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"FacebookPinterest\n\nChristine 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.\n\nYou 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.\n\nAmy 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.\n\nNot 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.\n\nAnyway, 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.\n\nBut a transgender sportswriter? As a reporter, she knew it would be a big story. She remembered Ren\u00E9e 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.\n\nAnd 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\u2014he'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\u2014he 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?\n\nLisa 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.\n\nHadn'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.\n\nAmy 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\u2014that 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.\n\nStill, 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.\n\n\"It was contagious,\" Amy recalled recently. \"She could make you forget all the things you came in worried about.\"\n\nMaybe Christine would be the one in a million who could pull it off, Amy recalled thinking back then, watching Christine take out a compact\u2014who used those anymore?\u2014to put on fresh lipstick. Maybe she could do this and not lose everything. Wouldn't that be amazing?\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n\"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:\n\nI 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.\n\nThat'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.\n\nThe 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.\"\n\nAt 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?\"\n\nAnnouncing the change to the entire world, though\u2014that 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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nChristine'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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nBut 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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nChristine'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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nChristine 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.\n\nShe 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nYou 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.\n\nBut 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.\n\nNo one knows how many men suffer from Gender Identity Disorder\u2014the official term used in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders\u2014but 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\u2014or a mysterious lack of it\u2014in 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\u2014until the pharmaceuticals kick in\u2014and thus far no one has isolated a genetic or organic cause.\n\nGender 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\u2014it's a lot harder to add than take away.\n\nMale-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\u2014many newly minted females say they don't come at all\u2014but most post-op transsexuals say there's plenty of sensation.\n\nAnyway, 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.\"\n\nRoughly 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIn 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.\n\nShe 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.\"\n\nWhen 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.\n\n*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._\n\nI 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.\n\nThe details are not important. What mattered to me on Friday was: David Beckham arrived. And so did I.\n\nThe 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.\n\n\"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.\"\n\nShe talked a lot about getting the surgery. First she had to live full-time as a woman for a year\u2014the 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.\n\nBut 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.\"\n\nIn 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\u2014it 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.\"\n\nLisa 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?\"\n\nEveryone 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThat 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.\n\nIn 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.\"\n\nOne 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.\"\n\nAround 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.\"\n\nThen 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nIt was late, almost midnight, when the phone rang at Amy's apartment in Redondo Beach. She knew right away who it was.\n\nThe 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.\n\nAmy had never had big expectations for her late-life transition\u2014all she wanted was to die an old woman instead of an old man\u2014but 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.\n\nShe 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.\n\nSo when Amy picked up the ringing phone, she braced herself. \"I think I'm in kidney failure,\" Christine said.\n\nAmy 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.\n\nShe 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.\n\nIt 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.\n\nChristine 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.\n\nWhen 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\u2014she worried about what would happen if she couldn't pass and people stared on the plane\u2014but the fear was worth being able to drink iced tea on the deck and fish on the river.\n\nChristine 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.\n\n\"You don't actually think Lisa will come back to you, do you?\" Amy asked quietly.\n\n\"No, not really,\" Christine said, her eyes on the steamy freeway ahead. Amy didn't believe her, but what was there to say?\n\nWhen 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.\n\n\"It's okay if you want to call me Christine,\" Mike told her, his voice a gruff whisper.\n\nBut 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.\n\n\"If you're Mike, you're Mike,\" she said.\n\nHe 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\u2014not 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.\n\nAt 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.\n\nAfter 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.\n\nMuch 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.\n\nWhen 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.\"\n\nAs 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.\"\n\nAt 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.\"\n\nBut 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.\"\n\nNovember 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.\n\nAmy 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.\n\n\"I'm driving through the Jack in the Box, and I have some errands,\" he told her. \"Don't worry about it.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nThe 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.\n\nBy 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.\"\n\nOn 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.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nPrincess 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.\n\nThere 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.\n\nAmy 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.\n\nSix 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.\n\nAnd you may ask yourself\n\nWhat is that beautiful house?\n\nAnd you may ask yourself\n\nWhere does that highway go to?\n\nAnd you may ask yourself\n\nAm I right? Am I wrong?\n\nAnd you may say to yourself\n\nMy God! What have I done\n\nNancy Hass is a New York City-based writer. This is her first piece for GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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