This URL replicates two articles referenced by the blog post, Does God Know Best?, as one related article has disappeared.

L.A. Weekly - Tragic Love Story
Mike Penner, Christine Daniels: A Tragic Love Story
Steve Friess - August 19, 2010

Note: This story has been changed to reflect facts appearing in a correction at the end.

Christine Daniels lay inert. The ash-blond hair that once framed a face envied by her peers was now an unwashed tangle hiding an inexorable melancholy. Her stomach was in sharp, constant pain and her mind was heavy with guilt. She ate, showered and dressed only when her caretaker demanded she do so, which was why she was in what seemed like 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.”

“How do you feel about that?”

Daniels grew even quieter, LaCoe recalls.

“Don't tell anybody,” Daniels 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, LaCoe says. By this point, in July 2008, the once-gregarious Christine Daniels, a formerly male sports writer 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 and ceased receiving hair-removing electrolysis treatments. Daniels' groundbreaking L.A. Times blog on transitioning to womanhood, “Woman in Progress,” had not only stopped appearing but had mysteriously disappeared from the newspaper's Web site and archives, leaving countless supporters and advocates worldwide without their new transgender hero.

Daniels shut out virtually every other transgender friend except LaCoe, who struck a nonjudgmental tone and persisted in demanding that Daniels let her help. Deep inside, LaCoe struggled to reconcile what it meant that the woman who had once been the role model for her own transition was crumbling. But she did her best not to let her doubts show.

“Don't decide so quickly,” LaCoe said. “Maybe you'll reconsider it when you feel better.”

“I have been feeling this way for a while,” Daniels gasped through tears. “I can't do it anymore.”

“Which part can't you do?” LaCoe asked.

More silence, then: “I had the perfect life with Lisa, and I threw it all away.”

Seventeen months later, Daniels would be found dead from carbon-monoxide poisoning in a 1997 Toyota Camry in the subterranean garage of a dreary apartment building on Sepulveda just north of National. 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 document described how Penner had snaked a hose from the exhaust pipe into the car with the engine running, how a neighbor had pulled him from the car and attempted CPR, how death was declared at Brotman Medical Center and how a suicide note had been found in the apartment.

The death of 52-year-old Penner would become as big a news story as her coming out as transgender in the pages of a major American newspaper, and as disturbing and perplexing as Daniels' decision in the fall of 2008 to return to life as a male.

What drove Penner's decision to take his life? News organizations and bloggers noted sadly that Daniels' gender confusion had had a tragic end, and the L.A. Times itself would write a lengthy story months after her death that also suggested it was Daniels' sense of being torn between two worlds that contributed to her decision to commit suicide.

But it wasn't like that.

The parts of the Penner saga that the public knows — from Christine Daniels' dramatic public coming out to Mike Penner's desperately sad suicide — spanned 31 months. But the story actually began much earlier.

In many ways, Penner's path was standard-issue for those born male who have an inexplicable yet ultimately undeniable desire to be female. He would sneak into his mother's closet in their Anaheim home to try on shoes and dabble with her makeup, then scrub it off shamefully 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 prehistoric era even for gays and lesbians, let alone those compelled to experiment with the trappings of the opposite gender. 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 parts ways with most of his counterparts because of the man he became. By all accounts, Penner was infatuated by sports out of genuine enthusiasm, not as some means of defying this yearning or bolstering his masculinity. He grew to a slim, athletic 6 feet 3 and was known as an avid soccer player who channeled this fascination and his innate writing ability into a career as a sports journalist.

He arrived at the L.A. Times in 1983, around the same time as sportswriter Rick Reilly, a future columnist for Sports Illustrated and ESPN magazine. Penner went on to cover several Olympics and World Cups, as well as pro baseball and football.

While covering the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York in 1984, Penner met fellow sportswriter Lisa Dillman, then with the Detroit News. He helped her get her job at the L.A. Times and they wed in 1986.

Dillman has never spoken on the record about her husband's transition, and Penner never answered the media's questions about their relationship. Daniels also never wrote of it in her blog on transgenderism, according to those who read it when it was available online.

The L.A. Times, in its March story about Penner, indicated that it was unclear when Dillman learned about her husband's interest in cross-dressing. This much is known: In May 2005, when Penner traveled to Port Angeles, Washington, to a transgender retreat known as Esprit, he told new friends that Lisa was aware of where he was.

Reilly, in an ESPN column in January eulogizing his friend, wrote that Daniels told him she used to keep a dress, wig and pearls in a toolbox behind the couple's bed board.

Claire Winter, a transgender friend and mentor 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.”

Other friends of Daniels' have similar understandings. “Lisa was not kept in the dark about this,” says Susan Horn, who had met Daniels at an L.A. clothing store for transgender women. “Christine would talk about how Lisa insisted Christine park her car in the alley and go out the back gate and into the car if she dressed at home before going out.”

The first known sighting of Christine Daniels by the transgender group that became her clique was in 2004 at Countessa's Closet, a small shop of roughly 1,000 square feet nestled in a dumpy Studio City strip mall that is routinely cited by male-to-female transgender Angelenos as their first major step in experimenting with a public transition.

The proprietor, Countessa (she goes by one name), is a woman who has developed a niche providing a refuge where those exploring their gender identity may try on clothes, take makeup-application lessons from the owner and meet one another.

Countessa recalls a shy, gawky blond man with bright blue eyes, browsing in slacks and a work shirt one afternoon.

“This is like a real ladies' shop,” Penner said to Countessa.

“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, the journalist who dwelled in the macho universe of a major metro sports department and pro-sports locker rooms began a process of explicitly moving toward the identity he always felt buried within. Like many transgender people who later became friends, Penner would slip over to the shop after work or on weekends and shuck “male mode” garb for wigs, dresses, jewelry and shoes. Within those confines, Daniels became legendary for taking so much time in the bathroom to fix herself up — so much so that a friend made a framed sign and hung it on the door, mocking her by warning others that if the potty was unavailable for long periods, Daniels was the culprit.

“Countessa's retreat has been called a sanctuary,” Daniels wrote in a November 2005 card that the proprietor framed for display. “You need to know why. Once inside, you have the feeling that nothing bad can happen to you. … Christina has never felt better or looked better.” (Among certain friends, Daniels called herself Christina.)

Such stores, which exist in most major cities, not only spare a man the embarrassment of trying on women's clothes in mainstream stores but also are a source of garments in the larger sizes that transgender women usually require.

This is where Daniels met Horn, and “Diana,” who asked the Weekly not to use her real name because she's not openly transgender at work. The duo later took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, which became Daniels' spiritual home. Daniels also learned at Countessa's about a support group for transitioning people at the L.A. Gender Center, which is where she met LaCoe.

In August 2005, Horn and Daniels shared a milestone moment for any transgender person: the first time Daniels went out in public in her transgender persona. They met at Countessa's to get dressed and then headed 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, an L.A. paralegal who lost her family and her career as a lawyer when she transitioned.

“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.” After dinner, Daniels used a women's public restroom for the first time — at a movie theater where they saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

The friendship with Horn was rocky, though. For a long time, Daniels did not let on to her friends that she was a noted sports columnist. Horn figured it out in June 2006 when she read a piece by Penner about the World Cup in Germany in which he had noted that someone's “pores were as big as a garage.” That seemed an odd observation for a typical male sportswriter to make, Horn said, so she pieced together a few other clues and perkily confronted Daniels.

“Next time I saw her, I said, 'I know who you are!' and she was terrified,” Horn said. “I thought she'd get a good giggle out of it. She was angry at me for weeks.”

Still, Daniels accompanied Horn to her first ear piercing.

Daniels also began helping others with their transitions. She counseled Diana's upset wife when she learned of her husband's transgenderism. After Horn and Diana took Daniels to Metropolitan Community Church, Daniels began floating the idea of forming a group that would call itself the Social Butterflies, transgender women who have regular outings at trans-friendly restaurants.

