Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (6 page)

A
PRIL 
1
,
2003

Dear Wyatt’s Diary,

Today Wyatt shared his secret thoughts with me. He is a very nice person. I love being his mommy.

W
yatt didn’t have a name for it, for the feeling, so to the question “Who are you?” his answer was simple: “A boy who wants to be a girl,” or “I’m a girl in a boy’s body,” or, more simply, “I’m a boy-girl.” That’s what Wyatt often told his mother and anyone else who asked. And if those “others” were first graders—and they sometimes were—they didn’t seem to care that his answer was slightly equivocal. If there was trouble at school, it was with kids outside his class, like a few of the second graders, who sometimes called him “girly.” That wasn’t so bad, really, except that he knew they said it to him to be mean.

Wyatt’s pre-K teacher, Mrs. Jenks, wrote on his evaluation: “Wyatt is a delight! His dramatics will surely have him on the stage in the future! It is interesting to watch Wyatt’s competitive side, which he displays mostly with his brother, rather than the other children.”

Being twins and spending so much time together, it was natural the boys would be competitive. But there was something else at work. It wasn’t that Jonas didn’t accept his brother being different. That’s all Jonas knew, so he never thought there was anything unusual about Wyatt’s behavior. Liking girl things was simply who Wyatt was. When Jonas introduced a friend to Wyatt, he’d say, “Here’s my brother. He likes to put a shirt on his head like it’s hair and plays with Barbie dolls.” And sometimes Jonas would even play with Barbie, too, at least until he got bored.

At other times, however, the differences in their personalities erupted in fights, usually with Wyatt lashing out at Jonas. When Kelly or Wayne separated them and asked Wyatt why he was so angry, he’d tell them he didn’t know. And he really didn’t seem to know, because it would happen so suddenly. Looking at Jonas, he saw himself, but also “not” himself. The cognitive dissonance must have rankled. It was as if his own image mocked him at every turn. Wyatt didn’t know why he and Jonas both looked like boys but only he felt like a girl. Once, when Wyatt was asked yet again why he had hit his brother, he finally gave an answer: “Because he gets to be who he is and I don’t.”

Four months later Mrs. Jenks added to her report. “I hope that the boys soon learn to be happy and comfortable with themselves as
individuals,
so they can also rejoice in one another’s successes and accomplishments rather than competing for the same attention. They are a beautiful pair with so much to offer and to discover about themselves! So much fun and excitement ahead!”

In Orono, the boys were put in separate classes in the first grade, but otherwise they spent most of their waking hours together, and their closeness, even with the occasional fights, was unmistakable. Their main play activity, nearly every day, was acting out TV shows or stories they saw, heard, or read. They’d play the Three Little Pigs, then a bit later, Teen Titans. Everything became fodder for a story, and stories were what they immersed themselves in.

The first real organized sport Wayne and Kelly got the kids involved in was soccer. One cool fall morning, Wyatt seemed particularly distracted out on the pitch. Dressed in his little shorts and shirt, he just stood in the middle of the field while the two muddy teams swirled chaotically around him. When he did get involved, it was simply to push someone else out of the way. When Wayne, who was coaching, saw this happen he grew irritated. He didn’t want the behavior of his children to affect the play of the team, so he pulled Wyatt from the game. Frustrated, angry, and unhappy, Wyatt took off running across the field, through the school parking lot, and right out into the street. Wayne sprinted after him, and Jonas after his father.

“Wyatt! Stop!”

There was a car heading directly for his son.

“STOP!”

Wyatt came to a halt, right in the middle of the street. A second later, Wayne grabbed him by the arm and swung him back onto the sidewalk, then practically dragged both boys into the back of the car.

“Don’t ever do that!” he kept saying to his sons, as he got in the backseat with them.

Wayne was frightened, and he wanted his children to understand why: that what Wyatt had done was very, very dangerous. Neither boy had ever seen their father this angry. And they’d certainly never been yelled at quite like this before. They were quiet and scared.

“You could have gotten hit by a car, Wyatt. Daddy was very worried. I love you both, and I don’t ever want you two to get hurt.”

