[inaudible conversations] you are watching booktv on cspan key with top nonfiction books and authors every weekendo of tv, television for serioustha readers. Nation host Amy Ellis Nutt is our guest and heres the cover of her book, becoming nicole. Who is now call . Guest nicole was born and identical twin boys in 1997. Board and given the name wyatt. This is a chart from the age of two, twoandahalf, identified as they grow. If when i see identified as a girl, didnt say to her parents i think im a girl, said wed like it to be a girl . You know, wed like it to look like a girl . Believed she was a girl and twon middleclass ordinary parents living in the state of maine, need to figure out what that was about. T how host how do they figure it out, or did they . Guest they did. Video of the book is really the mother. These twins were adopted atbirt birth. Kelly knew there were two things that were most important to her as a mother. Ha make sure that her children were safe and happy. She had to understand the happy part because she also knew that this child was unhappy when she didnt get to play with the toys that she wanted or a father who was, you know, conservative, republican, veteran, you know, was really unsure about who this child was and resisted it. But kelly was determined. And so she did very early what a lot of us do, and she googled the words boys who like girls toys. And that became the beginning of her odyssey to understanding. She had never heard the word transgender, and so it began she began to become a student of it and to understand it to try and bring her husband into it. It took her longer to do that. It took him longer. But hes probably the one who undergoes the most transformation in the book. Hes now someone who goes out and gives talks to people about transgender kids, transgender children and being transgender and especially is helping to try to work with fathers to understand their children. Host what about the other twin boy . Guest jonas is a remarkable, remarkable kid. They are both now entering their sophomore year of college at two different branches of the university of maine. What was wonderful about jonas is that jonas really probably knew before anyone, you know . Kids would come up to him and sometimes say to him, you know, what is it like to have a transgender sister . And, you know, he didnt know. He just knew he had a twin that was really a girl, not a boyment boyment boy. And when jonas they were both very young, said to his father be, dad, face it, you have a son and a daughter. And it was kind of a wakeup call for wayne to realize, you know, out of the mouths of babes, here is my child telling me that his brother is really his sister. So jonas had to go on a journey too to helping other people understand, to be protective of his sister when she was discriminated against in the fifth grade and bullied and then told by staff at their middle school that she would have to use the teachers restroom and not the girls room. Shed already changed her name, dressing as a girl for all intents and purposes was nicole. And it was tough on jonas. He had to be sort of big brother, and at the same time he said to me very profoundly, you know, im a kid, and i have a sixth grade vocabulary, so its hard to talk to people to try and make em understand. Make them understand. So he struggled with it too. But theyre very close. Theyre both very different in a lot of ways. And theyre each one anothers best friends and protectors. Host what was the first step in becoming nicole . Was it clothes . Was it name . Guest you know, i think it really was i mean, the first evidence to the parents certainly were clothes. Nicole, born wyatt, loved to, you know, she would pull her shirt over her head to make it look like it was long hair. She wanted to wear her mothers jewelry. She wanted to pretend, you know, that things were dresses. These were obviously the first signs, you know . And a lot of kids go through these phases, but this was consistent, and this was constant. And then there were things saying, you know, she actually would say, daddy, when does my penis full off . Fall off . So this was a child who wasnt saying i feel like im a girl, this was a child who knew she was a girl but couldnt understand, being a child, why people were treating her like a boy. Host when did surgery happen . Guest surgery happened last summer after she graduated high school. Nicole was one of the first cases of an american child at the childrens gender clinic in boston, the first one in this country, established in 2007 under dr. Norman spack, her daughter, was one of the first to have puberty repressed so she had time to go through the psychological tests, had time to dress and act and be a girl in order to know for certain this was who she was. And then when puberty was going to start for her, they could see in her twin brother when it was starting, that was when they started her on estrogen. And so she wasnt going to have the surgery until high school. She wanted to do it before college. This is a very, very important step. So many people go through puberty, and when they decide to make the transition, dont make it until theyre adults, its especially difficult for female transgender people because, you know, theyve gone through male puberty. And surgically, a lot has to be done. She didnt have to face that problem. She went through female puberty at the right time. So shes been able to have the right development and at the right time as other young women. And shes a beautiful young woman. And shes happy and thrilled and has a boyfriend and is about as normal a kid as you could come across. And its the beauty of this family is because theyre ordinary in so many ways, theyre extraordinary in how they dealt with the situation. But theyre ordinary in being, you know, an every mans family. Theyre your mother and father, theyre your sister and your brother. It would be hard motto identify with this family not to identify with this family. And i think to the degree that that can normalize for people what it means to be transgender and what it means to have a transgender member in family, then i think it spreads the message