Stripped rights
by Dennis McBriDe
How Nevada Helped destroy a family This article is excerpted from the book Out of the Neon Closet: Queer Community in the Silver State, now available at Sundance Books and other retailers. Tim Daly and Nan Toews were married in 1969, and their daughter, Mary, was born four years later. When the couple divorced in 1981, Nan took custody of Mary while Tim, who had moved to Berkeley to work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, kept visitation rights and paid both child support and alimony. Nan Daly and Mary lived in Reno. Daly had long realized he was transgender and began attending support groups at the Pacific Center for Human Growth Awareness in Berkeley. In August 1981, while daughter Mary was visiting him in California, Tim, who had adopted the name Suzanne Lindley Daly, told her he was transgender and planning surgery and urged Mary not to tell her mother. But Mary did tell her mother, and on May 12, 1982, Nan Daly filed a Petition for Order Terminating Parental Rights of Natural Father under Nevada Revised Statute 128.105. Nan did not want simply to end Suzanne’s visitation privileges but to sunder her legal identity as Mary’s natural parent. When Suzanne began living as a woman, legally changed her name, and underwent surgery, Nan Daly obtained a restraining order to keep her from contacting their daughter while the termination proceedings were underway. Suzanne asked the Reno firm Bowen, Swafford and Hoffman, who had handled her divorce, to represent her in her parental rights case, but they refused when they found she was transgender. Suzanne instead hired Susan J. Haveson of Reno’s Hall and Haveson, as well as California attorneys Ellen LaCroix and Ann Casamajor, who was herself transgender. Nan’s lawyer was Nada Novakovich, one of Nevada’s most honored attorneys and a prominent member of Reno society. The judge was John Gabrielli. The hearings took several days, during which Suzanne Daly and her legal team presented a strong defense not only of her fitness as a parent, but of the nature of transgender people. Among their witnesses were Lynn Frazier, facilitator for the transgender group at the Pacific Center Suzanne had been attending; Andrea Canaan, executive director of the Pacific Center; and Dr. Ira Pauly, chairman of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the University of Nevada School of Medicine. Pauly’s supportive testimony was particularly important. Pauly, who often collaborated with Dr. Harry Benjamin, is one of the great pioneers in the identification and treatment of what then was called “gender dysphoria.” Pauly wrote the two most respected reports on genital
Suzanne Lindley Daly
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