How Kricket Nimmons Seized the Transgender Moment

[Pdoggg]

 

Perched on a gurney at dawn, Kricket Jerná Nimmons, 40, kicked her feet giddily, like a girl on the edge of a pool, preparing to take a plunge. She wore a hospital gown and purple socks with paw prints. Her face was clean-scrubbed — “no lash, no makeup, just me” — and she looked at peace.

 

“So, this is it,” she said, exhaling theatrically, which is her way.

 

A Brooklynite by way of South Carolina and Georgia, Ms. Nimmons was ticking down the minutes, as she had ticked down the months, until she would be wheeled into an operating room for gender reassignment surgery. It was a moment she had long dreamed about but considered out of reach, a shimmer at the edge of her field of vision.

 

Now, though, societal attitudes toward “transgenderalism,” as Ms. Nimmons calls it, were shifting so rapidly that many health plans were overturning their long-held exclusions of transition-related care. Even public insurers were approving surgical procedures that, until recently, were accessible only to those who could pay out of pocket, despite medical consensus about their safety and efficacy.

 

Seizing the opportunity, Ms. Nimmons was about to become one of the first low-income New Yorkers to undergo a genital reconstruction paid for by Medicaid. In a few hours, if all went well, her body would be aligned with her identity for the first time, and she would no longer be “a chick with a wiener,” in her words, but “a woman in mind, body and soul, before the Lord and before the law.”

 

Peering under the sheet that draped her that early October morning at a hospital outside Philadelphia, Ms. Nimmons bade farewell to what she called “my friend” — that “extra part” for which she was pronounced male at birth. Tattooed on her right forearm was her birth name, “Jerome,” complete with quotation marks.

 

“When I lay down and when I wake up, I’ll be a whole new creature, a whole new being,” Ms. Nimmons declared. “Out with the old, in with the new.”

 

Over the course of this year, Ms. Nimmons has often said she never expected to make it to 40, much less to “complete” the long, lonely journey from Jerome through Meeka (her interim name) and Magnolia Thunderpussy (her drag name) to Kricket.

 

As a black transgender woman from the rural South, she had traversed a rocky path. She endured sexual abuse as a child, an H.I.V.-positive diagnosis and eviction from her family’s home as a teenager. She made her living by hustling, went to prison for fraud and theft, and suffered sexual assault by guards. She survived botched black-market medical procedures, suicide attempts and AIDS-related illnesses.

 

And her experience echoed a harsh reality. The rates of extreme poverty, homelessness, H.I.V. infection, attempted suicide, assault and incarceration, which are high for transgender people as a whole, are extraordinarily high for black transgender women.

 

“You’re talking about some of the most disempowered people in our society,” said Randi Ettner, a clinical psychologist in Evanston, Ill., and a board member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. “Some of these women have experienced constant, chronic trauma — trauma upon trauma. Yet what I also see in them is the most astounding resilience.”

 

Many of Ms. Nimmons’s acquaintances have not beaten the odds. They have died in their 20s and 30s of illness, violence and suicide. So steeled was she to join them, in fact, that she had a running joke with friends that they had better get to her body before her mother did so she would not end up buried in a three-piece suit with a bow tie.

 

Last year, after getting out of prison in Georgia, she was broken, physically and mentally, she said. She was jobless, all but homeless and in poor health; her T-cell count, a measure of her immune system’s strength, had fallen to a dangerously low level. She did not know how to save herself from becoming “extinct,” as she put it.

 

Then her closest friend, a native New Yorker named Kahmel Gilliard, whom she had once taken under wing in South Carolina, offered a lifeline: “Come on up here to Brooklyn, baby,” he said. “This is a place that will help you take care of yourself, and you won’t have to do anything illegal to survive.”

 

So last fall, Ms. Nimmons boarded a discount bus to New York City to start over in a place of greater tolerance and robust, high-quality services for people living with H.I.V. She had no idea that her effort to reboot her life would dovetail with the state’s effort to offer greater protection and care to transgender New Yorkers, as well as with a year of increasing visibility for transgender Americans.

 

After a 13-hour bus ride, Ms. Nimmons disembarked in the bustle of Chinatown. She had $200 in her pocket and butterflies in her stomach.

 

“I just looked up and I said, ‘Lord, whatever you have planned for me, let it be,’ ” she said. “And then I hailed a cab.”

Read the rest of the article at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/13/us/kricket-nimmons-transgender-surgery.html?