The Suicide of Mike Penner

This is a tough story to write about. A person lived as a man and had a high-profile successful career, then in middle age transitioned to a female gender identity, then quietly transitioned back last year, and then last week committed suicide. It is certainly a tragic story, but so much is left out of news accounts that it is impossible to know what conclusions to draw.

Here's the obituary from the LA Times, where Mike Penner / Christine Daniels worked:

Mike Penner, a longtime Los Angeles Times sportswriter who made headlines in 2007 when he announced that he was transsexual, has died. He was 52.

Penner was pronounced dead Friday evening at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, a Los Angeles County coroner's official said.

The cause of death has not been determined but was believed to be suicide.

"Mike was a first-rate journalist, a valued member of our staff for 25 years, and we will miss him," Times Editor Russ Stanton said. "He respected our readers a great deal, enough to share with them his very personal journey. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family."

A versatile member of The Times' sports staff, Penner covered the Olympics, the Angels, World Cup soccer, tennis, sports media and a variety of other assignments.

He also spent several years writing a sports column for the paper's Orange County Edition. Since 2008, he was the principal writer for the sports section's "Totally Random" feature.

"Mike was one of the most talented writers I've ever worked with, capable of reporting on any number of topics with great wit and style," sports editor Mike James said. "This is a tragic ending and a difficult time for all of us who knew him." Mike Penner dies at 52; Los Angeles Times sportswriter

There are quotes from friends and colleagues, and a little further down the question of gender identity is discussed.

In April 2007, Penner surprised colleagues and readers with an essay in The Times' Sports section announcing that he was "a transsexual sportswriter."

"It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-searching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words," he wrote.

Times Associate Editor Randy Harvey, who was the paper's sports editor at the time, said the essay allowed Penner to explain in his own way a decision that "we realized would be a human-interest story and a news story. We didn't want it to be filtered through someone else's lens."

In the essay, Penner said of his transgender decision:

"I gave it as good a fight as I possibly could. I went more than 40 hard rounds with it. Eventually, though, you realize you are only fighting yourself and your happiness and your mental health -- a no-win situation any way you look at it."

Writing as Christine Daniels, Penner started a column for the paper's website in May 2007 called Day in L.A. and a blog about the transition, then in July began writing for the paper again.

He returned to using the Mike Penner byline in October 2008.

It is interesting that the LA Times and other news sources describe him as a male who lived for a few years as a transsexual woman. His male name and masculine pronouns are used, as I am using them here, but the argument could easily be made that Penner's male gender identity was a cover-up, and that in honoring his passing his newspaper should have described him as a female.

The best discussion of the confusion in reporting about Penner's gender identity is found in Amanda Hess's The Sexist blog at the Washington City Paper: Should We Remember Mike Penner or Christine Daniels?. Amanda reviews how Penner's gender identity was handled by various publications, noting that almost all the sports publications used masculine pronouns, while LGBT publications tended to refer to Penner as Christine Daniels and use feminine pronouns. A good point here:

Interestingly, the decision to remember Penner as female in his obituary lies in direct opposition to a longtime cause of the LGBT movement: Ensuring that the mainstream media accurately represent the gender identity of transgender subjects. According to several professional style guidelines, writers are to use the gender identity, name, and pronouns preferred by the subject. So, if Mike goes publicly as Mike, you call him Mike; if Christine goes publicly as Christine, you call her Christine.

Mike had most recently chosen to call himself Mike and refer to himself as a man. Nothing is clear here, but I will go with that, too. Amanda discusses some of the implications of the choice on her blog, and I recommend the discussion.

The question of pronouns and language is an interesting one, but the real question lies in understanding the tragedy that resulted in Mike Penner's suicide. You can imagine the emotional turmoil that must be involved in changing your publicly presented gender in the first place. It is not something you do trivially, it can't be easy, especially for a sportswriter, of all things. Having done that, Penner, now Daniels, became somewhat famous in the LGBT community, and you can imagine -- but you can only imagine, because not much is known -- that her life now had changed dramatically. And then, after adjusting to life as a woman, Penner detransitioned back to a male gender identity, erasing all evidence of Christine Daniels from the public record. And again, we can only imagine going back to your old life as a guy, only now everybody knows that you were a woman last year. You lose your new LGBT friends and your old sportsroom buddies are suspicious of you -- that must be an uncomfortable place to be.

We can't know what motivated Mike Penner to commit suicide, you never know those things really. Maybe it was money, or depression, something that had nothing to do with gender identity. I hope that over the next weeks we will gain some insight into this person's life, his tangled motives, and I hope that some of the discussion will enlighten us about our own attitudes. What is so important about gender? Why do people get so upset about it? Why do some members of society feel it is necessary to enforce conformity to group norms above the autonomy of the individual?

One thing. I have noticed that some news sites and blogs that allow reader comments have had terrible things said. Many of the sites have had to delete comments or turn that feature off altogether. I am going to watch the discussion here, and will delete anything that I consider disrespectful. It is difficult for the majority of us to understand what it's like to feel that you have been assigned to the wrong gender category, and we have no way of knowing how hard it is to tell the world you are changing in a fundamental way. Let's not use this thread to say political things, or to judge someone who makes such a difficult decision. The story here is that someone has chosen to take their own life. There is a lot to talk about, but I want the discussion to remain civil. That doesn't mean you have to approve of someone's decisions, you don't have to take my point of view on anything here, but let us speak decently about important issues and speak respectfully of the dead. I will edit with a heavy hand.