Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  There was no turning back from the media attention now. The family’s story had made the newspapers, the morning newscasts, and the evening newscasts. It was fodder for the Left as well as the Right. On the ultraconservative website WorldNetDaily, one headline crowed “District Allows Boy in Girls’ Restrooms.”

  Reading some of the negative articles emboldened Wayne. It had been a long, slow process, learning that Nicole would need him to fight for her rights. He’d spent too much time dwelling on the loss of a son and had never really considered the special rewards of a daughter. One day, he took the twins to Walmart to shop for a present for Kelly. As Jonas jumped out of the car and was about to cross the street, Wayne instinctively reached out for his hand. Jonas, just as instinctively, pulled his hand away, embarrassed by his father’s protectiveness. Nicole, though, bounced out of the car and immediately reached for her father’s hand. The two swung arms all the way across the street and into the store. Wayne smiled, thinking to himself that maybe having a daughter was something he could take pleasure in, because girls were more willing to hug and kiss and hold hands with their fathers.

  CHAPTER 25

  Eyes On

  Our goal is to provide a school environment that enables students to:

  Believe in themselves as successful people;

  Feel liked and respected;

  Learn things that are meaningful and worthwhile;

  Have physical exercise and freedom to move;

  Feel school is safe and fair.

  —from the handbook for incoming students to Orono Middle School

  By the end of Nicole’s fifth-grade year, a staff person was following her everywhere she went on the school grounds. It was called an “eyes-on” policy and it was meant to protect Nicole. It was also supposed to be temporary. Instead, it was unrelenting. An adult was always waiting for her, standing across from her locker when she arrived at school in the morning, sitting in the back of her classroom all day, and if she got up to go the bathroom, following about six to ten feet behind her down the hallway.

  The twins would attend sixth grade at Orono Middle School. Not much would change except the building, which was adjacent to Asa Adams. Nicole and Jonas would pretty much have the same classmates and the same administrators. Two weeks before the start of sixth grade, Kelly was up early, writing an email to Sharon Brady, the special services director for Orono public schools, checking to make sure that Jacob wasn’t in Nicole’s or Jonas’s class and that their lockers weren’t anywhere near his.

  A few weeks after the start of the sixth grade, a troupe from the Young Americans, a nonprofit performance and music education organization, arrived in Orono. The players and performers spent the day and evening in the high school gym, on the same campus as Asa C. Adams Elementary and Orono Middle School, performing and holding workshops. During a break for dinner, Nicole followed a group of several older students on their way into the girls’ restroom. There was no gender-neutral bathroom in the high school. She’d have had to go next door, to an empty elementary school, and walk to the other side of the building, to use the unisex bathroom. As Nicole approached the restroom, one of the older students attempted to bar the way.

  “You’re not allowed in here,” she said. “It’s against the rules.”

  “That’s only during the school day,” Nicole retorted.

  “You’re still not allowed. It’s on school property. No girls’ bathroom.”

  The others chimed in: “You can’t be in here.”

  “Get out.”

  “You’re a boy in a girls’ bathroom.”

  Nicole lashed back, calling the girls “bitch” and “asshole.” More words were exchanged. The next day Kelly phoned the school to complain her daughter had been bullied. An investigation was launched, and then, more than three weeks later, the school finally wrote an official response to the Maineses. It was essentially Nicole’s fault, wrote assistant principal Robert Sinclair. She was supposed to be using the gender-neutral bathroom. His conclusion: “[Mrs. Maines’s] daughter was not harassed during this incident.”

  What little trust Wayne and Kelly had in the Orono school system to protect Nicole and do the right thing was completely gone. For her part, Nicole began to loathe using the unisex bathroom, feeling she was being singled out. It was now a source of deep embarrassment, even shame, every time she had to use the restroom, which is why she sometimes excused herself before a class was over so she could escape down the hallway and into the bathroom without being seen. Depressed, Nicole isolated herself from friends. Once, when she heard another student describing her mental “happy place”—Nicole said, under her breath, “That must be where there are no Nikkis around.”

  —

  IF KELLY HAD A SAFE PLACE it was probably work. She’d landed a part-time administrative position in the University of Maine Police Department where her job was to help steer the department through a voluntary accreditation program in public safety communications. That meant keeping track of whether officers were meeting written directives and standards for everything from how to make good management decisions to preparedness for natural disasters. Work was not a place Kelly typically shared her personal or family concerns; it was a place to distract her from them, if that was possible.

  Kelly’s problem was that she was always trying to figure things out—bad things, complicated things—before they happened, and that kind of anticipatory stress wore at her. She liked to joke that sixth grade was when she got that deep wrinkle on her forehead and the gray in her hair, and it wasn’t too far off. Because she worked part-time, she was always outside the twins’ school before the final bell rang. When the twins were in the fifth grade, Kelly would actually position herself in the hallway outside Nicole’s classroom when the school day came to an end. It was a lonely time for Kelly, especially with Wayne working full-time and not helping much with day-to-day problems. Even in the evenings he wasn’t around much, off biking, running, or chopping down trees. He had been stirred to protect his daughter and stand up for her rights when other people said or wrote hateful things, but it still wasn’t easy for him even to say the name “Nicole.”

