Becoming Nicole Literary Elements

Transgender non-fiction/Biography/Gender Studies

Primarily Orono and Portland Maine from the late 1990’s through the opening decades of the 21st century.

Third-person narration that enters the perspective of multiple characters throughout the story.

The tone is empathetic toward the difficulties of raising a transgender child in a petty and ignorant world even when family members are sometimes temporarily expressions of that very ignorance. The mood is generally upbeat, but tempered by the recognition that even scientific evidence which obstructs political arguments against the transgender “debate” won’t make an argument strong enough to tear down misassumptions based on outdated conventional wisdom.

Protagonist: Nicole Maines. Antagonist: systemic anti-transgender actions, policies, and violence.

The conflict which overrides everything else in the book is the reality of gender complexity versus the insistence of gender as a simple binary biological process.

Nicole undergoing surgery so that her physical manifestation of gender is reconciled with her non-physical expression of gender.

Wyatt dancing in front of the stove window while looking the reflected image of himself dressed in a skirt while his father insistently pushes him to “show me your muscles” is a genuinely painful foreshadowing of the generational divide between Wyatt/Nicole and Wayne which will persist throughout the narrative.

“There was no mistaking Wayne Maines for anything but pure American boy.” This proves to understate the systemic processing of how boys become adult males in America. Wayne is a prototypical example of the iconic line of development from “All-American Boy” into narrow-minded definer of masculinity which leads all boys who dare to deviate from this line to an inevitable point in time when their own masculinity will be questioned on no particularly scientific basis.

The explicit references to Ariel in Disney’s The Little Mermaid does not qualify as allusion because it is more than merely referential. Beneath the direct implications of Ariel as clearly feminine from the waist up, but ambiguously gender-neutral beneath her fin, however, is a persistently referenced concept which does qualify as allusion precisely because it is never directly addressed. Young Wyatt—and, indeed, all biological males suffering such gender dysphoria—desperately wants to become “part of that world” populated by fathers who “don’t reprimand their daughters” simply for being a daughter.

Nicole is born as part of a set of biologically male twins named Wyatt and Jonas. This birth commences twinning imagery throughout the book. Wyatt with his male anatomy but distinctly female personality traits is situated as being a twin brother/sister in his/her own right. Later, in a much darker turn of this imagery, Wyatt is paired with Jacob as a twin when Jacob becomes a pawn in his psychotic grandfather’s fight against transgender rights by literally committing the “crime” that so outrages Paul Melanson by entering the girl’s bathroom to protest Wyatt’s presence there. Other examples of twin imagery (Wyatt/Ariel, Wyatt staring at his reflections, etc.) pervade the story as a thematic underlayer to the concept of the gender division that is at the root of the story.

The whole book is based upon the paradox that one can be born with male genitalia without that necessarily meaning one is male.

Throughout the narrative, a recurring motif is based on the parallel between Ariel the mermaid and Wyatt/Nicole.

Unfortunately, a very common example of metonymy is necessary for telling this story. Throughout, “the court” and “the courts” are referenced in sections dealing with the legal entanglements involved in the life of a transgender person.

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