Structure

Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family is divided into four sections: Beginnings, The Sexual Brain, Gender Matters and Breaking Barriers. Beginnings allows the readers to understand Wyatt as a young girl from his toddler years to early elementary school. Readers are introduced and intimately meet the immediate family: Wyatt’s parents, Kelly and Wayne, and his identical twin brother Jonas. The Sexual Brain section allows the author to shift radically from personal story to writing about science, specifically the science behind gender, genitalia, and how the natural world holds anomalies to both. This is coupled with the harsh two years of fifth and sixth grade in Orono as if to show that even though anomalies exist in nature, how humans treat them with prejudice and harassment, even if they are children, is common. The third section, Gender Matters, discusses more of the psychology and difficulties...