Tag: Nicole Maines

BiPM includes a poll in his Friday C&J to select who won the week.  I decided I needed to riff off that for my title.

I don’t know that I have ever read the magazine Glamour.  I mean, I may have done so, once upon a time.  When I was a child, I read whatever I could get my hands on, just for the joy of reading.

On November 10, Glamour honored its 2014 Women of the Year award recipients at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

Glamour’s annual Women of the Year Awards is one of our favorite issues of the magazine, and the event marks one of the most inspiring nights of the year; it’s a chance to celebrate trailblazing women from all walks of life-Hollywood stars, political and cultural leaders, groundbreaking scientists and researchers, and more come together to honor the women who helped to shape and change the year. But let’s not forget that phenomenal women are all around us; to celebrate the spirit of Women of the Year, we named 50 standouts-one for every state. Flip through to see the hometown heroes whose work we recognize this year.

Flipping through the inspiring women from each state, one eventually encounters…

Several social welfare groups have joined an amicus brief in the Case of Doe v. RSU 26 (formerly the Orono School District), which has been appealed to the Maine Supreme Court.  The Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Maine Chapter of National Association of Social Workers and the Maine Psychological Association have joined with the Trans Youth Equality Foundation, the Maine Women’s Lobby, and the Downeast and Southern Maine chapters of the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) to file a brief in the case, which involves a transgender girl (now publicly identified as Nicole Maines) who was forced to stop using the girl’s restroom at her Orono elementary school in 2007.

When she was in the fifth grade, Susan Doe (as she is identified in the suit), was forced to use a separate, staff-only restroom after the grandfather of another (male) student complained that she was a boy and shouldn’t be allowed to use the girls’ restroom.

Nicole Maines has identified as a girl from a very young age and dressed, acted, and looked like a girl.  She is now 16.

The thought of me being a boy just kind of makes me cringe.  I couldn’t do it.  So I would always wear the turtleneck shirt as long hair.  I was always into the girl characters of everything.  That’s how I rolled.  I was like, yeah, I’m a girl.  I don’t think I could be a boy.

–Nicole Maines, 2011

Ace Nelson already published some of this story.

Several people have recently tried to make sure that I noticed the Boston Globe article about Nicole Maines and her family, entitled Led by the child who simply knew.  Jonas and Wyatt Maines were born twin boys but, as Jonas is reported to have said early in their childhood:

Dad, you might as well face it.  You have a son and a daughter.

The twins are now 14 and Nicole is being treated by the relatively new Gender Management Service Clinic at Children’s Hospital Boston.  The GeMS Clinic was founded in 2007 by endocrinologist Norman Spack and urologist David Diamond.  It is the first pediatric academic program in the Western Hemisphere to evaluate and treat pubescent transkids.

Not everyone agrees with what GeMS does, of course.

Not everyone agrees that they should, of course, and Spack has heard the arguments: Man should not interfere with what God has wrought. Early adolescents are too young for such huge decisions, much less life-altering treatment.