The twins’ safety was paramount for both parents, so much so that they enrolled the boys in tae kwon do just so they could develop the skills they’d need to physically defend themselves. Wyatt’s safety was particularly important, Kelly realized, because he could become an easy target for harassment. Kelly’s concerns about Wyatt meant she was always on alert for stories in the news about other children like him. She’d have preferred to avoid the ones about transgender people being physically attacked, but she felt it was her obligation to know exactly what Wyatt might one day have to face.

In October 2002, just after Wyatt and Jonas turned five, a grisly news story out of California’s Alameda County made headlines. Gwen Araujo, a seventeen-year-old from the town of Newark, had attended a party at a schoolmate’s house on the night of October 3, then seemed to disappear into thin air. Two weeks later, one of the partygoers drove with the police out to a remote part of the Sierra Nevada foothills to point out a shallow grave. Gwen, who had been born male, had engaged in sexual activities with several men in their twenties in the weeks leading up to her murder. Suspecting Gwen was male at birth, these men cornered her at the October 3 party, stripped her naked, strangled her with a rope, and beat her skull in with a frying pan. Her last words were, “Please don’t. I have a family.”

Stories like these made Kelly anxious. Before the kids visited their friends’ homes, she checked out the parents and made sure they understood about Wyatt’s unusual personality and behavior. Then she’d watch over the kids to make sure nothing untoward happened.

As the twins moved from kindergarten to first grade, Kelly knew she needed to speak to the teacher about Wyatt. More important, she needed to make sure the teacher would accept him for who he was—and wasn’t.

“Wyatt is a little different,” she told the teacher when they met early in the school year. “He really likes girls’ things and we’re okay with that—and you’re okay with that, too, right?”

She was. Kelly felt relieved. First school hurdle cleared.

One of Wayne’s friends was surprised by her own son’s reaction to Wyatt. The two families had spent time together on a weekend trip to Boston and on the way back, Wayne’s friend asked her own two sons, who were similar in age to Jonas and Wyatt, what they thought of the “Maines boys.”

“Mom, you mean the Maines kids. They have a boy and a girl,” one of the sons said.

“No, they have twin boys.”

The woman’s children insisted: Wyatt was a girl. Finally the husband asked, “Do you remember when you went to the bathroom together? Didn’t Wyatt have a penis?”

There was a long pause, then one of the sons answered.

“I know that boys have penises and girls don’t, but Wyatt is a girl, and she just happens to have a penis.”

Later in the year Wyatt composed and illustrated a “safety” book called “Things to Be Careful Of.” The cover of the booklet depicted a man-eating shark, but also a smiling crab and fish and, Wyatt’s favorite, a redheaded Ariel-like mermaid perched on an underwater rock. Inside, each page had a drawing and a reminder of what should be avoided, including strangers in cars who offer you candy, getting stuck in a tree when you climb too high, slipping on ice, ink-squirting squids, avalanches, vampires, stampedes, and the abominable snowman. Playing with matches and swimming when you’re not a good swimmer were also cited as dangerous activities. But the first words in the book were the most personal—and the most realistic:

You can have a bully. You know, the boy or girl who bosses you. Bullies are mean to you so stay away from them.

O
ne afternoon in early May
2003
, Kelly turned on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
to an interview with Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby College in Maine. Kelly had never heard of Boylan, and didn’t know that she used to be James Boylan, but when Oprah introduced her, Kelly saw something unexpected: a pretty, very normal-seeming woman, who just happened to have once been a man. Everything she’d read on the Internet, all the images of cross-dressers, of men with bad wigs and worse makeup, melted away. Here was someone she could learn from.

Oprah had read Boylan’s memoir
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
and said she couldn’t put it down. Male at birth, Boylan knew from the time she was six years old that something was not right, that she didn’t look the way she felt, which was female. She told Oprah, “My awareness of being transgendered is my earliest memory. But I also knew it was something that other people would find bizarre and hilarious. So I thought, I am going to make the best of things and be a boy, be a man.”

In her imagination, she was female, she said. In her dreams she was female. And in private, when no one in the family was around, she dressed like a female, in her mother’s and sister’s clothes. “It was tremendously sad,” she said. “Even I knew it was creepy, sneaking around, having a secret. You know that there is something very wrong; you know it intuitively. I think people know what their gender is based on what is in their hearts. If you have this condition, you know it.”

