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Requiem For a Transsexual Sportswriter
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
Casey, who was living in Seattle, had a similar experience. “I’m not sure what I could have done, short of flying down there and just showing up. And that might have been more destructive than constructive. He pauses: “[My parents and my girlfriend and I] talked about that at one point. We thought, 'Do we hang back or not.'”
In the end, Daniels did not go through with the gender-reassignment surgery and opted to resume life as Mike Penner, a change of heart that’s not so uncommon in transgender cases. (Renée Richards, in her books Second Serve and No Way Renée, discusses at length going on and off hormones before eventually going through with the full sex change operation.)
He apparently convinced his editors at the LA Times to scrub Christine’s blog “Woman in Progress” from the Web site. Doing that was certainly unusual—most news organizations don’t erase things from their Web sites unless they’re found to be seriously inaccurate and/or the subject of a lawsuit—but there was no precedent in the Times’ newsroom for a male-to-female transition, much less one that was being chronicled on the Web, a medium in which the rules of journalism are not yet entirely clear to newspaper companies. Ultimately, the paper was more concerned with Penner’s well-being than his trans-narrative. They complied.
In the office, Penner was not a frequent presence over the next several months of 2009, sources there said, but that’s not so unusual for a sportswriter—even one like Penner who’s no longer primarily on the road covering teams. “Most of those guys work from home,” says a second Times source. This made it easier for Penner to avoid any discussion of the situation, but it also seems to have compounded his tendency toward isolation.
“I think one thing that would be a mistake is to presume that [his suicide] was all about gender,” says a third Times colleague. “Certainly, that was a factor, a big one, but there were other underlying issues and I think one of the mistakes he made was thinking that if this transition takes place, he’d be happy.”
If friends weren’t worried enough to stage some sort of intervention, it’s in part because Penner remained astoundingly productive until just days before his death.
“I don’t recall him missing a day of work,” says one of the former Times colleagues.
“I used the column as a barometer,” says Kevin Casey. “I got the sense that he was keeping busy. Of course that probably means nothing. But they were still there. I thought things were moving along.”
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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activeduty
I feel bad for this person. These are some serious identity issues. I wish we could all just be satisfied with who we are and not wish to change ourselves.
SocialSecretion
I feel bad for you. You have some serious hate issues. I wish we could just all accept others for who they are and for who they wish to be.
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myrevenge
very sick person for sure
SocialSecretion
Talking about yourself I presume.
SocialSecretion
And I hope you realize it is probably the hate spewed forth everyday by people like you that led to the depression and eventual suicide of this person. I wonder how things would have turned out differently if they lived in a more supportive and loving society?
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dannycapistrano
The untold story is how the LA Times tried to exploit Mike's situation rather than handle it as carefully as possible. It made me sick when you look back at how the paper was doing victory laps over how much web traffic Mike's column and blog were generating. Mike was a nice guy and a great writer. Some people could have handled something like this under the intense scrutiny of the public spotlight. Obviously, Mike couldn't and a thoughtful, deliberate and considerate employer would have recognized that and, as you say, insisted he keep it as a human resources matter. The paper has never accepted any responsibility, and should feel both guilt and shame over this. Once it let Mike on the public stage against his better judgment it was too late. But to then exploit him for its own selfish goals was unforgivable.
jarussell
I'm not sure what you mean by 'sick' myrevenge.......
If you mean mental-health-wise, then yea, I'd agree with you. Anyone who has no option but to end their life is at a place where they are 'sick' to the point of being so low there's no where else to go.
I certainly hope you didn't mean sick in a negative way. That would be showing ignorance of a kind that only a person of low class and tolerance would show.
Transgendered people don't have the leisure of being 'satisfied' with who they are either, activeduty. Nearly all person who are transgendered relate that it is not a choice, it is a mistake of nature that puts them in a body with a gender that is not wired with the brain.
sebastianAugustus
I have a lot of sympathy for folks in this position...and this is a very sad story....but I don't really get it. Let's face it, these guys don't want to be the sort of women who wear pants, no make-up and keep their hair short -- like about half the women I know. They want big hair and make-up: a sort of costume. A quite familiar urge known to straight as well as some (by no means all) gay men who like to get up in drag.
