The Best American Sports Writing 2011 (52 page)

Gender discordance exists on a continuum. (Transvestitism, aka cross-dressing, is classified as a different disorder, a fluke of straight men who get a sexual charge from wearing panties or a skirt.) Most people who are convinced their genitals don't match their true gender will never go as far as getting sexual-reassignment surgery. Fewer than 1,000 such procedures are performed each year in the United States, where it can cost up to $30,000. (It's much cheaper elsewhere.) About three-quarters of the operations are male-to-female, partly because female-to-male surgery hasn't been perfected—it's a lot harder to add than take away.

Male-to-female technique has been so refined that the result is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The testicles are removed, and the penis is essentially inverted and reconfigured into a vagina, which is elongated with a graft of skin from the scrotum. You don't have orgasms like you used to—many newly minted females say they don't come at all—but most post-op transsexuals say there's plenty of sensation.

Anyway, sex is not really the point. "People assume that if you want to be a woman, then underneath it you really want to have sex with men and just can't deal with being gay," said Susan Horn. "But a lot of us aren't even thinking of whom we will have sex with. We're thinking about ourselves, that we want to be perceived by the world the way we perceive ourselves. We just want things to match."

Roughly half the men who become women wind up with another woman. "If you're interested in women before, you generally still are, even after you transition," said Horn. "Which, if you think about it, is the ultimate proof that gender and sex aren't as closely linked as we thought."

 

In the trans community, Christine was an instant headliner. "She was the public face everyone was hungry for," said Autumn Sandeen, who transitioned in 2003 and blogs for the popular LGBT website Pam's House Blend. "Someone with a visible career in a traditionally male field. Someone people couldn't ignore or diminish." Since January 2007, Christine had been a member of the Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood, where fashionable gay Hollywood worshiped. The Sunday after her coming-out column ran, the charismatic minister, the Reverend Neil Thomas, rhapsodized about her in his sermon.

She was the main attraction at a couple of major transgender gatherings that summer and fall, but the height may have been a giddy weekend at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association conference in September. There were four transwomen in attendance: Sandeen, Ina Fried of CNET, Diane Barnes of Global Security Newswire, and Christine. Sandeen loaded them into her secondhand Hyundai, and they visited what passed in San Diego for gay bars, the only places that might not balk at the sight of them coming through the door. "We were four fairly large women stuffed in a small car, windows down, cruising down the freeway, incredibly, insanely happy," recalled Sandeen. Later they discussed whether they would stay in the public eye or attempt to lead a quieter life. "Christine told me she felt it was her responsibility to be out there," said Sandeen. "She didn't want the younger girls to have to go through what we'd gone through."

When David Beckham debuted that July with the L.A. Galaxy, Christine blogged about making her appearance at the press conference, her first, at the stadium.

He arrived wearing a silver-gray Burberry suit, surrounded by a phalanx of assistants and yes-people, on his way to a temporary stage assembled on the Home Depot Center soccer pitch, where he would say hello to adoring fans and talk to the media about his new $250-million gig with the Los Angeles Galaxy.

I arrived wearing a golden-hued top from Ross and a multi-colored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed tan heels from Aerosoles, surrounded by nobody, just me and my press credential on our way to the far southwest corner of some very uncomfortable and un-shaded stadium seats to listen to him talk and write about what he said.

The details are not important. What mattered to me on Friday was: David Beckham arrived. And so did I.

The attention seemed to embolden her in ways that would have been anathema to Mike. Rick Reilly, who began his career in the Orange County bureau of the
Los Angeles Times
before going on to become the world's highest-paid sportswriter at
Sports Illustrated
and ESPN, was signing books at Borders in Westwood in May 2007 when he looked up to see a large woman with honey-colored hair staring at him. "It's me," Christine said. It took a moment for him to realize that this was the guy he'd played hoops with every Friday back in the late '80s at Mile Square Park near Huntington Beach.

