Tremendous Article

As long as there are people employed by newspapers who can write rigorous and thoughtful pieces like this story about the death of a Los Angeles Times sportswriter, newspapers should never die.

Mike Penner was a longtime columnist until 2007.  He worked for the Times after that, but that year he announced that he was to undergo gender reassignment.  In other words, Penner outed himself as a woman born as a man, and he would begin dressing, talking and acting like a woman in public.

I saw this as a blurb in a local paper and was floored.  Of all the men to decide he really was a she, it's someone in the masculine world of sports?  OK. ...

But according to Christopher Goffard's story, it turned out anything but for Penner.  Living life under the name Christine Daniels, she began to see herself as an advocate for GLBT rights.  But just as she couldn't stand all the years living as a man, Daniels couldn't take living as a woman either.  Gay rights advocates were using Daniels, according to her.  Meanwhile, Penner/Daniels's marriage of two decades, to Lisa Dillman (who also works at the Times, covering the Clippers), ended when Dillman filed for divorce two weeks after the column announcing his change.  The article doesn't make clear if Dillman knew about Penner's private life.

Something, or a series of things, finally got to Daniels, and after living like a woman for a "real-life test" before having actual gender reassignment surgery, she switched back to being Mike Penner.  The damage had been done, however -- to the marriage, which may or may not have been the major source of Penner/Daniels's pain, but also the confusion about who he or she really was.  Finally, around Thanksgiving, he turned on his car, stuck a vacuum hose in the exhaust, led it to the passenger-side window, got in, and proceeded to kill  himself.  Mike Penner was 52.

Goffard fills the reader in with many details that illuminate his internal suffering.  Shortly after he announced he was becoming a woman, Penner tried to take down and erase every single photo of him online.  After she decided to switch back, Daniels decided to do the same.  Near the end of his life he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and told a transgender friend he believed his employer broke into his house.  Daniels also blogged about her life back on the beat, Woman In Transition; the Times no longer has archival records of the blog posts.  The implication is strong in the piece that somehow Penner erased them.

For all the insight, I'm left with a lot of questions -- not necessarily with the story, but with the characters in them, foremost the main one.  I obviously am no expert on gender dysphoria, the mental illness where you feel you're trapped in the body of the wrong sex.  But I would think, or at least hope, that once Mike Penner became Christine Daniels she would feel free to be who she truly is.  Also, there were many signs that Daniels herself wasn't comfortable in her newsskin in much the same way he professed not being himself in his old skin.  There was a quashed article for Vanity Fair, and the photographer hired to shoot photos of Daniels couldn't calm her down after she saw them and thought she was ugly.  She was so hysterical she pushed the photographer.  I don't know if that's because she really thought she was ugly or if there was something deeper she was haunted by.  Yes, it seems like people were using her as a way to raise money.  It also seems like people didn't believe she passed as a woman.  But if you finally are you who you want to be, who cares?  Being able to stop lying to yourself and the world seems to be worth being exploited and ridiculed.  So Penner/Daniels's suffering leads this uneducated man to guess that if gender reassignment couldn't heal the wounds, nothing could've prevented him/her to suicide.

I am also troubled by how Penner/Daniels was remembered.  There was an open memorial to remember the life of Christine Daniels -- not Mike Penner, but Christine Daniels, the pastor conducted the service emphasized.  Is that supposed to be the case?  And would Mike have wanted that?  There was a family memorial for family only, and I can guess they were mourning "Mike."  But saying the public memorial was for "Christine" seems like a decision made by the people who organized the memorial, which veers dangerously close to the exploitation that bothered and embittered Daniels.  This is about the mourners, not the mourned.  What does Mike Penner say about not being eulogized in the public memorial?  What were  his last wishes, if he had any?  It's quite possible that even he/she didn't know who he was at the time of his suicide, but last I heard he went by "Mike Penner" on his byline.

Lastly, though, I am saddened, even disturbed, by the silence of both Penner's ex-wife, Dillman, and his brother, John, who also works at the Times in the copy desk.  For such a high-profile story (Penner's coming out was LAT's most viewed article in 2007), neither Dillman nor John Penner had anything to say for this story.  Sort of ironic that in a place and industry where you're trying to get people to say something about even the most controversial and painful topics, two members of the media had no comment.