The day Mike Penner left the Los Angeles Times, his departure
made the news. The longtime sportswriter wrote the article himself,
a personal essay explaining that he was taking some time off
and, upon his return, he would be known from then on as Christine
Daniels.
Penner's public acknowledgment in April 2007 that he was transgender
and would soon live as a woman shocked the world of sports journalism
and turned his new identity, Daniels, into an instant celebrity.
Daniels gave speeches, was profiled in Sports Illustrated, collected
honors for courage from transgender groups and wrote a blog
for the Times titled "Woman in Progress."
Except that the transition didn't last. In mid-October 2008,
Penner, 51, returned to the sports pages and the Times newsroom
as a man.
And just as suddenly, Penner's story, heralded in its early
days as a triumphant example of transgender progress, has instead
become a cautionary tale of the lesser-known phenomenon: transgender
regret.
"It's unfortunate, and it's relatively uncommon but certainly
not unheard of," says Denise Leclair, executive director of
the International Foundation for Gender Education, a transgender
advocacy group. "The simplest way to think about it is being
trans is something that never goes away. ... There's just a
fairly constant social pressure to just go back. You don't have
to be a genius to understand that society doesn't really accept
this."
Penner, a 24-year veteran of the newspaper, did not respond
to calls and e-mails for comment and has not written about his
decision.
Though there's no data available on how many transgender people
abandon their new gender, psychologist Ron Lawrence of the Community
Counseling Center in Las Vegas says about 5% of his transgender
patients revert. Leclair echoes that estimate.
Transgender advocates say the case of Penner, who never had
sex-change surgery, reflects the success of a system in which
American sex-change surgeons, adhering to their own code of
conduct, won't operate until the patient has had a year of intense
psychotherapy while living publicly in the new gender.
"We're required" by doctors "to go through all this stuff
for a reason, even though there are a lot of trans people who
bristle at being told what they can and can't do," says Donna
Rose, a male-to-female postoperative transsexual in Rochester,
N.Y. "The thing that people have to understand is that even
though Mike decided to retransition, that doesn't mean he's
not trans. It's not like you go all of a sudden, 'Uh, I'm better.'
Going back doesn't automatically clear the conundrum that causes
you to get there in the first place."
Rose reversed course on her own transition at first because
her then-wife became so distraught and coworkers were insensitive.
Six months later, she went through with it.
Transitioning carries with it the prospect of losing jobs,
friends and family, as well as mockery from strangers who find
the gender change visibly jarring, Rose and others attest. "You
become a very visible minority," Leclair says. "The average
male-to-female transsexual is taller, has bigger hands and feet,
has more facial hair than most women. There are a lot of physical
attributes that are hard to hide in a society that doesn't like
you."
Paul McHugh, director of the Department of Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
in Baltimore, is a leading proponent of the belief that the
cause is not biological, that transgender people have chosen
this path.
He halted the university hospital's practice of performing
gender reassignment surgeries in the late 1970s because, he
says, a study indicated that postoperative transsexuals were
no happier than they were before the operation. "You can live
any way you want, but don't come to us and ask us to give medical
resources to this proposal of yours, because we think it's a
social construct and not a condition of nature," McHugh says.
"No one has demonstrated any physical mechanism or physical
problem that causes this. The burden of proof is on them to
prove that."
Such comments are anathema to transgender advocates, who insist
the decades-old study McHugh cites was debunked. Like most transsexuals,
Daniels told Sports Illustrated in 2007 that her urges to be
female began as a child, and she wrote in the Times that same
year: "We are born with this. We fight it as long as we can,
and in the end it wins."
Claire Winter, a transsexual from Seattle who mentored Penner
and spoke to him late last year, doubts the sportswriter's reversal
will further confuse the general public about transsexualism.
"I think people are so bloody confused, I don't know if this
has a significant effect," Winter says. "But maybe this will
help people to understand that this is a very complex, highly
difficult situation. This indicates the fundamental problem
of trying to shove people into either end of the gender pole.
It serves to point out the fact that it isn't as simple as flipping
a coin.
"I would say give" Penner "some time," Winter says. "We have
to wait for him to let us know when he figures it out."
