Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (23 page)

THINGS THAT I’D LIKE TO SEE HAPPEN

September (
2013
)—Start eleventh grade

October—Turn
16

2014
:

September—Start twelfth grade

2015
:

GRADUATE!!!

turn
18

Be accepted into a fantastic Acting school

Have [sex reassignment] surgery

2018
:

Turn
21
and party hard!

2019
:

Graduate from College with a masters degree in acting…move to the west coast to better my acting career…buy a pretty house.

2020
–
2030
:

Find someone who loves me and get married

—Nicole’s journal, 2012

T
he Maineses were an average, middle-class family—and at the same time they were not. They were acting as they believed families should. They loved and supported one another. And Wayne and Kelly did everything they could so that their children would flourish and live long, productive lives.

In December 2013, Wayne decided to send out the family Christmas card with a letter inside for the first time since 2006. He’d given up shortly before Wyatt became Nicole, at a time when he couldn’t face the fact that his child was transgender. When he announced his intention to Kelly, she simply laughed and said, “Have fun!” He did.

Nicole has had a very full year and is growing into a beautiful young lady who is still interested in the Performing Arts, video games and civil rights work. She was in
Cinderella
and
The Crucible
at Waynflete. She again spent time volunteering at EqualityMaine and watched our state become the first state to bring marriage equality to our friends by popular vote.

Jonas is a tad taller than Dad, has a size 12 shoe and is typically impeccably dressed, just like his dad (NOT). He was a member of the Model United Nations Team that competed at Harvard, a member of the Mock Trial Team and he also joined the Performing Arts Club this year. He also played “Reverend Hale” in
The Crucible.

He still loves history and was also selected to represent Waynflete in the state poetry contest. He continues to play the guitar and keyboard and drive his sister nuts! He was a guest performer at “Open Mic Night” in Orono this summer.

Kelly had a very busy year at work, solving problems, developing new partnerships for the Sheriff’s Office, while taking on many new duties. Of course the rest of the time she was keeping track of, organizing and driving the kids to their many events.

It is still a big challenge for us to find time together. Living in two towns is not easy….Outside of work I continue to teach others about transgender youth and how to support equal rights. Every time I speak I can see that I am breaking down barriers that have existed for generations. It is always emotional and often healing. Our story is a good story and hearing it in person is a powerful tool.

O
N
T
HURSDAY MORNING,
J
ANUARY 
30
,
2014
, shortly before noon, Wayne picked up the phone at work. It was someone from GLAD, and she had a message: “You won!”

“What are you talking about?” Wayne, not sure who was on the other end of the line, was confused.

“You won and we want you to go to Portland right away!”

Then it clicked. Wayne was nearly speechless and as soon as he hung up he called Kelly to confirm it wasn’t all a joke—or a dream.

“We won?” he asked her. “Are you sure? I don’t believe it.”

Kelly had just gotten off the phone with GLAD, too, and she’d already texted the news to Nicole and Jonas. At that moment both of them were sitting in the school auditorium at an assembly, and Nicole didn’t hesitate when she saw the exclamation points on her phone: She dashed to the front of the auditorium and shouted out the news to the whole school.

“Everyone was clapping!” Nicole texted excitedly back to her mother and father.

Wayne excused himself from work and drove eighty miles an hour down the highway to Portland. It would take him longer than the usual two and a half hours, because he had to stop a couple of times to do phone interviews.

“This is a momentous decision,” Michael Silverman of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund said in a press release.

“It sends a message to transgender students that their lives are valuable, that their education needs are important, and that schools have to provide them with equal educational opportunities,” attorney Jennifer Levi said.

The opposing counsel said the Orono school district would take every step to comply with the law, and that the court “provided helpful guidance about how to handle this issue that is becoming more and more common in schools around the state and the country.”

As Wayne pulled up to the house he was met by a TV crew and asked to make a statement.

“I haven’t even talked to my wife yet!” he told them. “As parents, all we’ve ever wanted is for Nicole and her brother, Jonas, to get a good education and to be treated just like their classmates, and that didn’t happen for Nicole. What happened to my daughter was extremely painful for her and our whole family, but we can now close this very difficult chapter in our lives. We are very happy knowing that because of this ruling, no other transgender child in Maine will have to endure what Nicole experienced.”