And that was all before she became famous.

By late 2006, Mike Penner could no longer keep Christine Daniels out of Dillman's range. The reason was hormones.

After a couple of years of socializing at Countessa's, praying at Metropolitan Community Church, undergoing individual and group therapy and attending conferences around the country, Daniels was emerging fast and furiously. Presenting as Mike, in fact, had become tormenting. When the time came for Daniels to revert to male mode toward the end of outings or visits at Countessa's, Diana recalls, a devastating mood swing would occur. “He'd be lying on the floor crying,” she says.

Mike was reserved, even shy. As Christine, he transformed into an extroverted, emotional person. LaCoe recalls that at church, Daniels would sob on cue when the Rev. Neil Thomas would declare, “God loves you the way you are, he accepts you the way you are, your status has nothing to do with your salvations.”

Reilly, in his eulogy column, described the jarring difference thus: “Christine was the opposite: gregarious, 100 mph talker, always looking to cover an event, to be seen, the Funmeter pegged, the curls bouncing. She was flirty, always lightly grabbing your arm when she talked, covering her mouth when she laughed, which seemed like all the time.”

Penner moved out of the suburban Orange County home he shared with Dillman around New Year's 2007. The couple knew hormone therapy would prompt physical changes Dillman could not ignore, so Penner moved into a 700-square-foot apartment at the end of a circuitous and dank hallway in L.A.'s fortress-like, nondescript Westwood Villa Apartments.

LaCoe lunched with Daniels at a Japanese restaurant just before New Year's and heard about the couple's final Christmas together, in which “they exchanged practical presents that would be useful for life alone,” LaCoe says, adding that Daniels seemed convinced that Dillman eventually would come around and embrace her.

In the months that followed, Daniels became consumed by her transition, speaking endlessly about her desire to have sex-reassignment surgery.

The handful of American surgeons who perform sex-change operations follow a Standards of Care model requiring male-to-female patients to undergo a rigorous regimen of hormones and electrolysis to remove hair from not only the face but also the genital area. Surgery must be approved by at least two psychiatrists who can vouch for mental stability and, most importantly, the patient must live publicly as the target gender for at least a year.

Daniels' friends found her eagerness at once heartening and worrisome.
In late February 2007, Penner sat down with his boss, Los Angeles Times Sports Editor Randy Harvey, who noticed that the writer's hair and nails were longer. Penner broke the news of his transition.

By all accounts, Harvey was exceedingly gracious, dissuading Penner when he suggested a move to the entertainment section of the paper. Harvey also told Penner something that Daniels' transgender friends had been arguing: A male sports columnist at one of the nation's biggest newspapers cannot transition on the job and change bylines without making news. Harvey persuaded Penner to write about the transition.

“Other people have second-guessed me, and certainly I have second-guessed if that was the right thing to do, to encourage Mike to write that column,” Harvey says. “Would things ultimately have turned out differently? I don't know. I thought it was the right thing at the time.”

So write it, Daniels did. The piece that appeared in the L.A. Times on April 26, 2007, cleverly headlined “Old Mike, New Christine,” was a landmark. It was a breezy declaration that after 23 years writing as Mike Penner, he would take a break and return to live — and write — as Christine Daniels.

In an eloquent 826-word column, Penner summed up the typical journey of those who accept what they always sensed, that they were born into a body of the wrong sex, and that with this acceptance comes a duty to change: “I am a transsexual sportswriter. 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; a team of transgender friends screened Daniels' e-mails and tabulated that more than 1,000 came in within the first 48 hours. Just seven were negative, says Winter, Daniels' friend in Seattle. Overnight, Daniels became one of the most famous transgender people in a culture that has precious few transgender celebrities.

Supporters tried to prepare her for her newfound celebrity.

In advance of April 26, Daniels found herself on the phone and exchanging e-mails nonstop with several prominent transgender advocates trying to coach her. The fear was that Daniels could find herself becoming another Susan Stanton — the Largo, Florida, city manager fired that March after transitioning on the job.

Stanton was appearing on Larry King Live and other shows, seemingly unprepared for and discomfited by certain invasive questions. Winter says the transgender community worried that Daniels could be similarly vulnerable.

“The people who are just starting really don't know what's ahead, don't know what's coming at them,” Winter says. “They're just trying to analyze how they're feeling. To do that in a fishbowl is unimaginable.”

Stanton says she chatted with Daniels, too, although she says she wasn't sure how to advise the sportswriter because their circumstances were so different. Stanton had lost her job but retained the support of her wife and son; Daniels was embraced by the Times in a way activists viewed as a model to be venerated but was no longer living with Dillman.

“Christine told me she felt so bad for me compared to what she had on her side,” recalls Stanton, now city manager in Lake Worth, Florida, and subject of the HBO documentary Her Name Was Steven. “And I remember thinking, 'You know, I'm envious, but I think over time my relationship with my family is going to be more sustaining.'”

Daniels heard from so many voices in those weeks that four days before her piece appeared, she lashed out. In an e-mail to Winter, she griped that she felt “overwhelmed by everything and everyone. I feel as if I am being used as a pawn by the trans community (and maybe the Times as well). I have been close to tears many times. … I am flat-out exhausted.”

And this was still only the beginning.

The initial surge of public and professional support was thrilling for Daniels. She started writing the “Woman in Progress” blog and found herself in high demand giving speeches to transgender and GLBT groups. She gave interviews and was being venerated by friends, supporters and advocates.

“I think that all of a sudden, the transgender community — me included — latched on to her for strength,” LaCoe says. “Once she was out, boy, was she out. I think it was a pretty wild ride for her, and I think she probably enjoyed some of it, yes.”

At the Times, too, there was a noticeable shift. The night before Penner's column appeared, Harvey and another editor phoned 45 L.A. Times staff members to tell them, so they would not be caught off-guard.
Harvey said not one person expressed discomfort.

Daniels seemed to revel in that acceptance. Says Harvey: “Mike seldom came to the office, and when he did, he kept to himself. He had friends, but he was shy and he didn't seek out conversation.

“As Christine, she would come to the office and openly engage people in conversation,” Harvey says. “It was the same underlying sweetness about Christine that was also evident with Mike, but there was a difference.”

Dillman, however, was noticeably scarce in the newsroom, he says. “She was not comfortable being there when Christine was there.”

Daniels' perhaps overly optimistic outlook was summed up in a June 2007 interview with Queercents.com, a finance Web site. She was asked, “Money can buy hormones and a closet full of fabulous shoes, but does it buy happiness?”

Her e-mailed response contained a formula: “Hormones + legal name change + setting the stage for a new life = happiness, no doubt about that.”

Daniels' simplistic expectations could sound familiar to anyone who has gone through a divorce. In the first several months, many people often feel a wave of euphoria from the newfound freedom, the realization of fantasy and the ability to be positive and eagerly anticipate the future. Inevitably, however, the euphoria gives way to reality — and sometimes that reality includes sadness over the loss of a soul mate.

But in the spring of 2007, Daniels was still riding the wave. A fellow sportswriter recruited Daniels to co-coach the soccer team of his young daughter, LaCoe says. Friends invited Daniels to attend their wedding, an event she blogged about. And Reilly, then still at Sports Illustrated, wrote a glowing piece in July that seemed to set the tone in the sports-journalism world about what an enlightening thrill it was to meet Daniels.

On July 19, 2007, after weeks of placing the legally required notices in local newspapers announcing the intent to change names, Michael Daniel Penner became Christine Michelle Daniels, as decreed by the Superior Court of California. The origin of most of that name is obvious: Michael begat Michelle, Daniel begat Daniels. Christine was an homage to Christine Jorgensen, the World War II veteran famous for having had what is believed to be the first male-to-female sex-reassignment surgery.

July 19 was significant for another reason. It was the day Daniels' divorce attorney filed her first response to Dillman's divorce filing. Dillman had submitted the papers on May 23, Daniels' first day at the Times in her female persona.