  In the winter months, when it snowed, Wayne relished shoveling the three-hundred-foot-long driveway because it ate up so many hours, hours he’d spend trying not to think about his family. When she could, Kelly would retreat to the basement, where she painted in a makeshift art studio. But most of the time she was making sure she was doing everything she could to keep Nicole and Jonas happy and on track. The eyes-on policy, though, was beginning to wear Nicole down. If there was an eyes-on policy that should have been in place, she felt, it should have been eyes on Jacob.

  In the spring of the sixth-grade year, one of the school’s annual events was an overnight whitewater rafting trip. Nicole was told by the administration she needed to make special arrangements. She would not be allowed to sleep in the girls’ tent. Instead, her parents would have to accompany her and sleep with her in a separate tent. Kelly flipped. She marched into Bob Lucy’s office the next day and asked him probably the most ridiculous question she’d ever uttered: “Are you saying Nicole is a predator? Is that why she’s not allowed to sleep with the other girls and instead have her parents monitor her?”

  Lucy had no response.

  “Where are the gay kids sleeping? Or don’t they get to go on the trip, either?”

  Again, no answer.

  Kelly called Wayne at work and told him what had happened.

  “We’re out of here,” she said at the end of the conversation.

  Kelly knew now there was nothing more they could do as parents or as community members to help the school do right by their kids. They were going to have to move.

  Nicole vacillated between anxiety and anger. That was obvious to Christine Talbott, her new mental health counselor after Dr. Holmes retired. She practiced cognitive behavioral therapy and often engaged Nicole in art assignments during their sessions. In one early meeting she aske
d Nicole to draw a picture of herself. The pencil sketch was in the style of her favorite comic book characters from the Winx Club TV series. Like Darcy and Icy and Stormy, Nicole’s figure had a tiny waist. She wore a blouse and bell bottoms, smiled, and had her right hand on her hip and the other hand held aloft, giving a big thumbs-up sign. Talbott wrote down in her notebook: “Self drawing was very strong, client has flair for imitating comic book art. She has identified with comic art style of large hands in proportion to the rest of the body, suggesting that client must defend herself.”

  In the second session, Talbott asked Nicole to pick a card from a stack that contained simple line drawings of people and animals, then to imagine something happening to the person or animal and drawing that scene on a piece of paper. The test was, in part, to assess for depression and any tendencies toward violence. Nicole asked if she could pick multiple cards and do several drawings. Of course, Talbott said. Scoring was on a scale of one to seven, with one being the most negative—suicidal or homicidal—and seven being the most positive. Later, Talbott scored Nicole’s drawings:

  The first drawing of an Indian trying to be found “worthy and the best archer” suggests a 6-point score: “effective, strong and fortunate.” The second drawing about an evil man climbing an evil volcano to get a golden pistol that shoots the queen who banished him suggests a circular struggle that client has with her GI [gender identity] and social pressures she is receiving. The golden gun suggests a magic solution to her pain.

  Talbott’s score for this drawing: two.

  The challenge for the therapist was to help Nicole find better ways to soothe herself than plucking at her eyebrows or touching her gums. One of the ways she suggested was called the Emotional Freedom Technique, a counseling intervention developed in the 1990s. It was modeled on the principles of alternative medicine, especially acupuncture, and one of the techniques involves tapping the body’s “energy meridians,” which are located all over the body, most of them between the head and the collarbone and under the arms. The patient first identifies an issue to target, figures out the intensity level of the problem, then chooses a self-affirming phrase to repeat as he or she taps their energy endpoints. For Nicole, whose own self-soothing activities exploited her OCD tendencies, the physical repetitions appeared to help.

  In another session with Talbott, Nicole seemed ecstatic.

  “I just had an epiphany!” the ten year old told her therapist. “I’ve been on a treadmill, a treadmill of negativity!”

  Talbott asked Nicole to visualize getting off the treadmill, which she did, imagining herself actually crumpling the treadmill and throwing it away. The session ended with Talbott guiding Nicole through two rounds of the tapping technique. Over the next few months Talbott noted that Nicole was less and less the flighty, theatrical speed talker she’d been in earlier sessions. Instead, she appeared much more grounded. At the end of one session, the psychotherapist asked Nicole to do the tapping technique because she said she felt her “throat was clogged with swear words.”

  Afterward, Nicole told the therapist she felt better.

  “Client beginning to understand basic [cognitive behavioral therapy] skills,” Talbott wrote in her notes.

  In May, with the end of sixth grade fast approaching, both Kelly and Nicole felt exhausted and anxious. Talbott, on talking to Kelly before one session, suggested maybe she needed to see her for a few sessions. Kelly agreed. She needed the emotional support and help with coping skills, since Nicole was ending the school year on a low note. Jacob harassed her twice in May. The second time he mocked her about having a “mustache.” She was furious and vented online, which caused her mother to take the computer away from her for two weeks. The social pressures at school were unrelenting, and Nicole clearly was not handling them well. She resented the popular girls and fantasized about hurting them; she was angry at Jacob and a girl who often teased her, and sometimes she imagined killing them both.

