Book summary “Becoming Nicole”: summary

Introduction

You may struggle to understand how a child can know their gender differs from their assigned sex at birth. Amy Ellis Nutt tells the true story of identical twin boys born in 1997 who challenge conventional views when one asserts her female identity.

Identical twin boys adopted into a traditional rural family challenge conventional understandings of gender when one asserts her female identity from early childhood.

The book traces the family's journey from medical confusion in rural Maine to landmark legal battles and public advocacy. You will see how parents navigate fear and social hostility while seeking medical support.

• What drives a child to reject their biological sex?
• How do medical and legal systems respond to transgender youth?
• Can family love overcome societal prejudice?

1. Early Childhood and Divergent Behaviors

Identical twins can exhibit strikingly different gender-typed behaviors and self-expression from a very early age despite sharing identical DNA.

Kelly and Wayne Maines adopted identical twin boys born on October 7, 1997. The twins came to their parents through an unexpected private adoption arranged by a teenage relative. Sarah, a sixteen-year-old cousin, wanted to place her baby for adoption and moved into Kelly and Wayne's home in Northville, New York, in April 1997 while four months pregnant. Wyatt and Jonas both weighed 5 pounds, 2 ounces at birth.

Kelly and Wayne provided identical toys, such as dump trucks and Barbie dolls, to both boys. Jonas gravitated toward action figures and traditional boy play. Wyatt immediately showed a strong preference for feminine items, imitating Pilates moves with a Barbie doll and wearing his onesie like a skirt.

At two years old, Wyatt was filmed completely mesmerized by his reflection in an oven door while wearing a pink tutu, a bohemian chain, and a floppy hat, while his father Wayne unsuccessfully tried to get him to show his muscles.

Wyatt became utterly obsessed with the Disney character Ariel from The Little Mermaid. The character lives under the sea with a fish tail but desperately yearns to be a human female on land, mirroring an underlying feeling of bodily alienation.

Wyatt watched The Little Mermaid DVD incessantly and ran around the house with a red shirt half over his head to imitate Ariel's long flowing hair.

While taking a snack break with his father Wayne in the bathroom, three-year-old Wyatt looked up and stated, Daddy, I hate my penis.

2. Medical Definitions and Family Crises

Parents navigating a child's gender dysphoria must confront unfamiliar medical terminology and personal health crises while managing severe anxiety.

Kelly read the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition of transgender. You discover that transgender best fits a condition where inner gender feelings do not match physical anatomy.

The American Psychiatric Association changed the diagnosis from gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria in the 2013 DSM-V. You learn that homosexuality was eliminated from the DSM-II in 1973. The diagnosis requires manifesting traits or behaviors for six months alongside clinically significant distress. This distress arises from being locked in the wrong body rather than from personal confusion.

• A strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that one is the other gender
• In boys, a strong preference for cross-dressing or simulating female attire
• A strong preference for cross-gender roles in make-believe play or fantasy play
• A strong preference for stereotypically other-gender toys, games, or activities
• A strong dislike of one's sexual anatomy

Wyatt referred to himself as a "boy-girl" and frequently asked when his penis would fall off. Wayne tried to softly summarize Wyatt's dramatic and creative personality without fully exposing his distress. Wayne retreated by cutting down trees, working out, swimming, and working late. In the spring of 2003, Wayne accepted an academic job as executive director of safety, health services, transportation, and security at the University of Maine. You move the family from their home in Northville to a four-bedroom house on Marsh Island in Orono surrounded by six acres of woodland.

Kelly watched The Oprah Winfrey Show featuring Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby College. She subsequently bought her memoir She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. This media appearance helped Kelly realize that Wyatt's condition was valid and rooted in innate medical realities.

During a medical checkup in January 2004, Kelly was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer. You face multiple surgeries in Boston and punishing radioactive iodine therapy at age 43.

• Undergo thyroidectomy and fine needle aspiration biopsy procedures
• Flush the toilet twice after relieving oneself during radioactive iodine therapy to rinse away leftover fluid

Kelly drove 240 miles from Orono to Boston in snowstorms for cancer treatment. Statistics show that 85 to 90 percent of people with thyroid nodules do not have cancer. Kelly endured a 3-inch surgical incision on her neck.

As Wyatt entered school, his split life between home and school caused severe anxiety. You observe violent outbursts toward his brother Jonas and compulsive physical tics like pulling out his hair.

Wyatt wrote in his second-grade Secret Notebook about going "wild in the dark", biting his brother, and practicing karate. Psychologist Virginia Holmes noted his automatic desire to choke himself during appointments in Ellsworth, located 35 miles from Orono.

3. School Integration and the Biology of Sex

While schools can implement practical compromises for social transition, biological sex and gender identity are distinct products of in utero development.

