NEWSWEEK: You came out as transgender in your final column under the Mike Penner byline. That was incredibly courageous—though pretty shocking for most of your longtime readers. Was that your idea? Christine Daniels: There was no way in the world I wanted to do that column. I tried talking [the LA Times] out of it. I didn’t want to make this public. Two weeks before that column ran I was thinking of quitting the Times. I talked to editors in other sections—the Calendar and Image sections—and I was watching the Susan Stanton case from afar. [Stanton, city manager in Largo, Fla., for 17 years, was fired after it became known she was transitioning.]
So putting your own story out there must have been incredibly unnerving? Yes. Especially since I am an extremely shy, private person. Mike would never do interviews. I would have a hard time putting two or three sentences together, which I found out was largely due to my gender issues. But Randy Harvey, my sports editor, was supportive from the start. He said this is a news story, we have it, we can control the information and we don’t want what happened to Susan Stanton to happen here. I agreed with that. Then it became a matter of how do we do this? We thought about maybe having another columnist interview me and write about it; then we both decided if anyone was going to write this piece, it was going to be me. Then we talked about where to put it. I would have preferred to have it buried under the classified ads, the last page possible, or maybe somewhere in the middle on the Sunday magazine. I said please keep it off A1. So we decided on page two of sports, alongside my last “Morning Briefing” column as Mike.
Was it the most difficult column you’ve ever written? The column came very quickly to me. I’m usually a really tortured writer, but the first five paragraphs I wrote I was happy with. I slept on it, and the next day, the rest came very quickly. I tried not to dwell on the idea that a lot of people were going to read this story and it was probably going to be out there a long time. I just didn’t feel that pressure when I wrote it. It was free from the heart. Once they saw it, I had people tell me it was the best thing I’d ever written. As it turned out, it was one of the best days of my life, but I was braced for the worst.
It’d be different if you were a fashion writer, but as a sports columnist, it makes sense that you expected a major blowback. I have a friend, Emilio Garcia-Ruiz. He’s the sports editor of The Washington Post. When I told him a few months ago I was transsexual and I was trying to figure out how to transition, his first reaction was, “Could you have picked a worse profession to try and do this in?” Have I been wrestling this all my career? Yes. If I wasn’t a sportswriter at the LA Times I would have done this years ago. But it was always “How the hell do I do this?”
It does make an already complex situation even more complicated. Yes, like Emilio told me, “You know our profession, it tends to be narrow-minded, homophobic and you’d definitely assume transphobic.” I wasn’t even that concerned about colleagues. The talk-radio jocks, yeah, maybe. But there was also the readers and the hate community that’s out there on the Internet in chat rooms; I don’t even look at those things anymore in order to get through my day.
How did you make it through, psychologically, in the days before the column ran? I was freaking out about this leading up to the print date. I was in tears, I couldn’t sleep, it was horrible. A friend of mine who had transitioned at The New York Times years ago called and kind of reached through the phone and grabbed my lapels and said, “Look, you have 23 years built up at the Times, you have plenty of support there, you’re well respected, you’re good at what you do. What would you do if you quit the Times?” I said maybe I’ll go to an alternative weekly. She said, “You know how much they pay? Where in journalism would you get a salary that’s commensurate with that of a 23-year Times veteran?” It made sense and got me ready for the day.
Can you talk about the day your column was in the paper? On that day, I had scheduled a sportswriter friend of mine come to my house and screen my e-mails. I was told not to watch TV, not to listen to the radio, to stay away from the chat rooms. Somebody even told me security had advised I stay away from the office because there could be protests. None of this happened, in fact, it was 180 degrees the other way. People have told me my public transition may have been the smoothest ever. The public support was amazing. I literally had less than a dozen negative e-mails, and more than 1,000 positive. It stuns me. It makes me appreciate how great my friends have been. Especially in the media. I’ve had people say, “I know you wish you hadn’t waited this long to do this, Christine, but it’s probably good. If you had done this five or 10 years earlier, there wouldn’t have been this much tolerance or acceptance.” That’s probably true.
So you think attitudes about transgender have changed in the last few years? I was stunned when I started reading surveys and polls that said 60 percent of athletes would be OK with a gay teammate. That’s a significant change from five or 10 years ago. When [former NBA star] Tim Hardaway recently came back and said idiotic things about hating gays, he was lambasted, and rightly so.
When you return to the Times at the end of the month, will you return as a sports columnist? I’m coming back to do an Internet column after a revamp of our Web site, and I’m going to be the lead columnist on the site. My column’s called “The Day in LA.” It’s blog format and it’ll be my opinion on what’s going on in LA sports. It’s similar what I used to do during the Olympics. I’ll have a hopefully humorous wrap up of the day five times a week. Then I’ll be doing my Monday NFL column in the paper during football season. That’s the game plan right now.
How did you get through the early stages of transition while you were working? What helped me through the first part was that I was writing “Morning Briefing” from home. Before that I was doing sports-media criticism, and I could do that from home as well. I didn’t go in the office very often. But it’s interesting, since transitioning, I want to go in the office. I was very uncomfortable in there towards the end of presenting as Mike, it got to a point where the last few weeks I felt like I was going to jump out of my skin and scream. I had this sensation where I had tears built up behind my eyeballs the entire day, like I could cry at any second. I couldn’t concentrate. Once I presented as Christine, people would tell me I’ve never seen you this happy. My career-long writers block has vanished and I’ve never felt this creative.
I’ve been watching your blogs and was surprised to read that you turned to your church for support regarding transgender issues and transitioning. That’s a pretty open-minded church. Yes, I’ve regained a lot of my spirituality by transitioning. I found this church in West Los Angeles that’s very gay and transgender-friendly. It was the first place that accepted me wholeheartedly and unconditionally as Christine. I talked to the clergy and parishioners there at length about my transition, and they really guided me on it. I don’t know if I could have done it without them."