In other parts of Maine there was consternation. Michael Heath had resigned his top position at the Christian Civic League in 2009. Later he would write that others in the organization thought he’d become too “radioactive,” too opinionated about fighting homosexuality and what he referred to as transgenderism. In 2012, as the head of Helping Hands Ministries, Heath wrote on his blog that others at the league had questioned his “relentless advocacy to keep the ‘gay’ fight as the League’s number one priority,” which is why after leaving the league he turned his attention full-time to sexual orientation and transgender issues. In 2013, he wrote on his blog that he was continuing to try to hold back the “pro-sodomy” movement, because the “vile tide of perversion which these forces unleashed is now at a high-water mark, as sodomy and transgenderism have encroached on every institution in our state, in particular our public schools.”

When Paul Melanson heard the Supreme Court had decided against the Orono public school district, he was philosophical. He knew there’d be more fights about other issues, and he was determined to keep speaking his mind. That’s all he could do, win or lose, and he would keep doing it no matter what.

As for Melanson’s grandson Jacob, the legal fight had receded from his life after the sixth grade when he moved back to live with his mother in the town of Gilead. She worked as a hostess at a local restaurant, and he hoped to get a job in the metals trade, perhaps someday become a welder. When he thought about the case—and he didn’t much—it wasn’t about rights or bathroom politics or, frankly, even Nicole. He still believed it was wrong for someone born a boy to “pretend” he was a girl, but he did wonder what it was like for Jonas. He knew Jonas didn’t like him, but Jonas was the only person involved in the whole thing he could really understand. Jonas was a boy just like him. He knew who he was and was happy being male. What must it have been like, Jacob wondered, to be the brother of a transgender twin? He barely knew his own brothers, and he wondered if it had disappointed Jonas that Wyatt had become Nicole, that his brother had become his sister. It hadn’t, of course. Jonas was very clear about that.

“I never had a brother,” he once said to Nicole. “You were always a sister to me.”

Stories are about the dropped stitch. About what happens when the pattern breaks….Why is this moment different? What has changed? And why now?…They mark the turning points of our lives.

—DANI SHAPIRO

I
n March
2015
, seven years after Kelly and Wayne had urged Orono Middle School to do the right thing, a school board in Millinocket, Maine, about an hour north of Orono, announced the creation of a transgender student policy. The Maines case had forced school systems all over the state, indeed all over the country, to examine their rules and regulations to ensure they wouldn’t be legally liable in the way the Orono school district had been found to be. The four pages of new policy recommendations were written in direct response to the court order that enjoined the Orono School Department from discriminating against transgender students.

Under “Purpose,” the document stated that the new guidelines were meant to “foster a learning environment that is safe and free from discrimination, harassment, and bullying” and “to assist the educational and social integration of transgender students” in the schools. Two important items were also addressed in the Millinocket memorandum:

Restrooms:

A student who has been identified as transgender under these guidelines should be permitted to use the restroom assigned to the gender which the student consistently asserts at school.

Locker rooms:

The use of locker rooms requires schools to consider a number of factors, including but not necessarily limited to the safety and comfort of students; the transgender student’s preference; student privacy; the ages of students; and available facilities. As a general rule, transgender students will be permitted to use the locker room assigned to the gender which the student consistently asserts at school. A transgender student will not be required to use a locker room that conflicts with the gender identity consistently asserted at school.

When the
Bangor Daily News
ran the story about Millinocket’s response to the Maineses’ state Supreme Court victory, many of the online comments were surprisingly unsympathetic.

They didn’t discriminate in Orono. They said they didn’t know what to do…so they provided a faculty bathroom. Those poor administrators in Orono getting a bad rap over this.

This is oh so wrong.

My kids better never have an opposite sex in their restroom. I’ve told my daughter if you see an Adam’s apple, scream and keep screaming. She knows how.

At nearly the same time as the Millinocket debate, Boston University School of Medicine released the results of the first comprehensive review of the scientific evidence regarding gender identity as a biological phenomenon, and concluded, according to one of the authors of the report, that it provides:

one of the most convincing arguments to date for all medical providers to gain the transgender medicine skills necessary to provide good care for these individuals….Clinical experience with treatment of transgender persons has clearly demonstrated that the best outcomes for these individuals are achieved with their requested hormone therapy and surgical sexual transition as opposed to psychiatric intervention alone.

In a March letter to Nicole, the University of Maine, whose insurance is managed by Cigna, begged to differ.

After reviewing the information we have, we determined we cannot approve this request….We found the service requested is not a covered benefit.

