‘I’m OK with the complexity of it’
LOS GATOS » Almost from the moment he learned about his election to his high school’s hall of fame, J McKnight could feel the conflict building from within.
The three-sport athlete from Los Gatos High — then known as Jennie McKnight, but now identifying as a transgender man — decided right then he would not attend the induction ceremony.
“I didn’t know if being honest about who I am now would create a problem,” he said last month.
But after much deliberation, McKnight came to the conclusion that it’s not only important to accept the honor for his athletic achievements but also to show up as who he is.
“Throughout my life, I did my best with what I had to be myself,” McKnight said. “And I’m OK with the complexity of it.”
McKnight, 58, already knows what he will say at the ceremony Saturday night. He knows because he put it all to paper weeks ago and mailed it to his mom. She would deliver his acceptance speech in his absence.
On the day he mailed the letter from his home in upstate New York, McKnight received a call from a reporter.
Hours of conversation ensued. The reporter shared the heartbreak of losing a close friend, a well-known Los Angeles Times sportswriter who committed suicide in 2009 after suffering somuch internal strife over gender identity.
McKnight began to reconsider his position. A week later, he decided he would travel across the country to attend the induction ceremony at La Rinconada Country Club in Los Gatos. His mother, stepfather, two brothers and a former Wildcats teammate also plan to attend
McKnight, a psychotherapist, ref lected on how a transgender person should be recognized when referencing the past. He equated the awkwardness of his situation to what Caitlyn Jenner has experienced. Jenner, the 1976 Olympic decathlon champion then known as Bruce, announced three years ago that she was a transgender woman. While she is now known as Caitlyn, the record books still refer to the goldmedalist as Bruce Jenner .
t the time of the nomination to the Hall, the 10-member selection committee of athletes, coaches and administrators didn’t know McKnight was a transgender man. They had wondered why Jennie was now J but only learned about the situation when McKnight told them after they contacted him about the award.
“He was right up front with it,” said Joe Zanardi, a member of the selection committee.
McKnight’s gender identification didn’t change the way the committee felt about honoring the athlete, according to Zanardi and two other panel members.
“He met all the qualifications,” committee member Bill Frey said of McKnight. “We were trying to find those girls back then who were really good athletes but who weren’t acknowledged as such.”
McKnight competed in an era when female athletes were not afforded the same opportunities as boys, standing among the first wave of girls who pur-. sued sports after the passage of the landmark antidiscrimination law Title IX in 1972. Four decades later, he is being recognized amid a politicized cultural debate over gender identification, highlighted in March when the Trump Administration announced a policy to ban most transgender people from serving in the military.
McKnight recalled wearing PE uniforms with no fanfare and “girls” rules during his freshman season of basketball. By the time he graduated, McKnight was part of one of the best programs in school history, the John Mackey- coached basketball teams known as the “Orange Crush.”
Los Gatos dominated South Bay girls basketball through the mid-1980s, and the 1978 team, co- captained by McKnight, reached the State Tournament of Champions at the Oakland Coliseum. McKnight was named to the all-tournament team.
He doesn’t recall many details of life as a high school jock, but he remembers trying to emulate his idol, Rick Barry, by shooting free throws underhanded as the Warriors star did.
McKnight also pitched and played shortstop for the softball team that won a league championship. He was named most inspirational player in volleyball as a senior.
Although he didn’t keep the trophies, McKnight has held tight to the lessons he learned about being a valued teammate. The teams gave him a purpose at a time when interacting socially was challenging.
“Sports was such a great antidote to the alienation I felt as a kid who was not conforming to the norms around gender and sexuality,” he said.
McKnight came of age at a time of sweeping changes in attitudes toward sexuality and gender. He was in eighth grade in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association stopped categorizing homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disorder. Four years later Renee Richards became the first transgender woman to play professional tennis. But being gay or transgender also was highly stigmatized as the LGBTQ community sought to find its voice.
As a high school senior in 1978, McKnight attended a speech at Stanford where gay activist Harvey Milk told the audience staying in the “closet” wasn’t the answer.
That same year, San Francisco mayor George Moscone visited the McKnights’ residence for a fundraiser. Two weeks later, Moscone and Milk, San Francisco’s first openly gay supervisor, were dead, shot by one of their colleagues at City Hall.
“I got strong messages that it was really not safe, but for yourself and for others, you need to be who you are,” McKnight said.
McKnight, who earned a degree in feminist studies at Stanford, came out as a lesbian in the early 1980s and identified as such until recently. His mother Nancy Avoy of San Jose worried about her eldest child’s well- being.
“There was such hostility toward homosexuality,” said Avoy, who taught English at Los Gatos High “What kind of life was that going to be?”
It took McKnight decades to identify more as a transgender man, a slow exploration of self- discovery. UCLA’s Williams Institute estimates there are 1.4 million transgender adults in the United States. Transgender people are people who know their gender identity does not correspond to the gender they were assigned at birth.
McKnight hopes sharing his experience will help others not feel the need to suffer in silence the way he once did. About 40 percent of transgender people have attempted suicide, a rate nearly nine times higher than overall U. S. figures, according to the media advocacy group GLAAD.
McKnight changed his name and referred to himself with male pronouns only in the past four years.
But it doesn’t change who he was growing up.
“I always have been a masculine version of a person in a female body, and socialized as a female person,” said McKnight, who married in 2016. “Although I prefer masculine pronouns, I think of myself as a blend of masculine and feminine aspects, and it has been a lifelong process of coming to terms with that and figuring out how to explain it to others.”
His father, Berkeley psychiatrist Frank McKnight, says he sometimes “slips” when finishing a telephone conversation with “Bye, hon.”
The father, who is 82, can’t attend the ceremony Saturday because of a scheduling conf lict. But he’s proud of how his child always has had a positive outlook even now as McKnight provides a complex view of a transgender person navigating in a society that puts labels on everyone.
As JMcKnight put it: “It can feel terrible to sense you are a territory people have a claim on, and you’re supposed to be declaring some kind of allegiance to their idea of who you are or should be.”
He worried his mother wouldn’t be as accepting of him being a transgender man. But Avoy found it easier than when first learning decades earlier that her daughter was a lesbian.
She told McKnight to take whatever name he wanted. By simply using J, McKnight paid tribute to his birth name while keeping it gender neutral.
“I admired he was willing to confront it,” Avoy said. “He and his wife are courageously living the life they want to live.”
Frank McKnight shared similar feelings of acceptance.
“Society has changed a lot in my time in terms of relationships and what’s a family and so forth,” he said. “We’re trying to stay with it.”
Avoy had an inkling about the struggle years ago when finding her 9-year- old crying in bed, saying, “Every night when I go to sleep I pray that I will wake up and be a boy and when I wake up I’m sad that I am not.”
McKnight had no memory of the experience until his mother told him. He now understands that he had suppressed those feelings just to get by.
“Sometimes the choices we make to protect ourselves don’t feel heroic, and if you have lived with fear or shame, it can be painful to acknowledge those choices,” McKnight said.
But people don’t always have to feel heroic.
“Sometimes it is enough to be OK,” he said.