"I was thrown briefly, but then, hey, whatever," Reilly said recently. "She seemed happier and more comfortable than he'd ever seemed." After the signing, Reilly and his wife, Cynthia, took Christine out and killed a couple of bottles of Chardonnay. Christine told them about playing princess dress-up with her male cousins as a child, how her need to dress as a woman, to be a woman, had escalated till it became unbearable, how she'd kept a red toolbox of women's clothes behind the headboard through the years with Lisa. She said it was transgendering or death. Christine became a regular that summer at the Reillys' house in Hermosa Beach. "She and Cynthia would sit on the roof deck, and my wife would tutor her on all the details of being a woman," said Reilly. "Where to get the best shoes, how to wear a push-up bra."

She talked a lot about getting the surgery. First she had to live full-time as a woman for a year—the Benjamin Standards, a medical protocol developed in the 1970s by German-born endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, required it. Next summer, she planned to go to Trinidad, Colorado, where Marci Bowers, a surgeon who transitioned more than a decade ago, practiced. The Reillys had a second home in Denver, where she would recuperate.

But there was one subject that always brought the mood down: Lisa. If only she would come around, Christine would say, as Reilly topped off her glass. If they could only still be close, everything would be so perfect. "Christine honestly couldn't fathom it," said Reilly, "I said, 'Dude, why would you think this would be okay with her?' But she couldn't let Lisa go."

In fact, the media attention was crushing Lisa, who had filed for divorce in January. "They had been really private about it, and that was bad enough, but now, all of a sudden, her tragedy, her pain—it was all out there," said Scott French, a cofounder of the Scribes, who met Mike at the Rose Bowl during the 1994 World Cup. Christine scrupulously avoided mentioning Lisa in interviews, but reporters kept pressing. "It's extremely painful," she told an NPR interviewer. "That's really a personal side of this conversation I'd rather not have."

Lisa was a stoic midwesterner, not some reality-show-ready California type who could easily spill her guts in public. She told her friends not to talk to the press and has never spoken publicly about her husband's saga. (She didn't respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.) "What is there for her to say?" asked a fellow sportswriter who was close to both of them. "These were two people who were completely in love. Can you imagine what that's like?"

Everyone on the sports staff knew Lisa was suffering, and no one knew how to help. If Mike had been married to a suburban housewife, someone people hardly knew, it would have been different, abstract. Instead, Lisa was one of them. "People were nice to Christine, happy that she was happy, but they felt terrible for Lisa," said Larry Stewart. "Everyone in the newsroom sort of felt like they had to take sides. And they all chose Lisa. She's a lovely, fun person whom everyone loves. It wasn't an issue of Mike's becoming a woman; it was that Lisa was really broken up."

***

That giddy, golden summer of 2007 faded as the reality of being a midlife transwoman, single and lonely, set in: the stares as you passed on the street, the department-store salesgirls who whispered to one another as though you were deaf, the jarring sight of a stubbornly rugged jaw in the rearview mirror. "She would say that she had spent 45 minutes putting on her makeup and still she saw Mike staring back," Amy recalled.

In December, Randy Harvey called Christine at home to share a joke: the Olympic Committee had declared 2008 the Year of the Woman in sports. "I thought she'd get a real kick out it, but she got really offended," Harvey said. "I tried not to worry, but inside I knew there was something really wrong."

One night in February, Reilly was out late, getting hammered with Gene Wojciechowski, an ESPN colleague who'd worked with Reilly and Penner at the
Times.
On a whim, they dialed Christine to jaw about the old days. "She was totally touched that we included her," said Reilly. "She said she was going through a hard time with people she loved not accepting her. Then she cried, but I didn't think anything of it. Hell, she was always crying."

Around this time, Autumn Sandeen noticed that the activists had grown cold toward their poster girl. They sniped that she wasn't substantial enough, that A Woman in Progress spent too much time cataloging the new shoes in her closet and not enough mining the political turf. "They considered her frivolous," said Sandeen. "They didn't want to hear her talk about how great the
Times
had been about the transition or how Beckham gave her goose bumps. None of that highlighted the injustices and inequities that most transpeople go through. They wanted her to be a role model, a crusader. She was crushed. She just wanted to be Christine."

