Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  With the boys about to begin the first grade, the family decided to hold a “Get to Know the Maineses” party for the neighborhood. It was a cool, cloudy autumn day as guests streamed into the house. Kelly was still in the kitchen fixing platters of food, but with the party starting Wayne went looking for the two boys. He found Jonas in the den, then Wyatt appeared at the top of the stairs, smiling down excitedly at his father. There he was, his parents’ sweet, irrepressible, chestnut-haired boy—wearing his favorite pink princess dress from Toys R Us.

  “Wyatt, you can’t wear that!”

  Wayne’s harsh tone cracked through the party chatter, and Wyatt’s little body jerked, then froze. Kelly, who heard her husband’s strained voice from the kitchen, knew something was wrong and rushed out.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Wyatt cannot—”

  “What did you say to him?!”

  Kelly followed her husband’s eyes to the top of the stairs. One of Wyatt’s tiny hands grasped the banister; the other clutched a glittery wand. On his face was fear and confusion.

  “Are you going to let him wear that?” Wayne asked.

  Kelly didn’t answer. Instead, she raced up to Wyatt, hot tears now streaking his face, took him by the hand, and led him back into his bedroom. It was, she knew right then and there, the worst moment of her life. It wasn’t so much the reaction of the people at the party, who were mostly stunned into silence—that was Wayne’s issue—but rather the hurt her son was experiencing, and for no good reason other than that he wanted to wear his princess dress to the family’s party. How could she explain to him that he’d done nothing wrong when his father had just scolded him? She didn’t think she was ready for this, and yet she knew it was just the beginning.

  “This isn’t really the right time,” Kelly gently told Wyatt, persuading him it would be better, for now, to wear pants and a shirt.

  “I can’t be myself,” Wyatt said, a mixture of sadness and anger in his voice. “Jonas gets to wear what he wants. Why can’t I?”

  Kelly knew it was true, and that it wasn’t fair.

  “Let’s just try to get to know people first,” she said.

  Still dazed, Wayne remained downstairs, enveloped in a kind of concussive quiet. The world where he was a father and husband in an ordinary, hardworking, middle-class family had just blown up. He stood there stunned, unable to hear whatever was going on around him, as if deafened by the psychological explosion. Was everyone at the party looking at him right now? He felt strangely alone, and, worse, unmasked. As if the hunter, the fisherman, the air force veteran, and the Republican had all been stripped away and the only thing left was the father—but father of what and of whom? Yes, he was a happily married man and the parent of two beautiful boys, but it was also true he was embarrassed by one of them—and he’d just broken that little boy’s heart.

  Nothing seemed to help Wayne make sense of Wyatt, not his small-town background, not his time in the military, and certainly not all that education. How could Wyatt and Jonas be identical twins and be so different? There was no question Jonas was pure boy, and his very existence seemed to put the lie to Wyatt’s insistence he was female.

  Wayne had shared his fears, confusion, and anger with no one, not even Kelly. She knew he was disappointed in Wyatt and even angry, but he held it inside and instead continued to put distance between himself and the family—working late during the week, running and swimming and exercising for hours at a time, doing chores outside that allowed him to be alone with his thoughts. There was a stubbornness to Wayne and also, at times, an inability to see beyond the walls of his own experience. Kelly had learned that lesson up close. One day, early in their relationship but before they were married, Wayne announced he was going hunting. Kelly thought, how nice, he’s going to go off and do his male thing, so she made him a sandwich and kissed him goodbye. When he came home in his dirty camouflage fatigues, a deer was splayed inside his Chevy Chevette, its nose on the dashboard and its feet sticking out the back. Kelly was aghast.

  “What’s that in your pocket?” she asked, noticing a rather large bulge at Wayne’s waist. He pulled out the deer’s heart and proffered it to Kelly.

  “Oh my God!”

  Kelly couldn’t believe what she was looking at. What had her husband done? What kind of person was he? Actually, Wayne had properly gutted the deer in order to preserve its meat to bring home to be cooked, and the heart was particularly delectable to hunters and meat eaters. Flooded with all the wrong images, however, Kelly was suddenly furious with her husband and took off in her car. She drove for three hours—all the way from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Pittsburgh and back—trying to calm down. When she finally returned home, Wayne had cleaned up, but he told her they needed to talk, to work this out, because hunting was important to him—it was part of who he was. She told him she just hadn’t been prepared for exactly what that meant. She was fully capable of seeing beyond her own experiences and she knew she’d have to adjust. She just wanted him to know that it had been upsetting to her and that in the future, there would be no dead deer in the house. Period.

  —

  KELLY WASN’T SOMEONE WHO needed to have a lot of close female friends, but those she did have, she confided in. One of them was Chris, whom she met when she took the kids swimming at a local pool. Chris was homey, down-to-earth, and very matter-of-fact. She had four kids of her own, one the same age as the twins. Another friend and neighbor Kelly often talked to about Wyatt was Allison, who also had children the same age. On Friday afternoons, Kelly and Allison would unwind at the breakfast bar in Kelly’s kitchen, drinking Cosmos and eating veggie snacks, because they were both watching their weight. Allison was a kind of sounding board for Kelly, especially when she complained about Wayne. Everything was so complicated with him, she told her friend. He just didn’t understand, or want to understand, Wyatt, and he was so shut down she’d pretty much given up even trying to talk to him about their child.

  “Have you ever thought about divorce?” Allison once asked Kelly.

  “Oh God, no,” she replied. “I’d never think of asking for one. I’d be scared he’d get custody of the twins.”

  In truth, sometimes Kelly was afraid Wayne would leave her because she was “allowing” Wyatt to act like a girl. When he went out on one of his long bike rides, she thought maybe he wouldn’t come home. More than that he would leave her, though, she was afraid he would take Jonas and Wyatt. The bottom line was, she couldn’t count on Wayne. She also wasn’t about to run away or hide or rant or cry, either. She just needed to be a good mother to Wyatt. And right now she wasn’t sure how. What she was sure of was that Wayne wasn’t helping. No matter what she said to him, even if it was just wondering out loud if maybe Wyatt was gay, she knew what Wayne’s answer would be: “No, that’s not it,” he’d say, and then turn back to what he was doing.

  Despite his inability to talk with Kelly, divorce wasn’t in Wayne’s vocabulary, although he sometimes worried she would leave him. Wayne was also trying to make sense of Wyatt, in his own way, but mostly he was hoping these were all things his son would simply outgrow. He didn’t want to think about his son being gay. It was fine if the sons of other fathers were gay, because he had no problem working with gay people or his children having gay friends. He just didn’t want that for his son. It would be too hard his whole life, and Wayne was afraid he wouldn’t know how to be the kind of father Wyatt would want—or need.

  CHAPTER 6

  Things to Be Careful Of

  APRIL 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.

  Wyatt 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Pink Aisle

  One 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 wom
an, 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.”