Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt

massaged. There is no simple act of perception. What there is, is expectation. Coins appear larger to poor children than to those who are well off. Food-related words are clearer and appear brighter on the page to people who are hungry. Everything in our environment influences who we are and how we see ourselves—even our own bodies. Scientists have conducted experiments that show that people who deliberately take on classic poses of dominance and stand, for instance, with their legs apart and hands on their hips, even for just a few minutes, substantially increase their self-confidence. Ask someone to hunch over or curl up, and they will lose that confidence.
    What is the mirror image seen by children who believe themselves to be the other gender? The body tells a story, but the story can change what a body sees. And a body can change a person’s mind.
    On another day, when the twins were still in the fourth grade, Kelly picked up the phone again. It was Kreutz.
    “Wyatt is telling everyone to use female pronouns. Is that right?”
    Kelly was surprised, but not shocked. Wyatt had never wavered in identifying as a girl, or at the very least as a boy-girl. It was so deeply embedded in his sense of himself that it made perfect sense to Kelly that he would want his classmates to treat him as such.
    “If the kids are comfortable, I don’t think it’s a problem,” Kelly said.
    For Wyatt’s classmates it made sense. The only thing still “boyish” about him was his name. If other kids at school who didn’t know him well referred to him as “he,” that was okay by Wyatt, too. Kelly’s ability to accept Wyatt for who he was had helped instill a kind of confidence in him so that anything he said about himself to others seemed, in his mind, perfectly normal and ordinary.
    But Kelly certainly knew how far society, not to mention her husband, still needed to go. Transgender issues were rarely raised in public at the time. Gay marriage was still being argued—and defeated—in courts around the country. On Election Day, November 7, 2006, eight states voted on amendments to ban same-sex marriage. All but one (Arizona) passed those measures. Inroads in transgender rights were few and far between. On January 1, 2006, however, the state of California became the most protective state in America for transgender people when gender identity was included in the state’s nondiscrimination laws with respect to education, employment, housing, foster care, and health insurance. At the time, only three other states (Minnesota, New Mexico, and Rhode Island) had any laws on the books preventing gender identity discrimination in employment and housing. Those states also outlawed discrimination when it came to public accommodation—that is, restrooms. As liberal minded as California was, it wouldn’t add public accommodation to its nondiscrimination laws until 2011.
    Around the same time California passed its first gender identity law, twenty-seven-year-old Eric Buffong began to endure what would turn out to be months of mocking asides, insults, and outright harassment as a line cook at upscale Equus restaurant in Tarrytown, New York. A kitchen co-worker had discovered a 1998 White Plains High School yearbook with a senior-year portrait of Buffong—when he was Erica, not Eric. A trans man, Buffong was born female but for nearly a decade had lived as a man, worked as a man, and presented himself as a man. As soon as he was “outed” by a nine-year-old photograph, Buffong became the object of ridicule. His name was changed to Erica on the work schedule, his work hours were reduced, and four months later he was fired.
    Buffong filed a $3 million lawsuit claiming his dismissal was based not on job performance but gender identity discrimination. The restaurant asked the court to throw out the case. “We are good people and we wouldn’t do anything that is unscrupulous like that,” the executive chef told the New York
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