Read Online Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt - Free Book Online

from them.

CHAPTER 7
The Pink Aisle
    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