Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family
By Amy Ellis Nutt
279 pages. Random House. $27
Shouldn’t we all just accept the gender we were born with?
What should you do when your 2-year-old son identifies as female and insists throughout his childhood that he is actually a girl in a boy’s body? That’s the question Wayne and Kelly Maines wrestled with soon after their son, Wyatt, spoke his very first words as a toddler.
Years later, the boy continued to express his beliefs in unequivocal terms. So did Kelly, and so did Wayne. But Wayne’s view of his son’s gender dysphoria was altogether different from Kelly’s, and this clash of beliefs threatened to tear their family apart.
Before he started grade school, Wyatt had chosen to dress in girls’ clothing and live his life as a girl. His parents resisted but made compromises. He hated his genitals, and he wanted sex reassignment surgery as soon as possible. His female identity caused trouble at school, especially when it came to his use of gender-specific bathrooms. And it culminated in the lawsuit his parents filed against the local school board. By then, Wyatt had changed his name to Nicole.
As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amy Ellis Nutt tells the Maines’s story in “Becoming Nicole,” she returns countless times to the story’s central question, “Shouldn’t we all just accept the gender we were born with?“ This, in turn, leads to the story’s trickiest question, “How do we know for sure which gender we were born with?”
All sorts of people ask (and answer) these questions, especially transgender people who claim they were simply born with an internal identity that, by accident, conflicts with their external anatomy. Kind of like a child who was accidentally born with important body parts missing and who identifies as a whole person, even though surgery may be required to fix a few things. Or like an intersex (hermaphroditic) infant whose doctor decides, unilaterally, which gender the child will have. And gets it wrong. (Heads it’s a girl, tails it’s a boy?)
What is your gender?
Before accepting the gender we were born with, we need to know what it is, and that’s usually easy to determine. But not always. In fact, sometimes it’s impossible to be sure of one’s gender: Sometimes an embryo receives mixed messages from the genes and hormones that tell it which gender it will be. As a result, the embryo develops according to a skewed blueprint. This can lead to gender ambiguity when the baby is born. There’s no better way of illustrating this than with a description of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Masculinization of the male brain requires androgens. AIS results in a cell’s inability to respond to androgens, which leads to impaired development of male sexual characteristics both in utero and at puberty. So, with AIS, the external anatomy of a chromosomally male baby may — or may not — appear to be normal, while the unmasculinized brain leans towards a female gender identity. AIS is clinically significant only when it occurs in people who are chromosomally male (XY). (When it happens in females, hardly anyone notices.)
AIS is only one of many natural phenomena that can produce genetically-male female-bodied individuals who feel, look, and act like females. Chimerism produces a similar result, but it does so through mechanisms that are completely different from those of AIS. And then there’s pseudohermaphroditism and true hermaphroditism, which have their own variations in both cause and manifestation. Taking all these phenomena into consideration, it becomes clear that the gender binary is a cultural construct, not a scientific one.
What is your gender identity?
So, what does all this ambiguity of anatomy point to in terms of an individual’s gender identity? Nutt explains, “Our genitals and our gender identity are not the same.” Sexual anatomy and gender identity, she says, are each the result of two distinctly different processes that occur along separate neural pathways at different times during fetal development.
Sexual anatomy and gender identity are functions of both genes and hormones. And while one’s sexual anatomy usually matches one’s gender identity, it’s not always so simple: ”There are dozens of biological events that can affect the outcome . . . and cause an incongruence between the two. . . The permutations are myriad,” Nutt says. “Some individuals have the chromosomes of one gender but the sex organs of the opposite gender. Others are born with male genitals and testes, but internally have a womb and fallopian tubes. Still others have male genitals, small testes, and ovaries.”
