a feminine shirt or blouse, which meant that Wayne and Kelly sometimes found themselves getting into awkward conversations with strangers. If they were eating out someone might comment on the twins and ask, “How old are your son and daughter?”

“Oh, they’re four,” Kelly would say, not bothering to correct the questioner.