“The fact that Lisa responded to Christine's transition announcement as quickly as she did by filing for divorce — all of which was understandable — was a huge blow,” Winter says. It was only the tip of the iceberg.

Behind the scenes, Daniels' transition was marred by a series of blowout arguments with Dillman and Dillman's parents, Daniels' friends tell the Weekly.

“It was particularly tragic because Christine had been very close to Lisa's family,” Winter says. “The family felt like Mike did something to their daughter. How could he do this to her? There were definitely confrontations, a lot of them.”

Daniels went to great lengths to shield Dillman from scrutiny. But Dillman avoided Daniels. LaCoe said Dillman told Daniels, “I don't even want to see you around the office unless I absolutely have to, and then I want to be as far away as possible. I don't want to be associated with it. I don't ever want to see you that way.”

Daniels was crushed by Dillman's distance.

The same week as the divorce filing, Daniels suffered another blow. She covered a press conference for the L.A. arrival of British soccer superstar David Beckham. Also at the event was Paul Oberjuerge, a writer for the San Bernardino County Sun — and someone who didn't get Reilly's virtual memo to leave Daniels alone.

Oberjuerge took the opportunity to assess Daniels' transition. “She looks like a guy in a dress, pretty much,” he wrote on the paper's Web site. “Except anyone paying any attention isn't going to be fooled — as some people are by veteran transvestites. Maybe this is cruel, but there were women in that room who were born women in body, as well as soul. And the difference between them and Christine was, in my mind, fairly stark. It seemed almost as we're all going along with someone's dress-up role-playing. …”

The words greatly upset Daniels. Even an online outpouring of outrage on her behalf, which prompted The Sun to remove the post, didn't seem to make it better, because Oberjuerge had cut to the heart of one of the biggest issues for male-to-female transsexuals: whether they “pass.”

“Christine probably had a fragile side that was in some ways quite feminine and in some ways quite attractive,” LaCoe says. “She had a winsome side; she got her feelings hurt easily.” (Oberjuerge, no longer with The Sun, did not respond to the Weekly's requests for comment.)

That setback notwithstanding, life remained largely upbeat for Daniels in the summer and fall of 2007. That September, she and Winter met well-known sex-change surgeon Dr. Marcie Bowers at a transgender conference in Atlanta known as Southern Comfort and, shortly thereafter, the friends had appointments to have sex-change surgeries on the same day in July 2008, at Bowers' Colorado clinic.

“That was something we were really excited about,” Winter says. “Christine was so enthused by the female sex marker on her driver's license. It's a symbol of cultural acceptance.”

Bowers recalls her first meeting with Daniels, about whom she had heard a great deal. She sums up her impressions: “For as good as she looked, she seemed a little bit shy and insecure. But she was a lovely woman and seemed to have herself together.”

In truth, the euphoria wave was cresting.

The first outward indication was a big one. Friends say it was a catalyst in her downfall. Others say it was merely a manifestation of Daniels' rising inner turmoil. The occasion was a disastrous photo shoot intended for Vanity Fair.

Shortly after Daniels' 50th birthday, in October, she went to the L.A. studio of photographer Robert Maxwell. Accounts of what occurred there vary so starkly that they are hard to reconcile.

Maxwell was unreachable by the Weekly but told the L.A. Times in March that he intended to shoot Daniels in a “conservative, classy-type look.” He claimed that she was unstable and weepy, bawling that she was ugly.

“I was trying to say all the right things,” Maxwell told the Times. “How do you tell someone who looks like a man, 'You're a beautiful woman'? I don't know.” Vanity Fair reporter Evan Wright backed up Maxwell, telling the Times he feared Daniels was suicidal and pulled the plug on the piece because Wright, too, was unsure how to cover Daniels without disparaging her “fantasy conception … [of] who she is.”

This account infuriates Daniels' transgender confidantes. The sportswriter had told more than a half-dozen friends a very different version: that Maxwell's aim was to sex her up and that he pushed her to pose in provocative ways.

She had told her friends that, far from Wright calling off the piece, Daniels had to fight him to stop the project from moving forward. Winter and others, in fact, say they helped Daniels draft a letter demanding that Vanity Fair kill the piece.

Daniels described the event this way in an e-mail to Winter and other friends that week: “They promised me, and I quote, 'This will be done YOUR way, you will be happy and look beautiful.' 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, as I expressed numerous times. I was in tears by the end of it and a wreck for three days afterward. I felt betrayed, totally abused, and very, very vulnerable and exposed and alone in the world.”

Then things began to snowball.

The Vanity Fair fiasco exposed a growing rift between Daniels and some in the transgender community over how she was portraying transsexuality in her blog. They felt she was focusing too much on appearances, setting herself up for exactly the sort of treatment she said she received from Maxwell.

Daniels had a falling-out via e-mail with Stanton, the fired city manager in Florida. “She was writing a blog about how great it is to dress and color her hair and wear makeup and it was kind of very tranny,” Stanton says. “I was really nervous about this. A lot of people are saying, 'Oh, you look so gorgeous.' Then other people will say, 'My goodness, look at this pervert on the TV. That's nothing but a man in drag.'

“It's not about that,” Stanton tells the Weekly. “It's about being true to who we are.”

Daniels didn't take kindly to the critique, e-mailing back to end the friendship. “I think what I'm doing is correct. If you've got a problem with it, it's your problem. … I'm a real woman who loves makeup and clothes, shoes. A woman, not a trans-anything who needs to quote-unquote represent some undefined community. For the first time in my life, I'm being true to myself, and my true self loves makeup, clothes, shoes.”

As 2007 came to a close, Daniels began dealing similarly with many in the transgender activist community, friends say. She said she felt used by the trans community.

She also was increasingly despondent that the situation with Dillman was not improving.

Winter explains: “So many people were placing her in heroine status, she was starting to feel pressure to live up to her instant reputation. She would say, 'I'm here for a purpose, I should be doing better than I am. Why am I so depressed or lonely?'

“She was really riding a huge crest, but eventually the party settles down and people get back to work, and life gets back to some semblance of normalcy,” Winter says. “What you're left with once the confetti settles is realizing you've lost a lot of friends and you're lonely.”

Daniels began to withdraw.

She canceled a speech in January 2008 to a Denver transgender conference called Gold Rush and didn't appear in March when she was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in Los Angeles.

Dr. Bowers knew something was gravely wrong in January when her office contacted Daniels about moving the July 2008 surgery date by a week because of a scheduling conflict. Daniels became disproportionately upset and refused to take further calls from the clinic.

“We were surprised by the degree of disappointment — it was just a week,” Dr. Bowers says. “We tried to scramble a few ways to say, 'Look, we can do this, we can do this.' I don't usually call patients at home to apologize, but I did in this case. I sensed something was off.”

More alarming to LaCoe, at Easter, Daniels dropped out at the last minute from plans to see a passion play at her church, and her attendance at church fell sharply.

Daniels told people she was too busy caring for her mother, who was in the throes of rapidly accelerating dementia and died that spring. (Penner's father died 12 years ago.)

At the L.A. Times, Harvey sensed a shift. He called Daniels to joke with her about something and she became offended. “I thought, 'Okay, there's a change here,' ” he says. “That's when I began to think she doesn't seem as happy as she was.”

In April 2008, Daniels took medical leave from the Times, complaining of severe abdominal pain and telling co-workers her mother's decline and death were taking a tremendous psychological toll.

Daniels would never return to the paper. Her final byline appeared on April 4, 2008, less than a year after her first.

By May, LaCoe had realized the extent of Daniels' physical and emotional problems. It wasn't easy to find out. Daniels cut off friends such as Winter largely by not returning calls and e-mails. LaCoe and Diana were more relentless about stopping by her apartment, a turn of good fortune for Daniels, as LaCoe would become her primary caretaker.