In other words, Nicole’s sex reassignment surgery was considered cosmetic, and therefore not a medical or health necessity. Wayne and Kelly were not entirely surprised. Cigna had approved sex reassignment surgery and other transgender medical procedures in December 2014, but the University of Maine’s health management system had not adopted them. Still, after all they’d been through, to be told that Nicole’s final transition was cosmetic was laughable. Wayne and GLAD talked to the University of Maine management team, and Wayne submitted a second appeal. It worked. A little more than two months later, the University of Maine made a complete reversal—and not just for Nicole, but for all its health insurance beneficiaries. It was yet another battle won by the Maineses, and in the process they smoothed the way for others who would follow. That night Wayne wrote to Jennifer Levi about the family’s sense of relief. “I don’t know about you, but we needed a break from the battlefield.”

I
N THE SPRING OF
2015, high school was coming to an end for both Nicole and Jonas. They’d been accepted into colleges, with Jonas opting to study theater and psychology at the University of Maine in Farmington and Nicole pursuing theater and art at the University of Maine in Orono. Wayne and Kelly would get a break on tuition because Nicole and Jonas were the children of a university staff member. Instead of the $10,000 in-state tuition for each, for the year, the family would pay half that.

By the time the twins graduated from Waynflete, Wayne and Kelly had laid out nearly $120,000 dollars for their four years at the private academy. Without scholarships from the school, it would have been twice that much. To save more money, for the twins’ senior year Wayne once again downsized his living situation, moving from his graduate student housing to Orono’s Wilson Center, a nondenominational church, which, much like a mini YMCA, provided rooms for renters. At $450 a month, it nearly cut in half Wayne’s rent for his student apartment. He also had the advantage of belonging to a community. On Wednesday evenings, dinner was free and everyone pitched in to cook. On Monday there was meditation and yoga; on Tuesdays the Quakers held services. Wayne took pleasure in being an all-around handyman and was quick to befriend the two students with whom he shared close living quarters, an engineer from China and a sociology major from New Jersey. Wayne had enough room for a sectional couch, a bed, and a small refrigerator. There were shared shower facilities. “It’s like living in a tiny frat house,” he told visitors. “A co-ed frat house.”

At the beginning of the year, Wayne received an email from a transgender staff person at the Los Angeles offices of GLAAD, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (and distinct from GLAD, the organization that had represented the family in their legal battle). The GLAAD staff person had an offer for Nicole: Would she be interested in auditioning for the guest role of a transgender teen in an upcoming episode of
Royal Pains,
an hour-long series on the USA Network? The show follows the character of Hank Lawson, a reluctant “doctor for hire” to the rich and famous of Long Island’s Hamptons. In May, after her second callback, Nicole was offered the part.

The following month, Wayne drove his daughter down to New York for a week of rehearsals and taping. USA Network provided a limo every day to take them from their Manhattan hotel to the set. On the second day of shooting, their driver chatted about how he’d twice voted for Obama as president but was now a Republican. When Wayne asked why, he said, “They’re even screwing up college mascots.” Wayne asked what he was referring to and the driver told him that he’d just heard that Rutgers University in New Jersey announced it was going to try and create different versions of its mascot: the Scarlet Knight.

“They want a transgender mascot!” the driver said.

Wayne and Nicole immediately turned to each other and smiled. When they got back to the hotel room, they said, “What the hell was that all about? And what’s a transgender scarlet knight, anyway?” Transgender was the theme of the day. Toward the end of the week the driver asked Nicole about her role on the show. When she told him she was playing the part of a transgender student and that she herself was transgender, the driver seemed surprised and embarrassed, but Wayne engaged him in more discussion. He told the man that being transgender was a medical condition and that transgender rights weren’t about being a Democrat or a Republican. They were about being true to yourself.

Sometime after the sixth grade, Nicole wrote a poem called “Disequality.” It expressed sadness, frustration—and defiance.

What do you call a girl with a head

who regrets what she heard that equality said?

That you deserve the same

as your peers without blame?

Feeling the townspeople’s stares can’t even compare

to being watched by the dogs whose eyes are aflair.

Waiting for you to slip

for you to make one wrong move,

when their brains may flip

and their screams disapprove.

They have you sit alone,

away from friends

in hopes that your difference will come to an end.

What do you call a girl with a head

who regrets what she heard that equality said?

That you deserve the same as your peers without blame?

You call her Nicole.

And her difference makes her whole.

