The last word: Crisscrossing the gender line

CHRISTINE DANIELS LAY inert. The ash-blond hair that once framed a face envied by her peers was an unwashed tangle hiding inexorable melancholy. Her stomach was in constant pain and her mind heavy with guilt. She ate, showered, and dressed only when her caretaker demanded she do so, and seemed in a trance when she spoke. “Do you know what today was supposed to be?” Daniels asked her doting friend, Amy LaCoe. “What was today supposed to be?” LaCoe responded. “It’s the day I was supposed to have my surgery.” When LaCoe asked her friend how she felt about that, Daniels grew quieter still. “Don’t tell anybody,” she said. “But I don’t feel like I’m going to be Christine anymore. I feel like pulling the plug.”

The declaration wasn’t altogether unexpected. By this point, in July 2008, the once-gregarious Christine Daniels, a formerly male sportswriter who had shocked the nation 15 months earlier by writing in the Los Angeles Times that, going forward, she wished to be known as a woman, had been in emotional decline for months. LaCoe knew Daniels had stopped taking feminizing hormones. Daniels’ groundbreaking L.A. Times blog on transitioning to womanhood, “Woman in Progress,” had disappeared from the newspaper’s Web archives, leaving countless supporters without word from their new transgender hero. Daniels had also shut out virtually every transgender friend except LaCoe.

Seventeen months after telling LaCoe she felt “like pulling the plug,” Daniels would be found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in a 1997 Toyota Camry in the subterranean garage of a Los Angeles apartment building. By then, Daniels was again officially known by her male birth name, Mike Penner, though both her names were included atop the official coroner’s report. The death of 52-year-old Penner would become as big a news story as his coming out as transgender had been, a story complicated by Daniels’ decision in the fall of 2008 to return to life as a male. What drove Penner’s decision to take his life last November? The L.A. Times eventually published a lengthy story suggesting it was Daniels’ sense of being torn between two worlds.

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But it wasn’t about gender confusion.

PENNER’S SAGA BEGAN long before his dramatic coming out as Christine Daniels. In many ways, his path was typical of those born male who have an inexplicable desire to be female. As a teenager, he would sneak into his mother’s closet in their Anaheim, Calif., home to try on shoes and dabble with her makeup, then scrub it off ashamedly before vowing never to do it again. Then, of course, he would do it again, a new helping of guilt raining down on his Catholic soul. These were the 1960s and early ’70s, a very different era for those compelled to experiment with the trappings of the opposite sex. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, in fact, that gender-identity disorder was recognized as legitimate by the American Psychiatric Association.

Penner’s story differs from most of his counterparts’ because of the man he became. By all accounts, Penner was infatuated with sports out of genuine enthusiasm, not as a means to cloak a secret. He grew to an athletic 6 feet 3, and became an avid soccer player and a sportswriter He arrived at the L.A. Times in 1983 and, a year later, met the woman he’d marry— sportswriter Lisa Dillman, then of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He helped Dillman get her job at the Times, and the couple wed in 1987.

THE FIRST KNOWN public sighting of Christine Daniels came 17 years after that marriage—at Countessa’s Closet, a small strip-mall clothing store in Studio City that is routinely cited by male-to-female transgender Angelenos as a first step toward a public transition. Countessa, the shop’s proprietor, recalls a shy blond man with bright blue eyes browsing one afternoon in 2004. Penner spoke first: “This is like a real ladies’ shop,” he said. “Of course it is,” she replied. “Do you know what you’re looking for?” “No, not exactly.” “Is it for you or is it somebody else?” “It’s for me.” With that verbal admission, Mike Penner began embracing an identity he’d always felt buried within.

Over the next several months, Penner would slip over to Countessa’s Closet after work or on weekends and shuck “male mode” garb for wigs, dresses, and jewelry. Other transgender people were doing the same. At Countessa’s, Daniels made friends with Susan Horn, and with “Diana,” who has asked that her real name be withheld.

By August 2005, Daniels was ready to share with Horn a milestone: appearing in public, for the first time, in her transgender persona. Horn remembers meeting at Countessa’s to get dressed, then heading to Sisley, an Italian restaurant in Encino. “We drove over to this mall and I kept telling her, ‘Nobody’s gonna bother us, even if they recognize us as being transsexual,’” says Horn. “We sat down at the restaurant. A very cute waiter came over and said, ‘Can I help you, ladies?’ As soon as those words left his mouth, you could feel Christine relax. She was just ecstatic.”

A personality transformation was taking place as well. Mike Penner had always been reserved, even shy. His longtime friend Rick Reilly, a sports columnist, wrote in a January 2010 column that the Christine he eventually came to know was the opposite: “gregarious, a 100 mph talker … She was flirty, always lightly grabbing your arm when she talked, covering her mouth when she laughed, which seemed like all the time.”