For Kelly, this was the kind of affirmation she needed when she questioned whether what she was doing for Wyatt was right—that is, allowing him to wear his princess dress at home or to pull her down the “pink aisle” at Toys R Us. Yes, it was still very uncomfortable for Wayne, but it was perfectly natural for Wyatt, so how could Kelly doubt it?

“I did not want this other life,” Boylan told Oprah. “I thought it was as strange as anyone….You think you are the only person in the world that has this. In fact, we now know that there are tens and tens of thousands of people in this country alone who have this. One scholar says that it’s as common as multiple sclerosis, it’s as common as a cleft palate. It’s something that many people in the country and across the world have, but these people are living in silence and shame because they are afraid to speak the truth.”

When Oprah asked Boylan about the origin of her condition, she said, “No one really knows. I think there has to be a medical component. It’s something you have from the age of two or three. Some people think that it has to do with the secretion of hormones in the mother’s womb around the sixth week of pregnancy.”

In her heart, Kelly believed this, too, that there was some medical explanation for Wyatt’s behavior and feelings. They were so deep-seated, so seemingly rock solid, that even in her weakest moments, when she worried whether she might share some of the blame by indulging Wyatt in his choice of toys, she quickly dismissed those thoughts. Wyatt wasn’t disturbed, he wasn’t sick, he wasn’t bizarre, and he wasn’t a freak. He was unhappy as a boy—that was the bottom line, and so her job was to make sure he received the kind of help or assurances or whatever it was that he needed in order to be happy.

Listening to Boylan gave Kelly renewed confidence. Clearly she wasn’t the only mother who’d ever had to figure out why her son wanted to be a daughter. Now Kelly was learning that there was also a protocol for perhaps fixing that cognitive dissonance. Boylan explained to Oprah that when patients transition from one gender to the other, doctors follow a process called the Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People, originally developed by the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association more than thirty years ago. Basically, they are a set of medical protocols clinicians follow for patients seeking hormonal and surgical transition to the opposite gender of their birth. This was all fascinating and new for Kelly. Now if she could just find someone, some doctor, who could do all that for Wyatt. Kelly went out and picked up a copy of Jenny Boylan’s book.

“She’d be a great role model for Wyatt,” she said to Wayne one day.

“Uh-huh.” Wayne had heard Kelly but didn’t want to discuss it.

Kelly left Boylan’s book on the coffee table for a few days, hoping Wayne might pick it up. He didn’t. Then she moved the book to the bathroom. That seemed to do the trick. The book disappeared, but Wayne didn’t say a thing. Clearly he wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.

For the twins’ seventh birthday, Kelly thought she’d finally found a toy both boys would enjoy. She’d noticed Wyatt engrossed by some action hero cartoon on TV one day and had made a mental note. In October, at the birthday party, Wyatt and Jonas both unwrapped a slew of action figures. Jonas loved them. Wyatt was disconsolate. Kelly couldn’t figure it out. Finally, she asked him, didn’t he like watching the action figure cartoon on television every day? Yes, he said, but what he really liked was the pretty house the action heroes lived in.

That was it for Kelly. Her last doubt about whether Wyatt might be transgender was gone. When she’d first come across the word in her research she’d put off talking about it too much with Wayne. She hadn’t wanted to label Wyatt, to pigeonhole him, at least not at this stage in his life. How does a child this young know if he’s really a girl? Up until Wyatt’s seventh birthday she’d thought there was always the chance he might outgrow this. And in truth, she didn’t care if he outgrew it. She just wanted to do right by her son. So she’d quickly become an expert in analyzing other parents’ kids, looking for signs of passing phases in their behavior, such as the friend’s child who painted his fingernails, or the one who liked to wear his sister’s slip. But the behavior in those other boys was never really consistent, certainly not in the way it was with Wyatt. He wanted to wear dresses, be a princess, play Wendy in
Peter Pan
all the time, day and night. Sure, he also liked wrestling and was an athletic kid, but his sense of himself, the toys he played with the longest, the subjects of his fantasies, and the characters he playacted, were always female. Kelly didn’t know any other boy who so consistently thought and acted like he was a girl.

Most of all, she was upset she’d failed Wyatt on his birthday of all days. Screw this, she said to herself, I will never again buy him something just because Wayne thinks that’s what he should play with. It was all just too mean. The next day she went out and bought Wyatt the Ariel Playset he fervently wanted, and every Wendy, Cinderella, and Dorothy toy she could find.