By Karen Ocamb

Mike Penner loved uniforms. Always did. As a 10-year-old boy who loved to draw, he was enthralled by the colors of big league football jerseys—the red Kansas City Chiefs, the Oakland Raiders with their “very manly” steely colors of black and silver, the San Diego Chargers powder blue. He wanted to see more so he started watching football on television, and then started writing about what he saw.

His therapist joked that those colorful uniforms are what made him one of the most well-respected sports writers at the Los Angeles Times for the past 23 years.

On April 26, Penner came out as Christine Daniels. “During my 23 years with the Times' sports department, I have held a wide variety of roles and titles. Tennis writer. Angels beat reporter. Olympics writer. Essayist. Sports media critic. NFL columnist. Recent keeper of the Morning Briefing flame,” wrote Penner. “Today I leave for a few weeks' vacation, and when I return, I will come back in yet another incarnation—as Christine.

“I am a transsexual sportswriter. It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-wrenching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words. I realize many readers and colleagues and friends will be shocked to read them. That's OK. I understand that I am not the only one in transition as I move from Mike to Christine.”

To help her family, friends and fans better understand her transition, Daniels is blogging about it on the L.A. Times blog site, latimesblogs.latimes.com/womaninprogress.

“It feels like a rebirth,” Daniels told IN Los Angeles during a May 7 interview infused with giddy liberation. “Everybody has been so nice,” including the Times, which has handled her coming out “better than sainthood.”

Daniels has not been alone in the process. For the past year she has attended the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles in West Hollywood under the pastoral care of Rev. Neil Thomas and his spiritual team who, Daniels said, “have been instrumental” in her transition. “In the first place, they have never seen me as Mike. They just accepted me as another woman” and have been “so excited and supportive about my coming out.”

Three days after her public coming out, Rev. Randall Besta preached about the apostle Simon raising Tabitha from the dead. For Daniels and the other MCC parishioners, the sermon was more than a profound metaphor about spiritual and emotional numbness.

“As an example of someone coming back from spiritual death and the impact we, as a Christian community, can have, I highlighted Christine Daniels,” Besta told IN. “The love God has for Christine was evident through every person who was there on her journey, especially those in the church who made it clear there is not death inside her, just life that was screaming to come out.”

Daniels cried and the congregation applauded. At the end of the service, Thomas invited the transgender members to come forward for a group prayer.

“We all had streaky faces,” Daniels said. “I was balling like a baby.”

Daniels, a Libra, was born in Inglewood in 1957.

Asked when she first knew she was born in the “wrong” body, Daniels said, “I don’t know if it was that clear cut. When I was about 4 or 5, I can remember wishing to be a girl.” She told her boy cousins who “were not demeaning or derisive at all. They were just curious.” She demonstrated how she would wear a dress, put ribbons in her hair and walk. “I wished the rest of my socialization had been like that. We had a great time.” She also had a “sissy” friend who was invited over to play with GI Joes and, instead, the two played with Barbie Dolls.

Daniels always felt uncomfortable, out of place, excruciatingly shy. She did the typical “guy things” like build models. But she was also very creative and wanted to be a cartoonist like Peanuts creator, Charles Shultz.

“I remember drawing a lot of pictures of women and girls that I wanted to look like—Ann Margret was a big one,” Daniels said. She also drew science fiction comic strips starring herself and a friend as secret agents who took a potion and changed into women to work undercover. After they solved the crime, her friend changed back, but Daniels didn’t—and “lived happily ever after.”

When she was 12, her father moved the family to Anaheim where she was inculcated with a strict Catholic upbringing. Living with a “huge secret” was not easy.

“I needed to fit in,” Daniels said. “It didn’t come easily for me. It was a learned behavior. I remember in third or fourth grade walking down the hall and turning my books the way I felt comfortable with them—carrying them against my chest.”

The boys laughed and pointed because Daniels was carrying her books “like a girl.”

“That was a big seminal moment for me,” Daniels said. She started studying male and female behavioral differences, and “I got an exaggerated sense of the differences. I think all transsexuals do that in order to fit in ... I just created this little vault, and that’s where I buried everything—the manners, the gestures, the desires, dreams, hopes, fears. And it’s just buried away because you never want anyone to find that out about you, because you don’t think you’ll be able to function if people know the real you. The fallout would be too great.”

That was then; this is now. “When I dress as Christine, I have a million options. I love that,” she said. No more drab. Now there’s lots of color.

No more divided soul. “When I can present as Christine and I have people call me ‘ma’am’ and see me as a woman—it’s very important for us to be seen and treated as women —I feel whole.”

And finally free.