Before Nicole could express herself, before she was able to claim her own identity, Kelly had to do it for her. Wayne liked to say that the most important thing parents can do is make sure they have confidence in themselves. Only then can they give their children what they need without fear of what others might think. It had taken Wayne a long time to attain that confidence. For some reason, Kelly had always had it. There were self-doubts, of course—how could there not have been, especially when she had to piece together her own lesson plan on how to raise a transgender child? She and Wayne had sacrificed so much just to keep their kids safe. It was never easy. It was often painful. Kelly had set aside so much in her life. She’d pushed her love of painting into the background to raise two kids virtually alone. Wayne had missed much of the twins’ childhoods. And yet he’d be the first to say it had all been worth it.

Kelly knew that, too, although she sometimes felt she had to apologize to Jonas and Nicole. With all the worries, the planning, and the self-educating, she hadn’t had much time to actually play with her children as they were growing up. “I’m sorry if it hasn’t been much fun,” she sometimes said to the twins, but Jonas and Nicole would have none of it. This was how it was supposed to be. Jonas told his mother and father it would be cool if someday someone said, “Hey, have you heard about the transgender person?” and the response would simply be, “Yeah, so what?” It should just be a normal thing, he said, the way it had always been for him growing up. He’d always seen his brother as his sister. It just took a while for everyone else.

In the first week of June 2015, Nicole and Jonas took part in their last high school prom. Nicole’s date was Alex, a boy she’d met at an anime convention in Portland the year before, and with whom she’d been keeping in touch mostly through email since his home was about an hour away. He was a year ahead of Nicole in school, a rising sophomore at the University of Maine in Orono, where he was studying computer science. Jonas was between girlfriends, so his date was a close friend of both his and Nicole’s.

It was a warm night under a full June strawberry moon. Nicole wore a formal black gown and four-inch high heels, and along with Jonas and his date and their friend Austin and his boyfriend, they all piled into a rented limo for the trip to the Falmouth Country Club, ten miles north of Portland. It was a big step up from their freshman year prom, held at a local church. At the country club, the Waynflete seniors danced under white tents and colorful strobe lights to the music of a DJ. It was romantic, much like a wedding, and nearly perfect. When the limo dropped them all off at Austin’s house at the end of the night everyone was so exhausted they collapsed on various couches, fully dressed, and didn’t stir till dawn.

A week later, Waynflete held its 117th commencement. Jonas Zebediah Maines and Nicole Amber Maines were among the sixty-eight graduates who received diplomas and congratulations from the president of the board of trustees, the head of the school, and the director of the upper school. Jonas strode confidently across the stage in a tie and blue blazer that was a half size too small, then promptly bear-hugged each school official in turn, with the audience laughing in approval and the head of the school shrugging his shoulders in amusement. Next, Nicole, in a short white dress and tan high heels, skipped across the stage, curtsied ever so slightly to the three school officials, then, just as she was about to descend the steps of the stage, struck a pose: hands on hips, one leg bent behind her, head tossed back. They were identical twins, they were brother and sister, and they were, each of them, unmistakably their own person.

Watching from the audience, Kelly couldn’t quite believe any of it. It had taken so long to get here, and yet it had all gone so fast. After all those hours encouraging her kids to study, she still couldn’t believe they’d gotten all their work in on time. If it was possible—and she’d never thought so in the past—she was going to miss the “old times,” but since she was someone who was also always looking ahead, she couldn’t wait to see what her children would do with their futures.

As usual, Wayne tried not to cry. He kept thinking about the decision to send the kids to Waynflete, the worry over how they were ever going to pay for it, his doubts about why they even needed to attend a private school, a place that seemed so foreign to what he and Kelly had known growing up. If they hadn’t felt pushed into a corner by the dismal experience of King Middle School and the lottery split decision at Casco Bay, or if the decision had been his alone, he’d probably not have opted to send his kids to Waynflete. And he would have been so wrong.

Wayne knew he could teach Jonas and Nicole only so much—how to skin a moose, track a deer, maybe even play poker. He hoped he’d been able to pass on his and Kelly’s work ethic and their strong survival instincts, maybe even a bit of his own penchant for storytelling. But he knew Waynflete had exposed his kids to much more than he and Kelly had ever experienced as teenagers. A lot of people had helped them to get to this place, from schoolteachers and doctors to lawyers, activists, and politicians, friends, and family. Lisa Erhardt, the school counselor at Asa Adams, even sent the twins graduation presents.