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Chapter 42
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Becoming Nicole, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender Identity, Expression, and Transformation
Knowledge vs. Ignorance
Gender, Sex, and the Scientific Community
Discrimination, Advocacy, and Pride
Family, Love, and Social Expectations
Summary
Analysis
Transgender rights continue to evolve. As of 2015, 18 states and more than 200 cities and counties in the U.S. bar discrimination against transgender people. In July 2015, the Obama administration lifts the restrictions against transgender people serving in the military.
Nutt concludes her book by reinforcing the fact that transgender rights continue to evolve as society itself transforms into a more accepting place.
Themes
Children are also growing up in a world where marriage equality is the law of the land. Children quickly understand fairness and equality and accept differences. This is demonstrated clearly in a conversation between third graders at Asa C. Adams Elementary School that Lisa Erhardt overhears, and which she relays to the Maineses.
Nutt also emphasizes in her concluding story that when the knowledge about marginalized groups becomes second nature to children, they are much more open and accepting than adults are, and will hopefully grow up to encourage more open-minded generations in the future.
Themes
The conversation Erhardt hears involves a transgender boy who is coloring a giraffe teal and pink, for the transgender flag. He and another girl discuss what it means to be transgender, and how there had been a girl in school who was transgender: Nicole. The girl remembers Nicole but says she didn’t know she was transgender. The boy says, “Yeah, but it isn’t a big deal, you know.” The girl responds, “Oh, I know. It doesn’t really matter. As long as she’s happy.”
For these children to describe being transgender as “not a big deal” (even though this incident occurs only a few years after Nicole was forced to leave the school), it provides some hope for the future that someday, to all people, being transgender will simply be another aspect of a person’s identity—not a definition of who they are and how they live, and not a justification for their discrimination.
Themes
