LGBT POV

The Los Angeles Times just reported that veteran sportswriter Mike Penner  - who announced in 2007  that he was transsexual and publicly transitioned into Christine Daniels – only to return to The Times in 2008 as Mike Penner – was found dead in his home today. Suicide is suspected.

Here’s The Times report:

Mike Penner, the veteran Los Angeles Times sportswriter who made international headlines in 2007 when he announced he was transsexual and began working under the byline “Christine Daniels,” has died.

Colleagues said today that Penner was found dead at his Los Angeles home and that suicide was the suspected cause of death. He was 52.

“He was one of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with,” said Times Sports Editor Mike James, adding that Penner covered numerous beats including the National Football League and sports media during his more than two-decade-long career at the paper.

“He was a gentle man, a kind man,” James said. “It’s just a tragedy.”

Penner garnered much support and some criticism when he announced he was a “transsexual sportswriter.”

“During my 23 years with The Times’ sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer. Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist. Recent keeper of the Morning Briefing flame. Today I leave for a few weeks’ vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation. As Christine,” he wrote. “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.”

Penner ended up blogging about his transition and later wrote a Times sports blog.

In 2008, he began using the “Mike Penner” byline again.

The Times will have a full obituary soon.

Here is that original column on April 26, 2007 announcing Mike’s transition to Christine:

FIRST PERSON

Old Mike, new Christine

By Mike Penner

Times Staff Writer

April 26, 2007

During my 23 years with The Times’ sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer. Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist. Recent keeper of the Morning Briefing flame.

Today I leave for a few weeks’ vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation.

As Christine.

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.

Transsexualism is a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition. It is a natural occurrence — unusual, no question, but natural.

Recent studies have shown that such physiological factors as genetics and hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy can significantly affect how our brains are “wired” at birth.

As extensive therapy and testing have confirmed, my brain was wired female.

A transgender friend provided the best and simplest explanation I have heard: We are born with this, we fight it as long as we can, and in the end it wins.

I gave it as good a fight as I possibly could. I went more than 40 hard rounds with it. Eventually, though, you realize you are only fighting yourself and your happiness and your mental health — a no-win situation any way you look at it.

When you reach the point when one gender causes heartache and unbearable discomfort, and the other brings more joy and fulfillment than you ever imagined possible, it shouldn’t take two tons of bricks to fall in order to know what to do.

It didn’t with me.

With me, all it took was 1.99 tons.

For more years than I care to count, I was scared to death over the prospect of writing a story such as this one. It was the most frightening of all the towering mountains of fear I somehow had to confront and struggle to scale.

How do you go about sharing your most important truth, one you spent a lifetime trying to keep deeply buried, to a world that has grown familiar and comfortable with your façade?

To a world whose knowledge of transsexuals usually begins and ends with Jerry Springer’s exploitation circus?

Painfully and reluctantly, I began the coming-out process a few months ago. To my everlasting amazement, friends and colleagues almost universally have been supportive and encouraging, often breaking the tension with good-natured doses of humor.

When I told my boss Randy Harvey, he leaned back in his chair, looked through his office window to scan the newsroom and mused, “Well, no one can ever say we don’t have diversity on this staff.

“

When I told Robert, the soccer-loving lad from Wales who cuts my hair, why I wanted to start growing my hair out, he had to take a seat, blink hard a few times and ask, “Does this mean you don’t like football anymore, Mike?”

No, I had to assure him, I still love soccer. I will continue to watch it. I hope to continue to coach it.

My days of playing in men’s over-30 rec leagues, however, could be numbered.

When I told Eric, who has played sweeper behind my plodding stopper for more than a decade, he brightly suggested, “Well, you’re still good for co-ed!”

I broke the news to Tim by beginning, “Are you familiar with the movie ‘Transamerica’?” Tim nodded.

“Well, welcome to my life,” I said.

Tim seemed more perplexed than most as I nervously launched into my story.

Finally, he had to explain, “I thought you said ‘Trainspotting.’ I thought you were going to tell me you’re a heroin addict.”

People have asked if transitioning will affect my writing. And if so, how?

All I can say at this point is that I am now happier, more focused and more energized when I sit behind a keyboard. The wicked writer’s block that used to reach up and torture me at some of the worst possible times imaginable has disappeared.

My therapist says this is what happens when a transsexual finally “integrates” and the ever-present white noise in the background dissipates.

That should come as good news to my editors: far fewer blown deadlines.