“I became aware that Christine was really, really ill in May, when she was having a lot of stomach problems,” LaCoe says. “They were taking a toll on her digestive tract. She was constipated, had ulcers that caused her a lot of pain digesting food. She would say, 'I think I'm dying.'”

Daniels was hospitalized in June 2008. Doctors determined that the stress of so many traumas — the devastating Vanity Fair shoot, the paranoia over being used by other transgender people for their causes, an acute loneliness that followed the post-coming-out euphoria, the death of her mother, and Dillman's continuing distance — was manifesting as abdominal pain.

In the hospital, Daniels was diagnosed as severely depressed. Doctors prescribed a regimen of powerful psychotropic drugs that included the antipsychotic Zyprexa and the antidepressant Elavil. LaCoe remembers those drugs because she monitored Daniels to ensure she took them.

Daniels moved in with LaCoe for the summer, and it was in LaCoe's living room that the last phase began in the dismantling of Christine Daniels. The reporter tore up several spiral-bound journals that she had kept while in transgender therapy, gave away her clothes and jewelry to friends and stopped doing anything to feminize herself.

And then the ultimate step: Daniels ordered LaCoe and others to start calling her Mike again.

LaCoe says it felt like the reverse of what the wife of a male-to-female transsexual sees during the transition. Christine morphed back into Mike by shucking the hormones, allowing patchy facial hair to return and her breasts to deflate.

“It broke my heart, but I couldn't judge her,” LaCoe says. “That would have been hypocritical.”

De-transitioning is so unusual that there are no solid data about it. Psychiatrists who treat transgender people say it happens in less than 5 percent of cases.

Transgender activists say “going back” is inaccurate. People who choose to abandon transition are simply giving in to overwhelming stress and grief over what they lost from their previous life.

Certainly Penner's decision 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, but mental-health professionals who work with transgender people say patients who have stopped taking the drugs report feelings of distress.

“When they start taking hormones, they begin to express changes in their psyche — they're more able to focus, more able to feel empathy, concern for others,” says Antioco Carrillo, a counselor with many transgender clients at the nonprofit Community Counseling Center in Las Vegas. “Once they go through the process, when they have stopped it, they go back to being depressed because it contradicts what they experienced. I don't know if it's the medication, but it is about the worldview.”

Bowers believes Penner put one foot in the grave by abandoning the transition. “If we had done surgery, it probably would have saved her life. Now she died as an unhappy soul who never got a chance to align her body and soul, and that's the greatest tragedy about her.”

Although many issues were at play at this point, one stood out: Penner repeatedly told friends his return to a male lifestyle was a last-ditch effort to reunite with his wife in some way.

“I questioned whether or not there was any hope there, and I told Mike that, and Mike seemed intellectually to understand that,” LaCoe says. “It's like, 'Oh, yeah, nothing's promised.' But there was that hope that if Christine was gone and never coming back, then just maybe.

“There was at least a time when Mike would say, 'I'd settle for being her close friend. I'll settle for anything.'” Penner's byline returned to the L.A. Times in October 2008 without any public notification, and his divorce from Dillman became final on October 24. Penner and Dillman began to lunch together occasionally after that, but it was always awkward, LaCoe says.

Friends say Mike Penner 2.0 was sullen, visibly depressed and quiet, the opposite of Christine Daniels. And occasionally, there were mixed signals, like the time Diana suggested they go to a play in Malibu and Penner asked if maybe he ought to go as Christine. (He did not.)

At one point that fall, LaCoe accidentally called him “Christine,” then quickly apologized. “No, that's okay,” Penner told her. “One of the best years of my life was spent being Christine. But I'm never going back.”

Late in 2008, Penner went back to Metropolitan Community Church. It was the last time the Rev. Thomas saw him. The two stole away for a brief, private chat after the service, and Penner surprised the pastor.

“He looked at me and he said, 'Don't you ever believe that I've given up being Christine,'” Thomas recalls. “I knew exactly what he meant. Everything about his body, everything about his fabric, everything that made him human was still screaming, that had been screaming for 40 years, that got to the point of Mike transitioning to Christine.

“But he hoped returning to Mike could possibly lead to reconciliation with Lisa. He loved Lisa, there was no doubt about it.”

That it took Penner as long as it did — until November 27, 2009 — to kill himself is, in retrospect, surprising. LaCoe and Diana spent the summer of 2009 contending with what were clearly attempts at drug overdoses and Penner's constant talk of ending it all. Nobody knows how consistently Penner was taking his antidepressant medication, but the wild mood swings and suicidal chatter increased.

Penner was hospitalized twice in 2009, once in a psychiatric hospital after his brother, L.A. Times copy editor John Penner, learned he had made suicidal comments. LaCoe met and bonded with John Penner at that point. He told LaCoe he had never seen his brother happier than in the heyday of his life as Christine.

Two days before his death, Penner called LaCoe and asked if she could help him obtain a gun. LaCoe asked why and Penner said, “I'm at my rope's end here.”

LaCoe refused to discuss the matter further and reminded Penner she had already repeatedly refused to assist in Penner's self-destructive plans. She and Diana insisted on taking Penner out for dinner that night, and when they arrived the mood seemed deceptively lighter.

“You've already given me your answer — we won't discuss that anymore,” Penner told LaCoe. “I will obey your rules. Let's not discuss it. I'm hungry.”

On Thanksgiving, Penner sent what would seem like a valedictory e-mail to LaCoe and Diana: “I want to thank you for your friendship. It's meant the world to me.”

The next night, he put on a blue long-sleeved shirt, black jeans and black-and-white Adidas sneakers, got in his Camry in the garage beneath his apartment and breathed carbon monoxide until he died.

It was a year to the day after his divorce had been finalized.

“Christine died of a broken heart,” Diana says. “She wasn't confused about whether she was meant to be a woman. Any other reading of the situation is disrespectful to her memory.”

Mike Penner and Christine Daniels had separate funerals. Penner was laid to rest in Orange County in an event closed to media but populated by dozens of journalist colleagues. A group of Daniels' transgender friends tried to attend but were turned away at the door for not being on the guest list, a concept the Rev. Thomas says hearkened back to the darkest days of the 1980s, when gay friends and even lovers of someone who had died of AIDS were similarly refused.

“That is why we decided to do a memorial service here at MCC for the folks who needed closure,” Thomas says of the second, far more public remembrance of Daniels, covered extensively by the local gay media.

Amy LaCoe was the sole transgender friend of Mike Penner's who was invited to the Orange County funeral. The eulogies acknowledged the existence of Christine, and speakers noted that both Mike and Christine were consistently kind, loving people.

As LaCoe was leaving, Penner's brother John stopped her to hug her; he said he doubted Penner would have lived as long as he did were it not for her care.

And then, something startling occurred. As she walked by Dillman, who had never met any of Penner's transgender friends, the ex-wife halted another conversation to greet LaCoe.

“I know what you did for Mike and I just want to thank you,” Dillman said. She gripped LaCoe's hand with what LaCoe describes as a “very warm, two-handed handshake.”

“You're really welcome,” LaCoe replied. “I'm sorry I couldn't do more.”

The two women cried together for a moment, then LaCoe walked on.



Note: A story published Aug. 20 about the life and death of former Times sportswriter Mike Penner incorrectly spelled Amy LaCoe's last name as LeCoe. In addition, the story should have said that Penner's father died 12 years ago, not when Penner was 12 years old; that Penner met his future wife, Lisa Dillman, when she worked at the Detroit News, not at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune; and that the couple wed in 1986, not 1987.

From GQ: Culture

New Mike, Old Christine
Mike Penner was a shy, talented sportswriter who loved soccer, punk rock, and his wife. Then he became... Christine Daniels, an outgoing, talented sportswriter who loved slingback pumps, Legally Blonde, and her ex-wife.
By Nancy Hass
May 19, 2010


Christine had the eyes all the girls wanted, translucent turquoise marbles fringed by strawberry blond lashes. And the smile. Wide and natural, but somehow coy and elusive, too.