and educates people just by their presence. Host Amy Ellis Nutt, youre a Science Writer at the washington post. How did you find this story . Guest this story actually found me, honestly. It was First Published in the newspaper, in the boston globe, page 1, in december of 2011. Marty barron to, the executive editor of the washington post, was then the executive editor of the boston globe, very farseeing editor who promoted in this story. I read it, i was fascinated by it. And i was captain r contacted contacted, i didnt know that they were being represented at the time by someone i had known 30 years earlier in boston. And she reached out to me because the family was getting a lot of publicity requests. They were uncomfortable with doing anything more than that. They wanted to protect their kids and have them group, you know, have them a normal teenage. Teenage life. But they knew that down the line after they graduated high school, they would want this story to be told. She contacted me because she knew id written a book, and so the story came to me. But i remember saying to my agent, this is fascinating. And the fact that they were identical twins is an important aspect trying to explain the science and what we know about the brain and gender. I said, do you think anyones going to want to read a book about a transgender kid . That was five years ago. And the world has changed dramatically since then. So, honestly, its a serendipitous publication of this. Host whats the estimated population of transgender in the u. S. . Guest honestly, the best estimates are grossly inadequate. The ones that you read most frequently are between 7800,000. Those figures are based on 10yearold surveys of three states. Its impossible to know. It really is. And im waiting for the, you know, for the next sort of stage when we can get a better estimate of that. But, of course, we face the same problems in people not identifying as transgender or not wanting to identify even so honestly, i think we really dont know. But what i learned from doing this book is id always thought the phrase gender spectrum was very nice, politically correct, lovely phrase. But it really is true that this is not exceedingly rare that 1 in 200 kids are born with atypical 1 in 200 are born with atypical genitalia. There are many, many different kinds of variations of chromosomal dna. People can be born xyy, xxy, insensitive to androgen, you know, to testosterone or not. So there is no average male or female. We really are a spectrum in many ways. And so i learned that as we are beginning to learn the science of this, your anatomy is set in utero at six weeks. Scientists believe your gender identity process in the brain does not occur until six months in utero. So you think of all the things that can happen between six weeks and six months that affect the brain, and this is why identical twins can have the exactsame exact same dna, but they get different chemical messages from the mother even where theyre positioned in the womb. And the degree of variation because of things the mother takes in from the environment that affects the distribution of hormones, the variability in how our brains are set is nearly infinite. Host so what kind of testing did wyatt maines have to go through to become Nicole Maines . Guest yeah. Host before even surgery happened or anything like that. Guest you know, back then it was before really, honestly, genetic testing. So what she went through was mostly psychological tests. And also physiological tests, you know, to understand, you know, her anatomy. But it was mostly a series of psychological tests, and this is one thing why they, you know, delay puberty and suppress puberty so that the child cannily as the gender can live as the gender that they believe they are for as long as possible to be fully confident that thats who they are. Look, there are a lot of kids who, you know, test boundaries and, you know, boys that like to dress up as girls and girls that were tomboys, and these are temporary. These are things that are experimenting. Not all children who do that are transgender. But a child who says at the age of 2 when do i get to be a girl and says it constantly and consistently, thats a transgender child. Host Amy Ellis Nutt is the author of becoming nicole the transformation of an american family. Shes also the coauthor of the teenage brain. The accident happened so quickly that they didnt know what happened. The story was on the one hand a narrative about what happened to these men and their families buh also an investigation. I basically make the case, i think its a strong case, that they were the victims of the high seas hit and run by a container ship, a german containership that didnt stop. Its a mystery and its anan investigation and its a story about people. Host Amy Ellis Nutt spent nine years as a fact checker at sports illustrate the a bit of her career. Becoming nicole is the bookom weve been talking with her about. Here it is. This is grandview drive and this is what Teddy Roosevelt called the worlds most beautiful drive. In peoria i think our greatest connection to lincoln is 1854 speak. Hes really the trade in peoria i think as a hero, and someone who stood his ground against the spread of slavery. Account like this which has a great history, its the largest city on the river. One time it was the second largest city in the state. With the resource of the river a special at that time and the whiskey that was being made, and, of course, caterpillar is a big industry, it has a very rich history. Welcome to peoria, illinois, on booktv. With help of our comcast partners over the next 90 minutes we will travel the city and talk with local authors about the history of the area. We start with a look at organized crime in peoria during the first half of the 20th century as we explore the life and times of the shelton brothers gang. A famous game were able to for about three from aunt in 1926 and was between the shelton brothers and the burger again. About 40 or 50 men were killed. The sheltons, this was a vicious gang war fought out. It concluded the first aerial bombing, the first and only one on american soil when the