Maybe you think Nick Sarchet is a tortured soul.
Someone who deserves your pity. Or maybe, like the two men who beat him up two weeks ago, you think he’s some kind of freak.
“You queers don’t deserve to live,” they hissed after they bashed his head with a rock and kicked him in the gut. “We don’t want you in our school. We don’t want you in our neighborhood.”
Nick has been assaulted before. But this time, for the first time, he has decided to speak out. Without hiding anything. No matter what the repercussions.
“I’m tired of other people thinking people like me don’t exist, that we’re just weird or strange or abnormal. Someone has to make people like me real.”
The attack happened April 7, around 11:30 p.m. Nick had finished working on a paper about child development for his psychology class and had driven home. He briefly wondered who was in the small dark car turning the corner behind him onto his street. He unlocked the front door. Headed straight for the living room light when he heard a noise behind him. Thought it was James Dean, his cat.
The two men took turns kicking Nick in the stomach. Then they hurled him against the living room wall by the fireplace. They also hurled gender slurs at him.
Nick could feel the blood coursing through his head. He didn’t dare tell them what he really was.
Because Nick Sarchet, who until last month went by the name of Kimberly Lin Smith, is a woman. A woman in the process of becoming a man. It has taken years for him to get to this place, a place of relative comfort and self-acceptance.
Right now, Nick is in psychological therapy, a requirement for transgender candidates who want to take the male hormone, testosterone, which promotes the growth of body hair, lowers voice tones and redistributes fat. Nick plans to leave his genitals alone for now. But he hopes to have a double mastectomy, which costs at least $3,000, as soon as he can afford it.
“I want what’s in my mind to be congruent with the way I look,” Nick says.
He is 5 feet 7 inches, about 130 pounds. He has short red hair, thick red eyebrows and an upturned nose. His voice is a mixture of gentle femininity and boyish gruff. He walks with grace and confidence.
Nick Sarchet is 28, a junior studying biology and psychology at the University of Miami, where he has an academic scholarship. He moved to Miami-Dade’s Westchester neighborhood from Ann Arbor, Mich., in August because he thought South Florida was so diverse, he would simply melt into the crowd. But no.
The attackers finished spewing their rage and ran out of the house. Nick called 911. Metro-Dade Police Officer Janet Sosa responded.
“In my opinion,” Sosa says, “it was a hate crime . . . I really felt bad.”
Sosa speculates the attackers may have seen the stickers with the rainbow colors of the gay flag on the bumper of Nick’s car and followed him home from school. One read “Celebrate Diversity” and the other “Hate is NOT a family value.”
A week after the attack, Nick’s face was still marred by the assault. Black and blue marks had faded to a greenish yellow. A dark red scab stretched across his left eyelid. But he felt a lot better, he said, and has healed enough physically to begin to sift through his emotions surrounding the attack.
“People look at me and make judgments about who I am based on their own experience–not mine. Sometimes, though, they can’t fit me in a box and that scares them.”
The only box his psychologist is willing to put him in is that of a “well-adjusted person” who “is in touch with feelings but not ruled entirely by emotions.”
“I don’t see him as a tortured person,” said Kim Fuller, clinical psychologist at the University of Miami Counseling Center.
Still, the pressures of an often homophobic world, Fuller says, make life hard for Nick, no matter how levelheaded he is. The gay community faces similar stereotypes and the ensuing discrimination, but over the years has developed its own support network, she says. Yet, for people like Nick, who want to be a gender they were not biologically assigned, there is far less understanding, far less support.
And a lot more isolation.
Nick grew up as Kimberly Lin Smith in South Lyon, Mich., a small, middle-class town with one high school, one local newspaper and an abundance of churches and pizza joints. Kimberly’s father tested control panels and airbags for Chrysler. Her mother was a pharmacy assistant for a local drugstore. Both are devout Catholics and raised Kimberly and her two brothers accordingly.
She always thought of herself as a boy. In junior high school, Kimberly would lie in bed at night and fantasize about it.
The feeling that she was different continued to develop.
The older Kimberly got, the more acute the feeling became. So she did the only thing she could think to do to squelch it forever. She got married.
She was 22. By 23, she had a son. “I did that because I had really low self-esteem and I thought having a kid was the answer. I thought I would have someone who would love me the way I loved them.” By 24, Kimberly was divorced, a single mom with a son–and an identity crisis.
She stopped masquerading as a woman who liked men and began to call herself a lesbian. She cut her hair. Threw away her dresses and bought some jeans and striped T-shirts. She loved her new lifestyle.
But other people didn’t like that she felt that way. One day after a k.d. lang concert in Detroit, some men followed her into a parking garage, called her a lesbian, snatched her purse and slapped her around.
Last year, shortly before moving to Miami, she started binding her breasts with a lower-back restraint and passing as a man. Her friends still are grappling with the change but strangers and new acquaintances consider her a man.
This month, continuing her transformation, Kimberly Lin Smith filed a court order to become Nick Kim Sarchet.
Nick hasn’t told his parents about becoming a man. He’s trying to break it to them slowly, maybe in a letter.
His worst fear is that they will try to take his son, who is now 4 and bounding across the living room in Westchester.
Nick asks the child how he would feel about having another father.
“I don’t want you to be my daddy,” the child replies. “I want you to be my mommy.”
Nick says he knows it’s difficult for his son and plans to put him in therapy.
The phone rings. It’s a friend of Nick’s, wanting to know if Nick is going to scuba diving class. Nick says no, his face is still too swollen from the attack to wear his goggles. The caller worries about Nick. He’s fine, Nick reassures. Just needs a little more time to heal. Nick hangs up the phone and turns his mind away from the inherent stress of his life.
Luckily, he is not without a sense of humor.
“I have nothing to hide,” Nick says, “except my breasts.”