You could work for years and not get that right. Her peach-colored blouse draped just so on her six-foot-one frame, the silky skirt skimming her calves. She had let her sun-streaked blond hair grow to chin length, and she helped it along by pinning on a little hairpiece that grazed her broad shoulders.

Amy LaCoe was an earthier, more androgynous type. At 59, a decade older than Christine, she didn't even bother to dye her hair as she grew it out, just wore it straight and silver, and stuck to jeans and pastel cotton V-necks, with a modest pink cameo on a chain around her neck. Like the rest of the transition group at the Los Angeles Gender Center, she marveled at Christine's feline grace in the summer of 2006, how everyone seemed to turn toward her, unconsciously, like a source of heat on a cold day.

Not that that would make it any easier for Christine when she went full-time, as she was planning to do in the coming year. Probably the opposite. The others had more marginal careers or at least less glamorous ones. Some were self-employed. Others, like Amy, a career counselor at a community college, could hide in academia, which was full of sympathetic hippie types. Christine's transformation from Mike Penner, a name that had appeared in the sports pages of the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as an NFL writer, an Angels beat reporter, a tennis columnist, was likely to be cataclysmic. Others could change their identity and never again speak their male names aloud, but a byline haunted you forever.

Anyway, Christine, who had chosen her new name to honor Christine Jorgensen, the first well-known transsexual, and two iconic Chrissies, Evert and Hynde, had no intention of living in anonymity as a diner waitress in Fresno or a 7-Eleven clerk along the Las Vegas strip. Being a sportswriter at the Times was everything she had wanted since she was a boy back in Anaheim, interning at the local daily while still at Cal State Fullerton.

But a transgender sportswriter? As a reporter, she knew it would be a big story. She remembered Renée Richards's transition in 1975, how the caustic tennis player who went to court to compete as a woman had been a media obsession for decades.

And then there was Lisa to worry about. Most of the ten or so in the group had wives, but none had a marriage as symbiotic as Mike Penner and Lisa Dillman's. They'd been together for two decades, ever since they fell in love covering the U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows, New York. They even worked side by side—he'd long ago helped her move to the Times, where she covered tennis and had become the lead Olympics reporter. And because they'd never had children, they seemed even closer. Lisa played midfielder for the Scribes, a rec-league soccer team that Mike had co-founded and coached. On weekends their apartment in Long Beach shook with the sounds of Mike's music—he followed punk and indie rock, everything from the Clash to Nirvana to the Rapture, as closely as he did his beloved Arsenal of the English Premier League, and regularly sent his pals mix CDs labeled with his own personal radio call letters, KPEN. When other couples had dinner with Mike and Lisa, listened to them retell the story of how they fell in love, the wives would fuss to their husbands: Look at them. So nice, so loving. Why can't we be like that?

Lisa had known for years that her husband sometimes dressed as a woman, and she'd accepted it reluctantly as long as it was out of sight. But going full-time was a completely different thing, and Christine refused to dwell on how Lisa would react. Living without her was unthinkable, Christine told Amy on that first afternoon they went for something to eat after group. Lisa had been the best part of him for twenty years. Since they were kids. Since that day when he first met her, an open-faced midwestern girl barely out of her teens with Minneapolis Star Tribune press credentials dangling around her neck.

Hadn't other wives made their peace and stayed on, Christine reasoned as the waitress brought them their blueberry pie. What about Jennifer Finney Boylan, the Colby College English professor and novelist who had written that memoir, She's Not There, detailing how her wife stuck by her? It would be hard, sure, but not impossible: Lisa would come around. Surely she would realize that it wasn't about her; it was something Christine had to do to survive. She was the same person inside. She still loved soccer and the Raconteurs. She still needed Lisa as much as Mike had, maybe more.

Amy was quiet as the waitress refilled their coffees. In her experience, that just wasn't how it worked. The year before, when Amy told her wife of thirty-nine years that she was a woman and planned to live as one, she had screamed obscenities and thrown Amy's estrogen tablets out the garage door. Called her a queer, a freak. Not that Amy blamed her for being upset. The poor woman hadn't signed on for this. Sure, she had known that Amy dressed on the sly for decades, that she kept plastic tubs of girl's things in the back of the station wagon. But hormones—that was too much. She had every right to expect to get old with the man she married, rely on retirement benefits from his job, play together with the grandkids, die with him. Amy couldn't imagine how Christine thought it would all work out. She would be transgendering in the same workplace as her wife, something no one in the group had ever heard of. Lisa might not be the type to heave things, but that didn't mean she was going to adjust to it and carry on with a woman for a husband.

Still, it was hard not to get swept away by Christine's enthusiasm, her optimism. She clasped her hands to her chest at the sight of slingbacks that fit. She cooed at the flared poodle skirt on a rack at Countessa's Closet, a store in Studio City that catered to cross-dressers and transsexuals and let them keep lockers there. She never got tired of watching Legally Blonde. "I just feel so good," she would say, squeezing the arm of Amy's cardigan.

"It was contagious," Amy recalled recently. "She could make you forget all the things you came in worried about."

Maybe Christine would be the one in a million who could pull it off, Amy recalled thinking back then, watching Christine take out a compact—who used those anymore?—to put on fresh lipstick. Maybe she could do this and not lose everything. Wouldn't that be amazing?

···

"Old Mike, new Christine." That's the headline the editors chose for her coming-out column, which ran on April 26, 2007. Christine spent much of the previous night on the phone with Susan Horn, a pal she had met through Countessa's Closet. Horn, 49, a former lawyer who had been living full-time as a woman since January 2006, stayed on the line with her as Christine paced the tiny studio on Sepulveda Boulevard in West L.A., where she'd moved a few months earlier, each of them checking the Internet compulsively to see if the news had leaked out. "She was terrified," recalled Horn. "She was sure the response would be devastating, brutal." The column began:

...

I am a transsexual sportswriter. 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. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them.

That's OK. I understand that I am not the only one in transition as I move from Mike to Christine. Everyone who knows me and my work will be transitioning as well. That will take time. And that's all right. To borrow a piece of well-worn sports parlance, we will take it one day at a time.

The e-mails started streaming in at 2 A.M. By 6 P.M., there were more than 500, all but a handful supportive. Christine spent most of the day in tears, elated, says Horn. "She couldn't believe it; she just kept reading through them, weeping."

At first she hadn't wanted to write about it at all. It had been hard enough to tell her boss, sports editor Randy Harvey, a guy she had known since the 1980s, when they had both come to the paper as young pups: Randy a hotshot from the New York Daily News, Mike from the Anaheim Bulletin, the shitty little hometown daily where he had been made sports editor at 23. But Harvey had taken the news with remarkable equanimity. Christine later marveled to friends that he leaned back in his chair and said simply, "Okay, wow, how are we going to deal with this?"

Announcing the change to the entire world, though—that seemed overwhelming. Mike had never liked a lot of attention. Within the paper, he was widely acknowledged as one of the section's most stylish writers, a favorite of Harvey's but notoriously circumspect. Whatever emotion he had he seemed to put in his columns.

"Everyone thought of him as incredibly talented and really kind but standoffish," said Larry Stewart, a Times sportswriter for more than twenty-five years until he was laid off in 2008. "Sometimes halfway through a sentence you'd lose him. His eyes would go to the ground, and you'd wonder what had happened."

Christine's original plan was to retire the Mike Penner byline quietly and start writing as Christine Daniels a few weeks later. She had mapped out the timing during months of phone calls with Christina Kahrl, her guru in such matters. Kahrl, now 42, co-founded Baseball Prospectus, the stats bible, in 1996 and transitioned seven years later. She had done it gradually, without fanfare, and hadn't done interviews. The plan had worked well; Kahrl's transition had been as seamless as these things could be. The baseball world was just as eager for her pronouncements as it always had been. Her divorce was amicable; both her best man and the maid of honor remained her close pals.