What Lisa Dillman knew about her husband’s early experimentation with transition isn’t precisely known. Dillman has never spoken on the record about the subject. Claire Winter, a transgender friend of Christine’s who lives in Seattle, says Daniels “had struck an arrangement with Lisa that she’d explore these things. I’m pretty sure Lisa knew what she was doing.” In any case, by late 2006, Mike Penner could no longer keep Christine Daniels from Dillman’s awareness; the hormones he was taking made it impossible. Presenting as Mike, in fact, had become tormenting. When the time came for Daniels to revert to male mode toward the end of outings, Diana recalls, a devastating mood swing would occur. “He’d be lying on the floor crying,” she says.

Just after Christmas 2006, Penner finally moved out of the home he shared with Dillman. “They exchanged practical presents that would be useful for life alone,” LaCoe says. Daniels, she says, seemed convinced at the time that Dillman would eventually accept the change.

PENNER BROKE THE news of his transition to sports editor Randy Harvey in late February. By all accounts, Harvey was exceedingly gracious, dissuading Penner when he suggested a move to the paper’s entertainment section. Harvey also persuaded Penner to write about the transition. The April 26, 2007, piece that appeared in the Times under the headline “Old Mike, New Christine,” was a breezy declaration that after 23 years of writing as Mike Penner, the author would henceforth write as Christine Daniels. “I am a transsexual sportswriter,” Daniels wrote. “It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears, and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words.” The piece was an instant Web sensation. Overnight, Daniels became one of the most famous transgender people in America.

The initial surge of public support was thrilling for Daniels. She started writing the “Woman in Progress” blog and found herself in demand to give speeches to transgender groups. She spoke to friends about her desire to have sex-reassignment surgery, met with a sex-change surgeon in September 2007, and scheduled the operation for the following July.

But behind the scenes, Daniels’ transition was marred by a dramatic deterioration of her relationship with Lisa Dillman. On the very day that Daniels returned to the Times in her female persona, Dillman submitted divorce papers. Though the move was understandable, says Winter, the speed with which Dillman acted was “a huge blow.” Yet the filing was only the tip of the iceberg. Daniels endured a series of blowout arguments with Dillman and with Dillman’s parents. Daniels, friends say, was crushed by Dillman’s distance.

THE FIRST OUTWARD sign of Daniels’ growing distress was a disastrous photo shoot for Vanity Fair. Shortly after Daniels’ 50th birthday, in October, she went to the L.A. studio of photographer Robert Maxwell, who later told the Times that he’d intended to shoot Daniels in a “conservative, classy-type look.” He claimed that Daniels was unstable, bawling that she was ugly. But the sportswriter told more than a half-dozen friends shortly after the shoot that Maxwell had pushed her to pose in sexually provocative ways. In an e-mail to Winter, she wrote: “It was a total debacle, probably the worst experience of my transition. [The] photographer apparently wanted to portray me as a man in a dress, my worst fear … I was a wreck for three days afterward.” Winter and others say they helped Daniels draft a letter demanding that Vanity Fair kill the piece.

Feeling increasingly stressed by having to act as a transgender role model, Daniels began to withdraw. In January 2008, she canceled a speech to a Denver transgender conference, and in March she didn’t appear when she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in Los Angeles. In April, she took medical leave from the Times, complaining of severe abdominal pain. She cut herself off from transgender friends by not returning calls and e-mails.

Finally, in June, Daniels was hospitalized, and doctors determined that the stress of so many traumas—including the recent death of her mother—was manifesting as abdominal pain. Daniels was also diagnosed as severely depressed and given prescriptions for powerful psychotropic drugs. That summer, she demanded that LaCoe and others start calling her Mike again.

THAT IT TOOK Mike Penner until this past Nov. 27 to kill himself is, in retrospect, surprising. Though Penner briefly wrote for the Times again under his old name, LaCoe and Diana spent the summer of 2009 contending with what clearly were his attempts at drug overdoses. Certainly, his decision a year earlier to stop taking the feminizing hormones played a role in his deteriorating life, but the extent can’t be known. No studies have been conducted to determine whether withdrawal from the hormones can cause depression.

While many issues were at play by the end, one stood out: Penner had repeatedly told friends that his return to a male lifestyle was a last-ditch effort to reunite in some way with his wife. “I had the perfect life with Lisa,” he once told LaCoe. “And I threw it all away.” Penner understood, LaCoe says, that a full reconciliation was unlikely, “but there was that hope that if Christine was gone, then just maybe.”

Last Thanksgiving, a day after sharing a dinner out with LaCoe and Diana, Penner sent them what would seem a valedictory e-mail: “I want to thank you for your friendship,” he wrote. “It’s meant the world to me.” The very next night, he climbed into his Camry and breathed carbon monoxide until he died.

To his transgender friends, there could be only one way to interpret the date he’d chosen—a year to the day after his divorce had been finalized: “Christine died,” Diana says, “of a broken heart.”

From a longer story by Steve Friess that was originally published by the LA Weekly. Used by permission of the author. All rights reserved.