This weird insistence on a certain kind of rigid gender role presentation really doesn't have anything to do with being "female." I argue that neither do big breasts vs. small ones. Costume genitalia and hormone treatments do not, in fact, "change" your gender.
I'm all for people calling themselves male, female, Shirley, Joan, or whatever -- that's their right. And I do agree this is a profound feeling in the mind (or perhaps soul) of one who is gender-identified with the opposite sex, and not merely a matter of the body (despite the costumes, surgical and otherwise). So let's all support them, even if...as I said, I don't get it or buy into what I think is fiction.
(I've read that the DNA of post-op transexuals still reads as the gender they were born with -- perhaps others could comment on the validity of that).
The point of all this: I find it objectionable that gays should STILL, in the 21st Century, be somehow more identified with this phenom than are straights. Those laughably long political labels like LGBTQ -- etc. etc. DO lump gays together with people with gender issues. But I don't think most gay guys want to be girls any more than do most straight guys.
Doesn't anybody see that this is an absurd association? It could be argued that this associative self-labelling is an ongoing stigmatization of gays, even if oppressed gays are more likely to be sympathetic to a fellow oppressed sexual minority.
Of which the subject of this story is certainly one, and whose loss is indeed tragic.
jennywocky
The transcommunity is far bigger than the slice of the pie you seem to be looking at, and I'm not even sure where you're coming from on some of this. Many of us girls fit perfectly into the female demographic of how we dress and don't want all the big hair and makeup and crap, it's more than that. Still, remember that we've spent a lifetime being forced to live in ways where we were miserable, never could present as ourselves, and so regardless of age, we still tend to approach things at first just as a teenage girl would -- trying lots of styles of femininity and exploring our options until we finally settle on something that fits us. A lot of the transwomen community is far more understated than you seem to realize, nor are we drag queens or feel we have much psychologically similar to them.
I appreciate your support, although I'm not sure how you can be supportive of people who you think are just living "fiction"; it seems like a backhanded compliment. All of us live out fictions, non-trans or trans, if you want to be technical about it; and fiction is only fiction based on what you are assuming to be "reality" in the first place. Women with androgen insensitivity who thus do not externally differentiate into male physique and who are raised as women, later discovered to be XY genetically, are not suddenly deemed to be men. Obviously the definitions are pretty arbitrary. And while chromosomes do not normally change, all chromosomes are are "blueprint" -- and if you build a hotel starting from a blueprint of a school, you still would call your end result a hotel regardless of what the blueprints said. Very recent news -- female ovary cells have genetically been reprogrammed in rats to reproduce testicular cells. Genetics is overrated, and only a few states (the backwards ones, frankly) use genetics as the "bottom" line of gender.
LGBT is a political convenience. Transpeople share a coming out experience and social treatment with gay people, but otherwise our experiences are very different. Still, because of this, we find we are more successful in everyone being treated better if we support each other as minorities within a still somewhat repressive culture.
Hope you got the attention you wanted by playing off Mike's death here, since your comments seem to have little to do with them otherwise except as a springboard into your own political complaints.
Meanwhile, I'll just say "thank you" for the article, it's good to find out more about what had happened, and that it's a real shame that decent human beings -- trans or otherwise -- find themselves locked in a decreasing spiral and needlessly bring their lives to such a pointless closure. It's a loss for everyone.
