Hara_Juku Tgirl
05-14-2007, 01:42 AM
'It Stuns Me'
Christine Daniels wasn't eager to tell her readers at the Los Angeles Times about her new life. Then the e-mails came in.
By Lorraine Ali
By Web Exclusive
Newsweek
Updated: 1:11 p.m. PT May 12, 2007
May 13, 2007 - Christine Daniels is the Los Angeles Times's newest sports columnist. Well, she's not exactly new. As Mike Penner, she joined the Times 23 years ago to write about sports and became one of the paper's most respected columnists. But on April 26, Daniels told readers that Mike Penner was going on vacation and would return as Christine Daniels. She's not back on the job yet, but Daniels is currently writing about her new self in the "Woman in Progress" blog for the Times’s Web site. She granted one of very few interviews to NEWSWEEK's Lorraine Ali.
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 had 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, 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?
It 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 a 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?”
More on this at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18615905/site/newsweek/page/2/
__________________________________________________ ___________
~Kisses.
HTG
Christine Daniels wasn't eager to tell her readers at the Los Angeles Times about her new life. Then the e-mails came in.
By Lorraine Ali
By Web Exclusive
Newsweek
Updated: 1:11 p.m. PT May 12, 2007
May 13, 2007 - Christine Daniels is the Los Angeles Times's newest sports columnist. Well, she's not exactly new. As Mike Penner, she joined the Times 23 years ago to write about sports and became one of the paper's most respected columnists. But on April 26, Daniels told readers that Mike Penner was going on vacation and would return as Christine Daniels. She's not back on the job yet, but Daniels is currently writing about her new self in the "Woman in Progress" blog for the Times’s Web site. She granted one of very few interviews to NEWSWEEK's Lorraine Ali.
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 had 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, 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?
It 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 a 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?”
More on this at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18615905/site/newsweek/page/2/
__________________________________________________ ___________
~Kisses.
HTG