From Mike To Christine

It is the most e-mailed story in my local newspaper. My guess is you'll hear about it wherever you live, and not only by reading this column.

Mike is becoming Christine.

Mike Penner has been a sportswriter at the Los Angeles Times for 23 years. While a lot of us know about his affection for soccer, he's covered almost every sport as a reporter, columnist and essayist, and knows as much as anyone about football and baseball.

Which doesn't necessarily make him a man.

This morning, Mike came out to his readers, detailing his struggles for more than 40 years trying to live as a man while identifying as a woman, and his fear of telling people his secret. "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," he wrote, "it shouldn't take two tons of bricks to fall in order to know what to do."

But Penner, like most transsexuals, was more afraid of how people would respond than of anything else. "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."

With reason. Penner's poignant column announcing that he would be going on vacation, that on this vacation he would undergo reassignment surgery, and that he would return to his job as a sportswriter as Christine Daniels generated many positive and supportive responses. And some very ugly ones.

How dare he use the sports pages to unburden himself, a number of people have argued, on the paper's own website and on others that focus on sports. Weird, others said, in comments that can't be repeated here.

Many of them came from men. As one person noted, the women were so much kinder than the men that you couldn't help thinking that Penner had chosen the better sex.

But bias against transsexuals and transgender men and women is no laughing matter. In most states, there is simply no legal protection for those who don't fit neatly on one side of the Male/Female dichotomy. It's not a question of which bathroom they use, but whether they can be fired, evicted and denied medically necessary treatment because they make some of us feel uncomfortable. The answer, too often, is yes.

I've never understood why people who are secure in their own gender identity give a darn about anyone else's. I'm a woman. If you want to be one, that's your decision. If you don't, it has nothing to do with me. Is that so hard to see?

No one knows for sure how many transsexuals or transgender men and women there are in this country. These umbrella terms encompass a wide range of individuals, including cross dressers, those who choose to live as the opposite gender without any physical adjustments, as well as those like Mike Penner, who seek a surgical solution. On the Internet, you can find estimates of the incidence of transsexuality that range from 1 in 100 to 1 in 20, which would mean a whole lot of people are keeping a whole lot of secrets. So long as discrimination is rampant and transsexuals are stigmatized, it's impossible to get an accurate count. But so what? Discrimination doesn't become more acceptable because of the number of people being victimized.

Mike Penner took a big step this morning, not only for himself, but also for others who may see him as a role model. His description of the supportive responses he received — from co-workers, friends, his barber — may convince others that bias is not as big a problem as they feared. I hope that's right. It certainly should be.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.