Children at Asa Adams Elementary readily accepted Wyatt's female identity and requested pronouns. School counselor Lisa Erhardt and teacher Sara Kreutz worked to balance Wyatt's self-expression with school norms. The school housed 260 students in pre-K through fifth grade. Lisa Erhardt was twenty-six years old when she took her counseling job in 2003, and she was fifteen years apart in age from Kelly.

For the fourth-grade Christmas concert, where girls wore skirts and boys wore pants, Lisa Erhardt brokered a compromise allowing Wyatt to wear culottes, enabling him to stand proudly on the seam between the boys' and girls' sections.

Wayne struggled to accept Wyatt's feminine identity openly. He often shut down, threw himself into triathlons, built massive piles of firewood, and left decision-making to Kelly until external validation made denial impossible.

Wayne swam a quarter-mile across a pitch-black lake for nearly two miles late at night, leading police to respond after an elderly woman reported a potential suicide attempt. Wayne departed for the lake at ten o'clock.

Eric Buffong, a twenty-seven-year-old trans man and line cook at Equus restaurant, was fired after a co-worker discovered his 1998 high school yearbook photo four months later. That led to a 3 million dollar lawsuit that established precedent under sex discrimination laws.

Sexual anatomy and gender identity are products of distinct biological processes occurring at different times in utero via genes and hormones. While chromosomes establish genetic sex, subsequent hormonal surges differentiate sexual anatomy and separately influence brain structures and gender identity, allowing for natural variations and intersex conditions. There are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and fifty genes play a part in sexual identity development. The straight gyrus is about 10 percent larger in women than men. Anne Fausto-Sterling notes that one in one hundred infants are born with atypical sexual anatomy, and one in every two thousand infants are born with genitalia noticeably atypical. Biological terms include chimerism, mosaicism, and microchimerism.

Cheryl Chase founded the intersex movement after discovering her own intersex history following surgeries performed in childhood due to ambiguous genitalia.

Efforts to treat gender identity as a social construct that can be altered through environmental conditioning and forced assignment have proven to be disastrous failures. Behaviorism ignored the innate, biological nature of gender identity when assigning gender based on surgical convenience or psychological conditioning.

Bruce's penis was accidentally burned off at eight months of age. He was raised as a girl named Brenda based on Dr. John Money's theories, but he began transition to male at fourteen years old, and David committed suicide at thirty-eight years old in 2004.

Sports organizations have progressively adapted rules regarding transgender athletes, recognizing that hormone therapy eliminates physiological advantages. Scientific evidence demonstrates that after a year on hormone therapy or suppressants, transgender athletes possess no competitive advantage outside the normal range among cisgender athletes. The IOC in 2004 required two years of postoperative hormone replacement therapy, and the NCAA in 2011 required a year of male hormone suppression.

Chloie Jönsson sued CrossFit after being rejected from the women's division despite eight years of post-op hormone therapy, prompting a defense of inclusion by industry analysts.

4. Puberty Suppression and Legal Battles

Medical protocols using puberty blockers and legal protections like Section 504 help safeguard transgender youth against unwanted physical development and discrimination.

Dr. Norman Spack learned through college research on newts and their life stages that the transition of living creatures from one form to another is a standard part of nature. Encountering intersex and transgender individuals later in his endocrinology and volunteer work cemented his view that gender diversity is not a mistake.

As a student at Williams College, Spack took over a research project involving newts that showed how hormone administration alone could initiate metamorphosis between water and land life stages. Through his early transgender patients, Dr. Spack learned the fundamental distinction between whom a person is attracted to and the internal gender with which a person identifies.

A Harvard undergraduate assigned female at birth who lived as a man taught Dr. Spack the primary lesson: sexual orientation is who you go to bed with, while gender identity is who you go to bed as. Following practices pioneered in the Netherlands, pediatric endocrinologists can use suppressants to pause natural puberty. This allows transgender children time for psychological evaluation before later administering hormones matching their correct gender identity.

In Boston, Dr. Spack established a protocol where nine-year-old Wyatt Maines would use puberty-suppressing injections at age twelve to prevent male development like an Adam's apple or deepened voice, while his twin brother Jonas underwent natural puberty as a baseline reference. There are 25 percent of children expressing opposite-gender preferences early in life still feel that way approaching puberty, along with a 12-16-18 program referring to the ages for puberty blockers, hormones, and potential surgery. You can follow this clinical approach:

• At age twelve or earlier, take puberty-suppressing injections to stop adult male development.
• At about age sixteen, begin taking female hormones to develop breasts.
• At about age eighteen, undergo sex reassignment surgery if desired.

School counselor Lisa Erhardt submitted a Section 504 form for Wyatt to qualify under gender dysphoria, ensuring Kelly and Wayne could participate in official educational evaluations and securing bathroom accommodations. January 7, 2007 was the date when the Section 504 form was submitted. You can utilize these steps in educational settings:

• File a Section 504 form based on mental or physical impairments affecting major life activities.
• Participate in evaluation team meetings with teachers and school staff.
• Establish safe people and environmental accommodations for the student.