So now we all will take a short break between bylines. “Mike Penner” is out, “Christine Daniels” soon will be taking its place.

From here, it feels like a big improvement. I hope with time you will agree.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Here’s my interview with Christine for IN Los Angeles magazine:

Mike Penner loved uniforms. Always did. As a 10-year-old boy who loved to draw, he was enthralled by the colors of big league football jerseys—the red Kansas City Chiefs, the Oakland Raiders with their “very manly” steely colors of black and silver, the San Diego Chargers powder blue. He wanted to see more so he started watching football on television, and then started writing about what he saw.

His therapist joked that those colorful uniforms are what made him one of the most well-respected sports writers at the Los Angeles Times for the past 23 years.

On April 26, Penner came out as Christine Daniels. “During my 23 years with the Times’ sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer. Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist. Recent keeper of the Morning Briefing flame,” wrote Penner. “Today I leave for a few weeks’ vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation—as Christine.

“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.”

To help her family, friends and fans better understand her transition, Daniels is blogging about it on the L.A. Times blog site, latimesblogs.latimes.com/womaninprogress.

“It feels like a rebirth,” Daniels told IN Los Angeles during a May 7 interview infused with giddy liberation. “Everybody has been so nice,” including the Times, which has handled her coming out “better than sainthood.”

Daniels has not been alone in the process. For the past year she has attended the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles in West Hollywood under the pastoral care of Rev. Neil Thomas and his spiritual team who, Daniels said, “have been instrumental” in her transition. “In the first place, they have never seen me as Mike. They just accepted me as another woman” and have been “so excited and supportive about my coming out.”

Three days after her public coming out, Rev. Randall Besta preached about the apostle Simon raising Tabitha from the dead. For Daniels and the other MCC parishioners, the sermon was more than a profound metaphor about spiritual and emotional numbness.

“As an example of someone coming back from spiritual death and the impact we, as a Christian community, can have, I highlighted Christine Daniels,” Besta told IN. “The love God has for Christine was evident through every person who was there on her journey, especially those in the church who made it clear there is not death inside her, just life that was screaming to come out.”

Daniels cried and the congregation applauded. At the end of the service, Thomas invited the transgender members to come forward for a group prayer.

“We all had streaky faces,” Daniels said. “I was balling like a baby.”

Daniels, a Libra, was born in Inglewood in 1957.

Asked when she first knew she was born in the “wrong” body, Daniels said, “I don’t know if it was that clear cut. When I was about 4 or 5, I can remember wishing to be a girl.” She told her boy cousins who “were not demeaning or derisive at all. They were just curious.” She demonstrated how she would wear a dress, put ribbons in her hair and walk. “I wished the rest of my socialization had been like that. We had a great time.” She also had a “sissy” friend who was invited over to play with GI Joes and, instead, the two played with Barbie Dolls.

Daniels always felt uncomfortable, out of place, excruciatingly shy. She did the typical “guy things” like build models. But she was also very creative and wanted to be a cartoonist like Peanuts creator, Charles Shultz.

“I remember drawing a lot of pictures of women and girls that I wanted to look like—Ann Margret was a big one,” Daniels said. She also drew science fiction comic strips starring herself and a friend as secret agents who took a potion and changed into women to work undercover. After they solved the crime, her friend changed back, but Daniels didn’t—and “lived happily ever after.”

When she was 12, her father moved the family to Anaheim where she was inculcated with a strict Catholic upbringing. Living with a “huge secret” was not easy.

“I needed to fit in,” Daniels said. “It didn’t come easily for me. It was a learned behavior. I remember in third or fourth grade walking down the hall and turning my books the way I felt comfortable with them—carrying them against my chest.”

The boys laughed and pointed because Daniels was carrying her books “like a girl.”

“That was a big seminal moment for me,” Daniels said. She started studying male and female behavioral differences, and “I got an exaggerated sense of the differences. I think all transsexuals do that in order to fit in … I just created this little vault, and that’s where I buried everything—the manners, the gestures, the desires, dreams, hopes, fears. And it’s just buried away because you never want anyone to find that out about you, because you don’t think you’ll be able to function if people know the real you. The fallout would be too great.”

That was then; this is now. “When I dress as Christine, I have a million options. I love that,” she said. No more drab. Now there’s lots of color.

No more divided soul. “When I can present as Christine and I have people call me ‘ma’am’ and see me as a woman—it’s very important for us to be seen and treated as women —I feel whole.”

And finally free.