Don’t Look Behind You

Thailand to have a series of operations performed by a transgender surgeon. When he came back, he would be “Nicole.”
    Ty was angry with Nick, and he begged him to think it over—but Nick was adamant. He had waited all his life to be the person he felt he was, and he would not be dissuaded.
    A decade later, Ty still believes that no one is actually born in the wrong gender, and that those who have operations to change their sex are
choosing
to do that, and are in no way compelled. He argued, lectured, and pleaded with Nick not to take such an irreversible step as having all of his male organs removed.
    It was like talking to a stone wall. Nick wasn’t gay; inside, he felt he was a female. He went to Thailand and had the operations that would allow him to live like that.
    Even so, the brothers are still close. Except for their four daughters, Ty and Nicole are, basically, all they have left of their secretive and often bizarre birth family. They did locate their half brother Bobby Morrison and had an affectionate reunion.
    But now they have lost him again. They hope that he may read this book and get back in touch.
    Nicole didn’t tell her father what she had done; she hadn’t talked to him in years, anyway. Bob probably found out. Melissa, Nick/Nicole’s ex-wife, has an aunt and uncle who are longtime acquaintances of Bob Hansen’s, and he undoubtedly heard of Nicole’s surgery from them. It must have been a shock for him. The man who spent his whole life striving to be macho and the epitome of what he thought a male should be would not accept his oldest son as a woman, nor did he have the capacity to understand someone else’s deep needs.
    Nicole believes that her mother’s sudden disappearance had a great deal to do with her very early confusion about gender. Along with her siblings, she experienced separation anxiety when her mother was ripped out of her life.When that happened, none of Joann’s children could completely trust or feel total serenity again.
    Asked if she might have suffered so deeply at her father’s abuse that she wanted nothing to do with being male, Nicole nods.
    “I’ve considered that,” she says. “I just don’t know for sure. I’ve had a lot of therapy to help me understand it.”
    Ty had worked on many part-time construction jobs with his dad over the years, swallowing his feelings of anger when Bob belittled him. There were times when he simply needed the money, even though, on one roofing job, Bob Hansen threw him off the roof because he said Ty was tacking the shingles down wrong.
    However, when Ty learned the truth about what had happened to his mother, he wanted nothing to do with the old man.
    Bob began to sell off his rentals; in his third season in Costa Rica, he’d rented a nice condominium there and he was planning to buy a more expensive place.
    Flory was living under “lock-down,” and if she had ever felt love for Bob Hansen, she no longer did. She was a virtual prisoner, and neighbors along the street in Auburn felt sorry for her.
    They chuckled when they saw official-looking cars drive up and Department of Immigration officers stride toward Bob’s front door. When he opened it and started to argue with them, they wrestled him to the ground and put him in handcuffs.
    He’d had no choice but to marry Flory to keep her in the country.
    As I researched this case, no one knew exactly where Flory was. Fearing that she, too, might have vanished as Joann did, I checked with King County detective sergeant Jim Allen in May 2011, and he assured me that Flory was safe and living in Costa Rica. He had a recent telephone number for her and kept in touch.
    Bob had never worried much about what law enforcement could do to him. But the immigration agents had worried him. His plan was for him to leave America and live in Costa Rica; he was willing to take whatever steps he needed to take to move there, and he needed to have as clean a record with the police as possible.
    He had always felt invincible as far as the law went. He’d certainly been arrested a number of times for fighting and road rage offenses, but he’d only spent one night in jail—and that was the sentence Joann’s lawyer, Duncan Bonjorni, had given him back when Bonjorni was a judge.
    In March 1979, Hansen had been arrested for assault when he hit a highway employee with a shovel in an argument about the placement of a sign. Bob was working on one of his rentals and had placed a FOR RENT sign on