sheltons commandeered a world war i jimmy biplane and for over an burger side of which was like a little state lodge called shady rest in deep Southern Illinois and they dropped them down over shady rest. This was the only airplane raid we were had in american history. I wrote the book because, first of all of that a lifetime interest and ive been around a lot of years, in the, start against a history of downstate illinois. I grew up in bellevue which is next east st. Louis and across the mississippi were youve got st. Louis. East st. Louis figured heavily in the gangster history of downstate illinois. The sheltons basically the shelton did was run by three brothers. Karel the leader, big girl, is right in line come and the youngest brother in the family, bernard who was known as burning. They were three of the seven children who grew to adulthood in a family associate with old mall and paul shelton. In deep Southern Illinois, specifically in wayne county which is in the deep part of the state. They grew up very poor. They often had a tough time, even having food on the table. They lived in a very ramshackle little house about four miles east of fairfield illinois. One thing though they did learn as kids as teenagers were to shoot guns. And they learn real well. Eventually when prohibition set in, they bought a tablet and east st. Louis and soon were engaging obviously because of probation they were engaging in good lighting and started serving other taverns been the bootlegging sources of liquor illegal liquor for all the other taverns in st. Louis. They didnt really close during prohibition. The shells established themselves as the major bootleggers of Southern Illinois. That was the first real identity, and they were tough and mean and violent and smart, and they asserted themselves very quickly in the rapidly emerging world of organized crime that really was bond during prohibition. Thats one thing prohibition did, it did spawn what is now modern organized crime in the United States. As for the sheltons, the three shells, three of the seven kids, there were five boys and two girls, free of the five boys were later. The leader was karel who was very handsome, very smooth, very softspoken. He was handsome. He was a ladies man and he was very much, very charismatic actually. His brother, a girl, was very big earl. None of the boys got out of grade school but big earl was kind lieutenant to his brother karl. Then the Third Brother at the head of the gain was early, bernard, and he was the most violent of the three. Bernie like to shoot first and talk later. Bernie was the enforcer. As you know every criminal organization has one or more enforcers. Bernie was the enforcer. They gained prominence in i was in 1922, 1923, early in the era of prohibition. They quickly established themselves as they go to guys in the bootlegging business for all of Southern Illinois. They had a lot of lieutenant and so on, some of them had their own little empire within the vigor empire, and thats not unusual. They had everything going their way and deal, a lot of people, prohibition passed because there were people who want it enforced. It wasnt being enforced in most parts of downstate illinois. City officials look to the other way. Police chiefs look the other way. Sheriffs look the other way. So that gave rise to resurgence of the ku klux klan in the Southern Illinois. Now, that claim was basically, it was like a vigilante organization. It was like a comic book story plant of later years, 50s and 60s and someone. Years in which out the members of the local clan are fbi agents. But the klan was very serious about 23 year. And comprise a lot of leading citizens. They wore the white roads, pointed head coverings or whatever. But there were a lot of leading citizens in the klan because the one of prohibition enforced. When regular Law Enforcement authorities were not enforcing prohibition, they took upon themselves in a vigilante sort of way to do it. It resulted in incredible violence and murders and disaster situations. And it led to an allout war in Southern Illinois between the klan and between the bootleggers. The bootleggers led by karl shelton, like a bootlegging army. And incredible encounters occurred that come ideal i detail of course in the book, brothers notorious. It made frontpage headlines across the United States. From the New York Times to the los angeles times. Eventually the klan, the bootleggers defeated the klan. The klansmen back in the woodwork, okay . But then dissension erupted in the ranks of the shelton empire, and one case in particular named Charlie Berger was old empire in southeastern italy within the bigger shelton empire, a gang war, a famous gang war erupt from three to four months in 1926. Again it made headlines across the country and was between the shelton brothers and the burger king. About 40 or 50 men were killed. The sheltons reach their peak in 1930. That the world, the world by the tail in 1930. Everything had worked at the poynter finally come to their benefit. Their territory started south of peoria, a little south of peoria and what all the way down to the tip of the state at carol illinois down with the mississippi meets the ohio. Their influence and operations went a little bit into Southern Indiana and a little bit into southern missouri also as well as a little bit of western kentucky. Their headquarters basically were in east st. Louis, and the airy, they are linked together across the river from st. Louis. That was the foundation for many years of the sheltons criminal enterprises, bootlegging, then labor racketeering and then until a faulty camera. Peoria comes into play, its the last big hurrah in the shelton soccer. World war ii is starting, it is interesting that peoria was wide open. Everything and anything went in peoria. It had a National Reputation for being a wide open city. And amazingly, the underworld activity in peoria had continued to be dominated and led by local gangsters. This wasnt the case anywhere else in illinois. Of peoria was all dominated by the Al Capone Syndicate out of chicago, and starting south of peoria to the tip of the state it was all shelton bein