Ladybeth
You either haven't met very many trans women, or have failed to realize just how many you have. They come in all shapes and styles. Some, despite their best efforts, remain visibly trans. Many however, don't. But one thing is certain, they are women. Though their physical sex may be male, their gender is that of a woman. Gender is a state of the mind.They are not attempting to "change their gender", they are simply expressing the universal need humans have to exist as the the true gender their soul tells them they are. Studies have found that trans womens brains resemble those of other women, and not men. And the reverse is true for trans men, people who are assigned female at birth and transition to being male(there is an equal number of people who do this, but they don't get the ink) It is very difficult for people who do not have this problem to understand it. This comment may not help much. But can you imagine having known your whole life that you are a woman with a male body, terrified of of what people may do if they were to find out, because you have learned early how much humans disbelieve such a thing is possible, and hate the people who say it is. You live your life pretending to be someone you're not. And you feel very alone, because nobody knows YOU. Finally you can no longer stand the isolation. You can either die, or tell the truth. You tell the world who you really are. At first, it feels great. Lots of people give lip service to "understanding". But quickly you realize that people are just humoring you. They just see you as a confused man. They say you can't be a real woman because one week after beginning your transition you still are having trouble with your clothes and presentation, ignoring the fact you've been denied the basic training other women got growing up. Finally it dawns on you that you're still alone. Only now it's worse. At least when you were pretending to be a man people saw fit to involve you in their lives. Now, not so much. Most people still act nice to you, but you notice they don't come around or call much any more. You reach a point where you tried for most of your life to be something you weren't, and when you tried to let everyone know the real you, they didn't believe you. So all that is left is the last option. You decide it would just be best to stop being a bother to people and take your own life. Now this may not be Mike's story, but it's certainly true for some other trans women. I think in just a few short years we will be more wise about such things. And we won't hear about tragedies like this. Ultimately, it's likely that Mike Penner was born just a little too early.
klmnop
"Let's face it, these guys don't want to be the sort of women who wear pants, no make-up and keep their hair short -- like about half the women I know. They want big hair and make-up: a sort of costume."
That's one of the more offensive remarks I've heard or read in a long time. And you're wrong. I've known a number of trans women, and they dress like the other women I know. A person who doesn't "pass" well might knowingly overdo the hair and makeup in an effort to reduce ambiguity - at least that way people know that she would like to be recognized as a woman. Then it's up to you to decide whether you're going to be kind and generous or rude and thoughtless.
Anyway, you can be sure that you've met far more trans women - and, especially, trans men - than you know. Many are completely unremarkable. Yes, gender transition does not change a person's DNA, but sex (male or female) is far more complicated than just DNA, and gender (man or woman) is even more complicated. Sexuality (gay, lesbian, bi, straight) is yet another matter - don't confuse the three just because some combinations are more common than others.
Veronicaxy
Suicide takes any story to a whole other area.
Most runaways in my local area are in teen shelters because they're gay and unaccepted at home (usually kicked out). We've got a long way to go, but we're making progress.
My condolences to everyone that loved Penner.
Terrance72
Whether it's because of coming out or changing one's sex, the emotional trauma in these types of situations on an individual is immense. It a lot of ways it may be even more difficult later in life when families and established lifetime friendships are lost forever, so it's unfortunately not surprising that it sometimes ends up like this. It's also worth noting that the pain associated with this type of trauma is particularly acute at this time of year. One can't help but feel for friends or family who are left with the guilt that they didn't do enough to prevent it, no matter how much they did. The great paradox of suicide is that what on the surface seems like the ultimate expression of lack of self worth is in reality is the ultimate act of selfishness, relieving the departed of their earthly pain only to transfer it to the surviving.
GarboTalks
Thank you for this story. I think that the Los Angeles Times had ulterior motives for showing support. They knew this was a huge story that would sell. And it did. If they are proud of the way they handled it, they are in deep denial. Right after his announcement, Penner experienced the kind of euphoria all journalists do when they have just broken a big story. And this was a whooper. But the adage is true that you're only as good as your last story and reality always sets in. For Penner, the huge story he broke and continued to break was way too personal and potentially hurtful. The scenario played out like a typical big story in a newsroom: Editors followed another adage that if it bleeds it leads, Penner's journalistic instincts (like any good reporter) kicked in and he went for it. But the paper failed to consider that Penner was a human being and one of their own, not just a titillating story, not just a potential Pulitzer.
dooreen
They had an article about a transgender person here, and she said after the article, she was harassed all the time, or more correctly discriminated against when she into stores or wherever.
She thought moving to a bigger city would make it better.
I think people get shocked when they see anyone looking different than what is expected. Just look at the pictures. As a man he looked normal. No head turns. As a woman, if he looks like the picture, he looks like he is in a costume. I know it is not nice to say that, and a person shouldn't say that, but I am sure people do.
I think the roll of being a man or a woman gets confused with the physical issue of being male or female.
I personally don't think something so private should be in the newspaper.
Chaz Bono for example is in a situation where her face still looks very feminine, and she sounds like Sonny to me, now that her voice is deeper.
But whose business is it of anyone's.
Thank you.
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