Had you attended church regularly before, or was it something you came back to? I came back to it. I had a very strict Catholic upbringing, attending Catholic school through 9th grade and went to weekly mass until my mid-20s. Then I started formulating my own thoughts because it wasn’t speaking to me any longer. Some of the policies just seemed archaic. So I was a lapsed Catholic, than lapsed further into being borderline agnostic for the last 10 years. I believe in God but not organized religion. Then, in January 2006, a friend of mine said, “Let’s go to this church,” and it was probably the most meaningful and moving service I’ve ever gone to. It changed me. With transition, everybody gets fixated on the surgery, which is ridiculous, appearance and all that. But it’s a really spiritual journey: why was I born like this? What are the meanings of gender? The differences between the sexes? It’s really something to put your mind through.
Did you come to a bigger realization about gender as you struggled with your own? From my experience, we talk about it being a binary culture—male, females and nothing in the middle. In actuality, there are a lot of sub-levels. I wish people recognized that. But in our culture, you’re male or you’re female. It’s so black and white. I felt extremely restrained in the male role, and maybe it was only my interpretation of the male role.
Did you know as a child that you were transgender? I remember being 4 or 5 and wanting to be a girl. I look at home movies of myself back then, and I was a very thin, effeminate boy, but extremely happy. Then you start getting knocked down when you find out you’re acting differently than boys. I remember third grade or so I was carrying my books the way I always carried them—clutched against my chest. A group of boys in the hallway started laughing and pointing—there’s the boy who carries his books like a girl. I thought really? Is there a difference? It just felt comfortable to me. Then I looked and saw boys carry books on their hip, and girls clutch them to their chest, so from that day on I said, “I guess I have to study this because I don’t know how to be a guy.” I was so conscious of trying to write like a guy. I could cover up the byline in any paper or magazine and tell you if a male or females wrote it by word choice here or there. Think of how stifling that is to the creative process.
But you ended up writing about sports—the most macho realm of journalism. My therapist has had a lot of fun with the reason I got into sportswriting. No one in my family was that interested in sports when I was growing up: I’m the oldest boy. But at age 11, it was the late 1960s and the American Football League was still playing. Philip’s 66 was a sponsor of their telecasts, and I remember our family driving into a Philip’s station and they gave us a TV schedule and a brochure talking about the teams. I was flipping through and they had artist’s full-color renderings of all the uniforms. I thought wow, this San Diego uniform is pretty cool, powder blue with little lightening bolts. Or the Raiders, the steely colors. I just got into the uniforms. I went home and started drawing the uniforms, coloring them in with pastels. I said, “Wow, I’d like to see these uniforms on TV,” and that is how I became a sports fan—the uniform.
When did you know you wanted to write about sports? I thought about becoming a sportscaster, but when you’re as painfully shy as I am, it’s not going to happen. I did have some writing ability, so that dovetailed into sports. I was the perennial horrible athlete in high school, so I started writing sports for the high-school paper. I majored in journalism in college, Cal State Fullerton, then became sports editor of the Anaheim Bulletin then came to the Times in 1983.
What was it like operating in such a testosterone culture all those years? For years I wanted to tell people about my condition, but I didn’t know I was transsexual until three or four years ago. But I sensed I might be, so I avoided therapy at all costs and really avoided researching it. I stayed off the Internet. I knew about Renée Richards and Christine Jorgensen and Jan Morris. I also knew they did a lot of surgeries in Colorado, and I thought if I get into therapy I’ll probably be taking a flight to Colorado some day.
What a struggle, because even when you come to the difficult realization that you want to transition, there’s the question of how it will affect everything, and everyone, in your life. A few years ago when I was thinking very seriously about going down this road, I talked to a transsexual friend who had gone through it 10 years earlier. She said if you really feel you have to do this, be prepared to lose your marriage, your job and all your friends. That floored me, leveled me. A lot of people have lost their jobs. For me, it was just the opposite. The Times has probably set the template for how to let an employee transition in dignity. I can’t commend them enough. I have kept 99.9 percent of my friends, and 85 percent of them have become better friends. I never expected anything close to that reaction.
When you return to work, it means you’ll be going to games and interviewing coaches and players. What do you expect the reaction in the sports world will be? I wonder what that will be like too. It’s such a metamorphoses and spiritual change. I feel so much happier now, so much more comfortable in my skin, that I want to be seen as Christine. People are noticing, “Wow, you’re going to the office a lot.” Yeah, I feel comfortable there now. I have received e-mails from the Dodgers public-relations staff, the staff at A.E.G. [Anschutz Entertainment Group, which owns the Los Angeles Kings] and the Staples Center–which would be the Galaxy, the Lakers, the Clippers and the Kings–and they all say we welcome you back, and we look forward to working with you.
And you get to shop for a new wardrobe! I’ve always loved shopping. When I wanted to relax I’d go shopping as Mike, but I had no interest in men’s clothes. I would go window shopping and get stomach pain from longing—I’d love to wear that! Don’t even take me past a prom dress or bridal shop. I almost can’t make it past. Now, when I’m stressed out, like during the whole coming-out period, I went shopping for the whole day with a friend, had makeovers. It was fun, relaxing, it took my mind off of it. I understand the concept of retail therapy now. My good friend’s wife, Lorrie, has just adopted me. She’s helping me shop. There were feminists who weighed in [online] and said, “You’re paying too much attention to clothes and makeup.” But it’s like honey, I’ve waited all my life for this.
