Michelle Wolf's Page

The first time I picked up Jennifer Finney Boylan’s autobiographical work, She’s Not There; A Life in Two Genders, I was in a pretty terrible place. I hadn’t yet dared to use ‘the T word’ to describe myself, but I was starting to get very close. I paged through it in the Barnes and Noble parking lot while an early November snow began to come down. “This is either going to be so strange that I know I’m on the wrong track, or it’s going to be way too familiar and then I’m in big…

What the hell is ‘dysphoria’ anyway? It’s really a question along the same lines as asking what Lupus, Shingles, or Planters Fasciitis are. None of these, by the way involves wolves, roofers, or gardeners, contrary to the naming conventions followed by less elusive ailments like Tennis Elbow. In any case, being transgender, or specifically transsexual, used to be known as ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ and was classified as such in the DSM before they decided to knock it the hell out of there…

You ever just kind of feel like there is an elephant in the room and that it’s probably you? Living in full time transition, it’s a feeling you tend to get a lot. A whole lot. You can often fool yourself and pretend it’s not there, but then all of a sudden someone refers to you as ‘he’ in a meeting, by accident, and the room grows deathly silent with all eyes focused intently on anything outside your immediate area. Nice, right? Let’s talk about that for a minute.

We’ve kind of…

Some of you may have noticed that my frequency of posting has gotten, well, a little lackadaisical of late. All right, fine, it doesn’t appear that anyone really noticed at all, or worse, was relieved not to have my little thoughts show up every fricking time they opened their email. Yes, I know it was you and believe you me, I will remember. Silly little half-assed threat aside, I thought I’d talk about that for a minute because, why not?

More specifically, it’s becoming more and…