  Talbott suggested that when faced with harassment or bullying, Nicole just stare blankly back at the person instead of being provoked into swearing or hitting. “Client admitted she can provoke, too,” Talbott wrote in her notes. “Hates current school.”

  In April, Nicole came home one evening from an after-school activity particularly downcast. Kelly and Wayne tried to get her to talk. Finally she admitted she had been with her girlfriends and they were all about to go into the restroom so they could touch up their makeup, when principal Lucy whistled loudly at the group, pointed at Nicole, then gestured toward the staff restroom.

  “We’re using the other bathroom,” he said, using “we” to refer only to Nicole.

  She was mortified.

  “I hate being transgendered,” she said to her father on the way to bed that night.

  Dear Universe,

  Hi it’s me, Nikki. I know that we haven’t talked in awhile, but I thought that I would just bring up something that has been bothering me lately. Transgenderism. No, not transgenderism itself, more like, how we are treated, and why can’t we do this or that, or why it’s such a big deal to everybody.

  For starters, why IS it such a big deal to everyone what somebody has in their pants? Now, I don’t mean to get too philosophical here, but isn’t this the same argument that we have been having for years now? First it was African Americans, then it was Jewish people, now it’s the LGBTQ community. Really I think people just want something to complain about, so they target minorities. They make a big fuss that we are the bringers of doom, so they try to put us in separate bathrooms and invoke laws to put us at the bottom of the pile….And here’s another thing, if the medical world is going to call transgenderism “Gender Identity DISORDER,” why don’t they treat it like a disorder? Insurance companies have labeled Sex Reassignment Surgery as cosmetic, not necessary. It’s ridiculous! It’s like people will do anything to make this harder for us! The only surgery that insurance companies see as necessary is surgery that will keep you from dropping dead. And in a sense, SRS surgery is a matter of life and death, seeing as 41 percent of transgender people have attempted to commit suicide—this is more than 25 times the rate of suicide attempts by average citizens. It makes me wonder how much lower this percentile would be if every trans person’s surgery was covered by medical insurance. And as much as I wish I could say that it would be 0 percent, I know that there are still factors that would cause suicide attempts, like bullying in school….So if you wouldn’t mind, universe, can you please change so that the LGBTQ community is safer? It would be greatly appreciated.

  III

  Gender Matters

  Diversity is not disease.

  —GEORGES CANGUILHEM

  CHAPTER 26

  The Transgender Brain

  Scientists studying gender have recently been able to build upon the burgeoning research into the genetic and neurophysiological underpinnings of homosexuality. Researchers have found, for instance, that a son born to a woman who undergoes stress early in her pregnancy is more likely to grow up being gay than a son born to a nonstressed mother. The reason: Stressed pregnant mothers release a hormone called androstenedione, which mimics testosterone but is, in fact, much weaker. This stress hormone disrupts the timing and amount of the release of testosterone into the fetal brain, which, in turn, interferes with the development of the part of the brain linked to sexual orientation.

  But where is the physiological evidence for being transgender? Beginning in the mid-1990s, multiple studies looked at the brains of transgender individuals postmortem and when researchers compared brain anatomy between males and females they found a profound difference where the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, begins to send projections into the hypothalamus, the source of many of the body’s essential hormones. This area, called the central region of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, or BNST, is responsible for, among other things, sex and anxiety responses. On average it is twice the size in males as in females. Likewise, the BNST in the brains of transgender fe
males—individuals with male external anatomy, but who have lifelong female gender identification—look exactly like the BNST in the brains of those with female genitalia and reproductive organs, that is, smaller than a man’s. Interestingly, these differences hold whether the transgender individual has undergone sex reassignment surgery, hormonal treatment, both, or neither. Likewise, when scientists autopsied the brains of patients whose testicular cancer was treated with heavy doses of the feminizing hormone estrogen, they found no shrinkage of these men’s BNST.

  In 2008, Australian researchers discovered a genetic variation in transgender women: Their receptor gene for the male sex hormone testosterone was longer than in gender-conforming males and appeared to be less efficient at signaling the uptake of male hormones in utero, resulting in a more “feminized” brain. The number and size of neurons in the hypothalamus of male-to-female transgender adults is similar to females, and the number and size of hypothalamic neurons in female-to-male transgender adults is similar to males. The size of the deep brain structure called the putamen, which forms part of the basal ganglia, is also different in transgender individuals, corresponding to a person’s gender identity, not biological or sexual status.

  If further evidence is needed that gender identity rests not in anatomy but in the brain, take the cases of men whose penile cancer forced them to have their genitals removed. In one study, 60 percent of these men experienced feelings of pain where their genitals used to be, similar to those who have lost a limb. In elective male-to-female sex reassignment surgery, however, where the genitals are removed and refashioned into a vagina and clitoris, there have been no reported cases of “phantom penis” syndrome.