"I told Christine that there's attention from every corner of your real life when you do this, that that's hard enough to deal with," Kahrl, a tall redhead with a square jaw, subtle jewelry, and finely arched eyebrows, recalled over tropical cocktails and tapas in a restaurant near her home in Chicago in January. "I thought that writing a column, doing this all so publicly, was a terrible idea, and I blame the paper for that. Christine wasn't ready for what it would bring."

But Harvey, a bearish man with gentle brown eyes, made a good argument. It was important for her to own the story, to control it, he told Christine. Otherwise, speculation would spread across the Internet like a fungus. "I knew she didn't want that 'gotcha' thing to happen," he said during an interview in his glassed-in office in the ornate, slightly bedraggled Times building downtown.

"I am a transsexual sportswriter. 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."

Christine's wasn't the only awkward, painful transition at the paper in the spring of 2007. Just two weeks before, the ailing Tribune Company accepted a buyout offer from Sam Zell, the irascible real estate billionaire. The specter of an unpredictable new owner and more layoffs made an already grim newsroom funereal. In that context, Mike Penner's travails seemed downright uplifting. "It gave people something to feel good about, made everyone feel as though they were breaking ground," said Kahrl.

"People figured that we were sports guys, that we'd be Neanderthals, but that just wasn't the case," said Harvey. "Sure, it was unusual and some people had questions, but this is a pretty sophisticated place."

The reaction of Christine's own family was more mid. Joan Penner had sent her son Mike to Catholic school for nine years, and she was horrified. The Dillmans didn't want anything to do with Christine, either. But Christine's 42-year-old brother, John, who had followed Mike to the_ Anaheim Bulletin_ and now worked on the Times copy desk, was still talking to her, which she considered a great victory.

The national press, of course, went nuts. Hundreds of newspapers and the networks picked up the story, flashing the stilted snapshot from Mike's ID badge next to a blurry photo of Christine. There were countless interview requests, from NPR to the Toronto Sun. Evan Wright, an award-winning Vanity Fair reporter, was dispatched to do a profile. David Kuhn, a well-known New York literary agent, pursued her to do a book.

Christine was exhilarated by the response. "She really blossomed," said Harvey. Billy Witz, an L.A. Daily News sportswriter who played for the Scribes, asked her to help coach his 9-year-old daughter's soccer team, and to everyone's surprise, none of the parents objected. A couple of trans friends persuaded her to join them performing a number from Dreamgirls for an AIDS fund-raiser at a local church. The annual CD compilation, cheekily relabeled KGAL, arrived on schedule as spring melted into summer. Long plagued by writer's block, Christine told people she had never felt more at home in her prose.

She even took Harvey up on his offer to write a blog, "A Woman in Progress," about her transition. She began spending more time in the office than she ever had as Mike, stopping by colleagues' desks to chat and flirt. She laughed easily, covering her mouth with a well-moisturized hand. When she interviewed Vin Scully, the legendary Dodgers announcer, for a front-page profile, she gushed to colleagues that it was the best day of her life. "She hugged me on the walkway when I ran into her," said Larry Stewart, the former Times sportswriter. "She seemed really ecstatic."

...

You probably don't wake up in the morning glad for your penis. Maybe you run a hand through your hair or notice that your breath still reeks of scotch and the cigarette you wish you hadn't smoked last night, but if you're not a sex addict or a narcissist, you probably don't start the day thanking God or nature for your gender.

But if you're sure you aren't meant to be a man, your gender is everything. You open your eyes and reach for the only thing that can save you: a shiny tablet of estrogen or the syringe you jab into your glute. You can opt for the patch if you don't like needles, or ask the doctor to implant a time-release pellet under a buttock. The important thing is to get that daily hit; it's the air you need to survive. Only slightly less important is the anti-androgen. You wash the tab down with your coffee to block the effects of testosterone. Later in the day, you pull out another syringe and pump yourself full of progesterone to coax your breasts to swell. You will do anything to escape the hairy, stinky prison of your body. Anything.

No one knows how many men suffer from Gender Identity Disorder—the official term used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but the American Psychiatric Association puts it at one in 10,000. Nor is there agreement on why some of us wind up believing we're the victims of such a cruel cosmic joke. A rough scientific consensus has emerged over the past decade that the disorder is at least partially explained by some sort of aberrant neurochemical reaction born of hormone exposure—or a mysterious lack of it—in utero. A few studies suggest that transsexual brains are measurably different from the brains of people who are comfortable in their gender, but transgendered people have normal hormone levels—until the pharmaceuticals kick in—and thus far no one has isolated a genetic or organic cause.

Gender discordance exists on a continuum. (Transvestitism, a.k.a. cross-dressing, is classified as a different disorder, a fluke of straight men who get a sexual charge from wearing panties or a skirt.) Most people who are convinced their genitals don't match their true gender will never go as far as getting sexual-reassignment surgery. Fewer than 1,000 such procedures are performed each year in the United States, where it can cost up to $30,000. (It's much cheaper elsewhere.) About three-quarters of the operations are male-to-female, partly because female-to-male surgery hasn't been perfected—it's a lot harder to add than take away.

Male-to-female technique has been so refined that the result is virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. The testicles are removed, and the penis is essentially inverted and reconfigured into a vagina, which is elongated with a graft of skin from the scrotum. You don't have orgasms like you used to—many newly minted females say they don't come at all—but most post-op transsexuals say there's plenty of sensation.

Anyway, sex is not really the point. "People assume that if you want to be a woman, then underneath it you really want to have sex with men and just can't deal with being gay," said Susan Horn. "But a lot of us aren't even thinking of whom we will have sex with. We're thinking about ourselves, that we want to be perceived by the world the way we perceive ourselves. We just want things to match."

Roughly half the men who become women wind up with another woman. "If you're interested in women before, you generally still are, even after you transition," said Horn. "Which, if you think about it, is the ultimate proof that gender and sex aren't as closely linked as we thought."

In the trans community, Christine was an instant headliner. "She was the public face everyone was hungry for," said Autumn Sandeen, who transitioned in 2003 and blogs for the popular LGBT Web site Pam's House Blend. "Someone with a visible career in a traditionally male field. Someone people couldn't ignore or diminish." Since January 2007, Christine had been a member of the Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood, where fashionable gay Hollywood worshipped. The Sunday after her coming-out column ran, the charismatic minister, the Reverend Neil Thomas, rhapsodized about her in his sermon.

She was the main attraction at a couple of major transgender gatherings that summer and fall, but the height may have been a giddy weekend at the National Lesbian Gay Journalists Association conference in September. There were four transwomen in attendance: Sandeen, Ina Fried of CNET, Diane Barnes of Global Security Newswire, and Christine. Sandeen loaded them into her secondhand Hyundai, and they visited what passed in San Diego for gay bars, the only places that might not balk at the sight of them coming through the door. "We were four fairly large women stuffed in a small car, windows down, cruising down the freeway, incredibly, insanely happy," recalled Sandeen. Later they discussed whether they would stay in the public eye or attempt to lead a quieter life. "Christine told me she felt it was her responsibility to be out there," said Sandeen. "She didn't want the younger girls to have to go through what we'd gone through."

When David Beckham debuted that July with the L.A. Galaxy, Christine blogged about making her appearance at the press conference, her first, at the stadium.

*He arrived wearing a silver-gray Burberry suit, surrounded by a phalanx of assistants and yes-people, on his way to a temporary stage assembled on the Home Depot Center soccer pitch, where he would say hello to adoring fans and talk to the media about his new $250-million gig with the Los Angeles Galaxy._

I arrived wearing a golden-hued top from Ross and a multi-colored paisley skirt from Ames and a pair of open-toed tan heels from Aerosoles, surrounded by nobody, just me and my press credential on our way to the far southwest corner of some very uncomfortable and unshaded stadium seats to listen to him talk and write about what he said.