The argument that Nutt makes about the biological underpinnings of gender identity has been made many times before, and it’s based on the assumption that, in utero, gender identity develops in the central nervous system separately from processes that determine external sexual characteristics. Nutt explains, “Sexual differentiation of the brain, including gender identity and the setting of our gender behavior, is, at least partly, a process distinct from external sexual development.” We know her assumption is valid when we observe the characteristics of males who identify as females as a result of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Nutt describes many other features of brain anatomy that provide evidence supporting a dual-development model of gender identity. There is also supporting evidence from the field of epigenetics.
Every imaginable variation of gender that could lie between male and female has appeared at one time or another throughout human history, and the mechanisms driving these variations are well understood. Other vertebrates, such as the clownfish, have enjoyed success with gender ambiguity for tens of millions of years. (Clownfish change their gender according to the need of the moment.)
When it comes to individual expressions of gender diversity, there is nothing new under the sun. That’s why specialists in the field have come to regard gender as a spectrum rather than a two-sizes-fits-all model. There have always been feminine boys and tomboyish girls. And women with testicles. And men with ovaries. Always. Well, almost always: but if you go back far enough in time, you’ll find no creature of land, sea, or air having any sort of gender. “At the beginning of time,” Nutt writes, “life was asexual.”
Where is your gender identity?
Dr. Norman Spack runs a gender clinic at Children’s Hospital in Boston.
Wyatt Maines was one of his first American transgender patients. Dr. Spack would oversee the six-year process of preparing Wyatt for sex reassignment surgery. The first time he met the Maines family, he stated his case clearly: “Gender identity is in the brain, not the [sexual] anatomy, and there are many, many things that can happen to a developing brain to change or alter how a child will develop, including a child’s gender identity.” One of Dr. Spack’s former patients had another way of putting it: “Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with. Gender identity is who you go to bed as.”
The real hero
The Maines family endured several brutally difficult years in Orono, Maine. Students and administrators at Adams Elementary School bullied and harassed Nicole. There were widely publicized statements against the Maines’s from the Christian Civic League of Maine, along with others who believed it was unlawful for Nicole to use the girls’ bathroom at her school. She had become too well known. So, to escape the harassment and bullying, the family moved to Portland, Maine. But Nicole continued to have a rough time at school until Wayne and Kelly enrolled their children in the Waynflete school, where they remained until graduation.
Nicole’s odyssey was a grueling ordeal, not only for herself but for her father, mother, and brother. Her mother was tireless in her constant dealings with school administrators, doctors, and lawyers. Advocating for Nicole became Kelly Maines’s full-time job, and she did it well, year after year, all the while holding down her regular day job. But, in a way, it is Wayne Maines who comes out as the real hero of this story, because he’s the one who had to change himself the most. And, little by little, he rose to the occasion. He changed himself through sheer force of will, driven by strong love for his child. He chose to fight against his shame and embarrassment. He chose to challenge his long-held beliefs about human sexuality. He worked hard at all of this, but he had to spend a lot of time away from his family while he sorted things out in his head. Kelly often lived like a single parent, and this put considerable strain on their marriage. Wayne had desperately wanted to understand and support his child’s transgender nature, but he was so steeped in the conservative thinking of his early upbringing that he simply couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It was contrary to everything he had been taught as a child, so he couldn’t accept it, at first. It took him years to overcome his prejudices, but eventually he prevailed, and the outcome was worth the wait.
Here’s what Wayne Maines said to the House Judiciary Committee of the 124th Maine Legislature on Tuesday, April 12, 2011: “In the beginning, I was not on board with this reality. Like many of you, I doubted transgender children could exist, I doubted my wife, and I doubted our counselors and doctors. However, I never doubted my love for my child. It was only through observing her pain and suffering and examining my lack of knowledge about these issues did I begin to question my behavior and my conservative values . . . ”
Nicole underwent her surgical transformation on July 28, 2015. The procedure went well, and everyone was amazed. But the transformation her father had gone through was equally amazing. He was one kind of creature when the story began and an altogether different one at its conclusion.