Kelly and Wayne petitioned a Maine court to keep Wyatt's legal name change to Nicole out of the newspaper to avoid retaliation from the Christian Civic League of Maine, ultimately receiving approval after Wayne and Kelly testified under oath before a seventy years old judge who presided over the name change hearing.

The transition to multi-stall restrooms in upper grades creates intense community debate regarding public accommodations. Anti-LGBTQ activists and concerned guardians often use protesting students to challenge school policies and demand restrictions. Paul Melanson coached his grandson Jacob to enter the fifth-grade girls' restroom after Nicole was permitted to use it, leading to direct confrontations, homophobic slurs, and escalating legal threats against the school district, despite Paul Melanson having served fifteen years in the navy.

When parents instruct a cisgender twin to protect their sibling from public hostility, the resulting pressure can make the child hyper-vigilant, defensive, and prone to schoolyard altercations. Jonas Maines physically attacked Jacob on the school playground after Jacob targeted Nicole during a four-square game, resulting in two weeks of lost recess assigned as punishment for the playground fight and highlighting the heavy emotional toll placed on the supportive twin.

5. Brain Anatomy and Relocation to Portland

Postmortem studies and escalating hostility in unsupportive communities prompt families to seek legal recourse and relocate for safety.

Kelly Maines filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission alleging that school officials violated the Maine Human Rights Act by excluding Nicole from the girls' restroom based on her gender identity. On April 10, 2008, Kelly filed the complaint after a student named Jacob repeatedly followed Nicole into the girls' restroom and both were punished. A Bangor Daily News poll showed that 17.2 percent of respondents said yes to the bathroom access, while 82.8 percent said no.

Research on the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, or BNST, indicates that transgender females have a smaller BNST matching female brain anatomy, regardless of whether they underwent surgery or hormone treatment. Scientists examining the brains of transgender individuals and patients treated with heavy doses of estrogen found consistent anatomical correlations in the BNST and hypothalamus.

Anthropological and historical evidence shows that various cultures incorporate third genders or alternative gender roles that challenge Western binary assumptions. In Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, millions belong to the hijra group, while the Bugis people of Indonesia recognize five distinct genders. Four thousand years marks the historical duration of the hijra group in Asia, and five is the number of genders recognized by the Bugis people of Indonesia.

Faced with an unchanging hostile environment, an eyes-on policy, and forced use of staff restrooms, the Maineses decided to split households, with Kelly and the kids moving to Portland. Kelly and Wayne arranged to sell their Orono home, move into a Portland duplex, and enroll Nicole and Jonas in King Middle School under a stealth policy where only administrators knew Nicole was transgender. The distance from Orono to Portland is 140 miles.

Physicians evaluate testicular volume and genital enlargement before starting suppressants, while also addressing physical health and weight parameters. Dr. Spack told Nicole she did not need puberty suppressants yet because her testicular volume had not increased, advising her instead to gain weight and stop pulling her eyelashes. Nicole stood four feet eight inches and weighed 69 pounds.

Mental health counselor Christine Talbott used cognitive behavioral therapy and tapping techniques to help Nicole process negative thoughts and reduce trichotillomania behaviors. Across the country, 41 percent of transgender people have attempted to commit suicide.

To apply this tapping practice:

• Identify an issue to target.
• Figure out the intensity level of the problem.
• Choose a self-affirming phrase to repeat.
• Tap the body's energy meridians between the head and collarbone and under the arms while repeating the phrase.

10 Key Ideas

1. Identical twins can exhibit strikingly different gender-typed behaviors and self-expression from a very early age despite sharing identical DNA.
2. Parents navigating a child's gender dysphoria must confront unfamiliar medical terminology and personal health crises while managing severe anxiety.
3. While schools can implement practical compromises for social transition, biological sex and gender identity are distinct products of in utero development.
4. Medical protocols using puberty blockers and legal protections like Section 504 help safeguard transgender youth against unwanted physical development and discrimination.
5. Postmortem studies and escalating hostility in unsupportive communities prompt families to seek legal recourse and relocate for safety.
6. Children at Asa Adams Elementary readily accepted Wyatt's female identity and requested pronouns.
7. Efforts to treat gender identity as a social construct that can be altered through environmental conditioning and forced assignment have proven to be disastrous failures.
8. As a student at Williams College, Spack took over a research project involving newts that showed how hormone administration alone could initiate metamorphosis between water and land life stages.
9. Kelly Maines filed a complaint with the Maine Human Rights Commission alleging that school officials violated the Maine Human Rights Act by excluding Nicole from the girls' restroom based on her gender identity.
10. Physicians evaluate testicular volume and genital enlargement before starting suppressants, while also addressing physical health and weight parameters.