Excerpt: The public triumph and private torment of LA Times sportswriter Mike Penner/Christine Daniels

It was so very sad to hear of the death of LA Times sportswriter Mike Penner last fall. He had famously transitioned into a woman named Christine Daniels but for the last year of his life, he returned to being Mike.

Times writer Christopher Goffard has written an in-depth piece detailing Penner’s struggle. Here is a portion of it:

In late April 2007, Mike Penner published an article unlike any of the thousands he had written for the Los Angeles Times. It was brief, just 823 words, and placed without fanfare on the second page of the Sports section that had been his home for 23 years.

Under the headline “Old Mike, new Christine,” Penner explained that he would soon assume a female identity and byline, a decision that followed “a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy.”

It was “heartache and unbearable discomfort” to remain a man, he explained. Being a woman promised “joy and fulfillment.” The article ended on a hopeful note: “This could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.”

Gone was quiet, circumspect Mike Penner, replaced by ebullient, outgoing — and instantly famous — Christine Daniels. Celebrity meant a megaphone, and Daniels vowed to use it as an advocate. She told her story at transsexual conferences across the country, becoming a symbol of courage to a transgender community inspired by the most visible coming-out in decades.

A year after the essay, the Daniels byline vanished from the newspaper, and within months Penner was back at work, living as a man and writing under his male name. Once so voluble about the reasons for becoming Christine, Penner was silent about the reasons for abandoning the identity.

This time, there was no essay, no explanation. But friends saw a person in torment. Last November, in the parking garage of the apartment complex where he lived alone, Penner killed himself. He was 52.

As the year wore on, Daniels grew estranged from the Los Angeles transsexual community, complaining that she had become a fundraising tool. At one gathering, she spoke of how supportive the Los Angeles Times had been, only to be confronted by someone who insisted that this didn’t reflect the experience of most transsexuals.

In October 2007, Daniels showed up at a Los Angeles studio to pose for photographs to accompany a profile in Vanity Fair magazine. The photographer, Robert Maxwell, said Daniels wore simple, elegant dresses in what was intended as a “conservative, classy-type look.”

Maxwell said he sensed Daniels’ brittleness and tried to deal with her sensitively. On seeing the photos, she dissolved into tears, saying: “I’m ugly.”

“I told her, ‘No, you’re beautiful,’ ” Maxwell said. “I was trying to say all the right things. How do you tell someone who looks like a man, ‘You’re a beautiful woman’? I don’t know.” As he tried to console her, Maxwell recalled, she pushed him away. The photo shoot was “a total debacle, probably the worst experience of my transition,” Daniels wrote in an e-mail to a friend.

The photographer “apparently wanted to portray me as a man in a dress — my worst fear,” Daniels wrote. “I felt betrayed, totally abused, and very very vulnerable and exposed and alone in the world.”

The profile writer, Evan Wright, said that to write an honest article, he would have to observe that the sportswriter did not pass as a woman. “I thought, ‘Bottom line, she has a fantasy conception. She doesn’t accept who she is.’ ”

Wright said that after the photo shoot, he was so afraid Daniels would commit suicide that he asked his editor to cancel the story. It was never written.

The episode seemed to mark a turning point, a retreat. By year’s end, Daniels had cut off many of her transsexual friends.

Here is a LINK to the entire piece.