The details are not important. What mattered to me on Friday was: David Beckham arrived. And so did I.

The attention seemed to embolden her in ways that would have been anathema to Mike. Rick Reilly, who began his career in the Orange County bureau of the Los Angeles Times before going on to become the world's highest-paid sportswriter at _Sports Illustrated_ and ESPN, was signing books at Borders in Westwood in May 2007 when he looked up to see a large woman with honey-colored hair staring at him. "It's me," Christine said. It took a moment for him to realize that this was the guy he'd played hoops with every Friday back in the late '80s at Mile Square Park near Huntington Beach.

"I was thrown briefly, but then, hey, whatever," Reilly said recently. "She seemed happier and more comfortable than he'd ever seemed." After the signing, Reilly and his wife, Cynthia, took Christine out and killed a couple of bottles of Chardonnay. Christine told them about playing princess dress-up with her male cousins as a child, how her need to dress as a woman, to be a woman, had escalated till it became unbearable, how she'd kept a red toolbox of women's clothes behind the headboard through the years with Lisa. She said it was transgendering or death. Christine became a regular that summer at the Reillys' house in Hermosa Beach. "She and Cynthia would sit on the roof deck, and my wife would tutor her on all the details of being a woman," said Reilly. "Where to get the best shoes, how to wear a push-up bra."

She talked a lot about getting the surgery. First she had to live full-time as a woman for a year—the Benjamin Standards, a medical protocol developed in the 1970s by German-born endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, required it. Next summer, she planned to go to Trinidad, Colorado, where Marci Bowers, a surgeon who transitioned more than a decade ago, practiced. The Reillys had a second home in Denver, where she would recuperate.

But there was one subject that always brought the mood down: Lisa. If only she would come around, Christine would say, as Reilly topped off her glass. If they could only still be close, everything would be so perfect. "Christine honestly couldn't fathom it," said Reilly, "I said, 'Dude, why would you think this would be okay with her?' But she couldn't let Lisa go."

In fact, the media attention was crushing Lisa, who had filed for divorce in January. "They had been really private about it, and that was bad enough, but now, all of sudden, her tragedy, her pain—it was all out there," said Scott French, a co-founder of the Scribes, who met Mike at the Rose Bowl during the 1994 World Cup. Christine scrupulously avoided mentioning Lisa in interviews, but reporters kept pressing. "It's extremely painful," she told an NPR interviewer. "That's really a personal side of this conversation I'd rather not have."

Lisa was a stoic midwesterner, not some reality-show-ready California type who could easily spill her guts in public. She told her friends not to talk to the press and has never spoken publicly about her husband's saga. (She didn't respond to repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.) "What is there for her to say?" asked a fellow sportswriter who was close to both of them. "These were two people who were completely in love. Can you imagine what that's like?"

Everyone on the sports staff knew Lisa was suffering, and no one knew how to help. If Mike had been married to a suburban housewife, someone people hardly knew, it would have been different, abstract. Instead, Lisa was one of them. "People were nice to Christine, happy that she was happy, but they felt terrible for Lisa," said Larry Stewart. "Everyone in the newsroom sort of felt like they had to take sides. And they all chose Lisa. She's a lovely, fun person whom everyone loves. It wasn't an issue of Mike's becoming a woman; it was that Lisa was really broken up."

That giddy, golden summer of 2007 faded as the reality of being a midlife transwoman, single and lonely, set in: the stares as you pass on the street, the department-store salesgirls who whispered to one another as though you were deaf, the jarring sight of a stubbornly rugged jaw in the rearview mirror. "She would say that she had spent forty-five minutes putting on her makeup and still she saw Mike staring back," Amy recalled.

In December, Randy Harvey called Christine at home to share a joke: The Olympic committee had declared 2008 the Year of the Woman in sports. "I thought she'd get a real kick out it, but she got really offended," Harvey said. "I tried not to worry, but inside I knew there was something really wrong."

One night in February, Reilly was out late, getting hammered with Gene Wojciechowski, an ESPN colleague who'd worked with Reilly and Penner at the Times. On a whim, they dialed Christine to jaw about the old days. "She was totally touched that we included her," said Reilly. "She said she was going through a hard time with people she loved not accepting her. Then she cried, but I didn't think anything of it. Hell, she was always crying."

Around this time, Autumn Sandeen noticed that the activists had grown cold toward their poster girl. They sniped that she wasn't substantial enough, that "A Woman in Progress" spent too much time cataloging the new shoes in her closet and not enough mining the political turf. "They considered her frivolous," said Sandeen. "They didn't want to hear her talk about how great the Times had been about the transition or how Beckham gave her goose bumps. None of that highlighted the injustices and inequities that most transpeople go through. They wanted her to be a role model, a crusader. She was crushed. She just wanted to be Christine."

Then there was the matter of sex. Early on, Christine had dropped hints to Amy and Susan that she wanted to experiment with men, but as the weeks and months passed, she grew more withdrawn and uncertain. When they suggested she go out on a date to see how it felt, she demurred. "She said she had already had her great love," said Amy. "She said she couldn't fill that void."

...

It was late, almost midnight, when the phone rang at Amy's apartment in Redondo Beach. She knew right away who it was.

The death of Christine's mother the month before had been drawn-out and traumatic. Joan Penner had never accepted Christine and in her final dementia had vacillated between treating her as the daughter she never had and an abomination. The_ Vanity Fair_ piece that Christine hoped would show her as a complete, happy woman had fallen apart over differences about the photography and the direction of the reporting. "She realized that what she had envisioned, something glamorous and romantic, was never going to happen," said Sandeen. Then there was the divorce. Christine hadn't really believed Lisa would go through with it, but she could no longer ignore the documents that kept coming. They lay on the raw wooden table in her apartment amid tangled necklaces and a pile of old newspapers.

Amy had never had big expectations for her late-life transition—all she wanted was to die an old woman instead of an old man—but Christine had been convinced that becoming a woman would solve everything. Amy had tried to make her understand, from the beginning, that the act of becoming a woman itself wouldn't make you happy, any more than glasses would make you observant. But Christine just smiled that perfect smile. Until she didn't anymore.

She took a leave from the paper. Randy Harvey hadn't asked what was wrong, just told her to take care. She quit returning calls, even from Reilly. Mostly she sat in her apartment, the Audrey Hepburn posters on the wall failing to cheer her up, staring for hours through the sliding door to the dreary balcony and the busy street beyond.

So when Amy picked up the ringing phone, she braced herself. "I think I'm in kidney failure," Christine said.

Amy drove her to the hospital at Century Plaza. It was the third time in the past few months Christine had gone to the emergency room and the doctors had found nothing. But Amy couldn't let Christine go alone; hospitals were hard on the transgendered. The scanty gowns, the overworked staff poking and prodding you, some with barely concealed disgust. The fluorescent lights didn't do anyone any favors, even Christine, who had been so religious about electrolysis.

She was in bed in the ER, getting woozy from the sedative, when Amy took her hand. "I hope you won't be upset," Christine said, her voice faint, "but I'm thinking of pulling the plug on my transition." She couldn't live without the warmth, she stumbled to explain as the drugs kicked in. Without Lisa.

It was like watching a tennis ball attached to a rubber band stretched too tight and then released, Amy thought. It would snap back, but not all the way. You couldn't go back. Not really. That much Amy was sure of.

Christine came to stay at Amy's apartment after she got out of the hospital, spending most days under a coverlet in the spare room. She stopped taking her hormones, wasn't shaving her legs or bothering with makeup.

When Amy's sisters invited her to visit them in Oregon in August, she couldn't say no. The girls, who shared a house on ten wild acres, had been surprisingly supportive when she told them their only brother was going to become a woman. Going up there meant flying as a woman for the first time—she worried about what would happen if she couldn't pass and people stared on the plane—but the fear was worth being able to drink iced tea on the deck and fish on the river.