Then there was the matter of sex. Early on, Christine had dropped hints to Amy and Susan that she wanted to experiment with men, but as the weeks and months passed, she grew more withdrawn and uncertain. When they suggested she go out on a date to see how it felt, she demurred. "She said she had already had her great love," said Amy. "She said she couldn't fill that void."

 

It was late, almost midnight, when the phone rang at Amy's apartment in Redondo Beach. She knew right away who it was.

The death of Christine's mother the month before had been drawn-out and traumatic. Joan Penner had never accepted Christine and in her final dementia had vacillated between treating her as the daughter she never had and an abomination. The
Vanity Fair
piece that Christine hoped would show her as a complete, happy woman had fallen apart over differences about the photography and the direction of the reporting. "She realized that what she had envisioned, something glamorous and romantic, was never going to happen," said Sandeen. Then there was the divorce. Christine hadn't really believed Lisa would go through with it, but she could no longer ignore the documents that kept coming. They lay on the raw wooden table in her apartment amid tangled necklaces and a pile of old newspapers.

Amy had never had big expectations for her late-life transition—all she wanted was to die an old woman instead of an old man—but Christine had been convinced that becoming a woman would solve everything. Amy had tried to make her understand, from the beginning, that the act of becoming a woman itself wouldn't make you happy, any more than glasses would make you observant. But Christine just smiled that perfect smile. Until she didn't anymore.

She took a leave from the paper. Randy Harvey hadn't asked what was wrong, just told her to take care. She quit returning calls, even from Reilly. Mostly she sat in her apartment, the Audrey Hepburn posters on the wall failing to cheer her up, staring for hours through the sliding door to the dreary balcony and the busy street beyond.

So when Amy picked up the ringing phone, she braced herself. "I think I'm in kidney failure," Christine said.

Amy drove her to the hospital at Century Plaza. It was the third time in the past few months Christine had gone to the emergency room and the doctors had found nothing. But Amy couldn't let Christine go alone; hospitals were hard on the transgendered. The scanty gowns, the overworked staff poking and prodding you, some with barely concealed disgust. The fluorescent lights didn't do anyone any favors, even Christine, who had been so religious about electrolysis.

She was in bed in the ER, getting woozy from the sedative, when Amy took her hand. "I hope you won't be upset," Christine said, her voice faint, "but I'm thinking of pulling the plug on my transition." She couldn't live without the warmth, she stumbled to explain as the drugs kicked in. Without Lisa.

It was like watching a tennis ball attached to a rubber band stretched too tight and then released, Amy thought. It would snap back, but not all the way. You couldn't go back. Not really. That much Amy was sure of.

Christine came to stay at Amy's apartment after she got out of the hospital, spending most days under a coverlet in the spare room. She stopped taking her hormones, wasn't shaving her legs or bothering with makeup.

When Amy's sisters invited her to visit them in Oregon in August, she couldn't say no. The girls, who shared a house on 10 wild acres, had been surprisingly supportive when she told them their only brother was going to become a woman. Going up there meant flying as a woman for the first time—she worried about what would happen if she couldn't pass and people stared on the plane—but the fear was worth being able to drink iced tea on the deck and fish on the river.

Christine got out of bed to drive Amy to the airport. They didn't talk much on the way. Amy knew it was the last time she would see Christine.

"You don't actually think Lisa will come back to you, do you?" Amy asked quietly.

"No, not really," Christine said, her eyes on the steamy freeway ahead. Amy didn't believe her, but what was there to say?

When Amy flew back into LAX two weeks later, Mike was waiting for her in his old Toyota Camry. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a loose short-sleeve button-down shirt from Costco; his lank blond hair was chopped to the shoulder. Amy kept things light in the car, but it was hard. She had promised to be there for Christine no matter what, but this felt like a death.

"It's okay if you want to call me Christine," Mike told her, his voice a gruff whisper.