Christine got out of bed to drive Amy to the airport. They didn't talk much on the way. Amy knew it was the last time she would see Christine.

"You don't actually think Lisa will come back to you, do you?" Amy asked quietly.

"No, not really," Christine said, her eyes on the steamy freeway ahead. Amy didn't believe her, but what was there to say?

When Amy flew back into LAX two weeks later, Mike was waiting for her in his old Toyota Camry. He was wearing jeans and sneakers and a loose short-sleeve button-down shirt from Costco; his lank blond hair was chopped to the shoulder. Amy kept things light in the car, but it was hard. She had promised to be there for Christine no matter what, but this felt like a death.

"It's okay if you want to call me Christine," Mike told her, his voice a gruff whisper.

But Amy couldn't bring herself to do it; that would violate everything it meant to be trans. You got to be called what you wanted to be, what you decided you were. That was the whole point.

"If you're Mike, you're Mike," she said.

He moved back to the apartment on Sepulveda. He was broke and needed to go back to work. Randy Harvey tried not to ask too many questions, just limited it to "Will you be coming back as Mike?" Harvey suggested taking over "Totally Random," a short column of feature items. It was a simple assignment, a way to ease in. Before he returned, Mike asked the online editors to take down "A Woman in Progress." They obliged by obliterating every trace of it in the system—not an easy task, and a first in the history of the paper. Harvey wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of altering the record, but the guy's mental health was at stake, he told himself.

At first Mike came into the office every few days, like Christine had, but it was awkward. He was a shell, hollowed out to the rind. "He wasn't there anymore," said Harvey. Someone heard him make a reference to wanting to kill himself, and he wound up back in the hospital for a few weeks around Christmas.

After he got out, he stuffed Christine's clothes in plastic bags and brought them to Goodwill. Slowly he got rid of the jewelry stands shaped like little Victorian dolls that had brightened up the apartment; he gave Amy the necklace with the blue glass beads that she had always admired and a pair of peridot earrings.

Much of the trans community was angry with him, and he didn't blame them. Transsexual regret was a radioactive subject, especially with someone so well-known. Fewer than 5 percent of transsexuals come to lament their decision, but there it was, a USA Today story about his reversal: FOR SOME, SHADOW OF REGRET CAST OVER GENDER SWITCH. Susan had dropped him, betrayed. The vibe at church the one Sunday he ventured back had been so hostile that Reverend Thomas later took a few bitter congregants aside.

When Thomas called to make sure he was okay, Mike told him he had never stopped being Christine but that he just couldn't take the expectations, the loneliness, the loss. "He knew it was irrational," Thomas said, "but there was part of him that believed he could get his old life back."

As 2009 wore on, Amy was the only one he seemed comfortable with. She had liked Christine better than she liked Mike, but she kept reminding herself not to be judgmental, that they were the same person in all the ways that counted. Fridays, after deadline, he would come to her apartment for dinner and a DVD. The night they screened a favorite, Wonder Woman, he gave her his Wonder Woman costume, size 10. Christine used to wear it whenever they watched. Amy told him she would hold on to it, in case Christine ever came back. "She's not coming back," he said. "Christine is gone."

At least Lisa was willing to see him again, to have lunch or a cup of coffee; an hour with her made him happy. Amy could tell when he had seen her. His voice brightened on the phone, and when he came over, his eyes glowed turquoise again. "Lisa told him she was glad all that silly stuff was over, that she was happy he was back," said Amy. "He nursed some kind of hope it would develop beyond that."

But as the months slid into fall, the light dimmed. There were crushing bills, and no more mentions of Lisa's laugh over an afternoon latte. When Amy asked him if he'd seen her lately, he just said, "She's moved on."

November 2009 was unusually chilly for L.A., a damp cold that rarely settled over the city. The night before Thanksgiving, Mike called Amy and asked if she had a gun. "You know I can't help you with that," she said. She drove to his apartment, but when she got there he wouldn't talk about it. She dragged him to Marie Callender's for some chili, but he just stared past the chintz curtains at the cars whipping by in the darkness.

Amy was going to the home of a colleague for Thanksgiving dinner, a woman who had urged her to bring Mike along. "If you don't want to come, at least sit in my apartment and wait for me there," Amy pleaded.

"I'm driving through the Jack in the Box, and I have some errands," he told her. "Don't worry about it."

...

The call came in at 8:15 P.M. on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. One of the neighbors and her boyfriend had spotted the Toyota as soon as they pulled into the parking structure below the stained stucco apartment building on Sepulveda. The motor was running, and a vacuum-cleaner hose snaked through the passenger-side window. A man was slumped against the seat. The boyfriend pulled him from the car, tried some CPR, and the girl dialed 911 on her cell phone.

By the time the EMS had taken Mike to the hospital in Culver City, the building manager had let two police officers into his apartment. At first, the 500-square-foot studio seemed like the typical lair of a transient single man: nothing on the walls, jeans draped over the generic pine furniture, the small fridge virtually empty. "Then I looked at the unopened mail," recalled Antonio Vasquez, one of the officers. "There was a lot of it, and most of it was addressed to a woman."

On the bed, in an envelope, was a handwritten note. For two decades, Mike Penner had crafted subtle sentences that teased the ironies out of the self-important world of sports; Christine Daniels, the woman he became for eighteen months, added self-revelation and raw emotion to the mix. But in the end, there were only terse instructions. Call my brother, John. And Chris Foster, a close friend and colleague from the Los Angeles Times. And Lisa. Of course, Lisa. To her, "All my love."

Princess Di. Farrah. Cher. They are all here, or at least their wigs seem to be, at Christine's memorial service, on a Saturday afternoon in January at the Metropolitan Community Church. Some of the women sit together in the pews, reaching behind one another's broad backs to gently pat a shoulder; others come in alone, drawing fringed wraps or generously cut jackets around themselves to ward off the chill. By 5 P.M. the room is filled, both with full-timers and those who are living as men but have slipped away to pull on a dress and pumps to remember Christine.

There was a funeral in Long Beach a couple of days after Mike's death, a farewell to "Lisa and John's idea of who Mike was," said Scott French, who was asked to speak. "The story line was that he was depressed and had tried a lot of things and they didn't work." In the entryway there was a single image: a head shot of Mike, his mouth a closed-lipped smile. French and a few Los Angeles Times colleagues spoke about Mike's gentle impenetrability, his boundless love of soccer, the teammates who called him the Gaffer, British slang for "the boss." They praised his talent and mourned the sadness that dogged him. The only acknowledgment that their friend spent a year and a half as a woman was when Billy Witz got up to describe Christine's joy over the first goal by the shyest of the girls they had coached. The room was silent.

Amy was the only trans at the funeral, and she sat quietly in the back. John Penner had called to invite her; they had run into each other time after time at the hospital. Another transwoman, Michelle Evans, who had struck up a friendship with Christine through the blog, had shown up with her wife of twenty-seven years, but Lisa had insisted that John turn them away at the door.

Six weeks later, at the Metropolitan Community Church memorial, an ebony-skinned transwoman in a black-and-yellow dress belts out "Walking Around Heaven All Day" like Cissy Houston. Amy LaCoe, nervous speaking in front of so many people, looks down at her notes and recalls that Christine was "as elegant in a pullover and jeans as she was in an evening gown." Susan Horn, a size 22 in a maroon silk sleeveless top, straps on a vintage Gibson ax and launches into "Travelin' Thru," from the soundtrack of Transamerica, which she and Christine often watched over trays of cocktail franks and glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. By the end of the song, the crowd is weeping. A photomontage flashes across the fifty-inch screens that flank the stage. The music is Talking Heads, "Once in a Lifetime." Christine at an awards luncheon with a toothy smile. Christine at the microphone at a conference, her hand chopping the air. Christine in a soft blue sweater, her head thrown back with laughter.

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! What have I done


Nancy Hass is a New York City-based writer. This is her first piece for GQ.