Michelle Wolf's Blog (161)

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…

There is nothing like being called out on your words to generate some good discussion. There seems to be a lot of that lately, and frankly, I could not be happier about it. It’s not so easy to come up with new things to write about every few days, so if anyone wants to lob some grenades my way, I can’t help but be just a little bit thankful. The latest, and plucked right from my very last post, was the charge that trans women perpetuate a negative stereotype of women. Not only do I have to…

My identity as a female recently got another shot of validation. Not exactly the good kind either to be perfectly honest. At the end of last year I had my car inspected and found out the cost to bring it up to code was a little over 3 times what the car was worth. Well, after 11 years and not one single breakdown, the shoe was going to drop eventually. Having heard enough horror stories about trips to the mechanic from other women, I decided to try to cut them out of the picture as much as…

While most of the commentary has been very agreeable so far, we do have one amongst us who tends to take the dissenting opinion. This is good because fairly few discussions really need to any new thought when everyone just sits around agreeing with each other all day. I mean what fun is that? Based on the content provided by this person, who remains nameless and allegedly no one I know, my guess is that they fall in line with the RadFem philosophy. As this person, to date, is the only one of…

I’m now 9 months into what my gender specialist calls my ‘Year Long Test’, or what I simply call the rest of my life. For those who may be unfamiliar, The Test is the period of time a trans person must live as the gender of their identity in order to qualify for GRS, or as 99% of the population knows it, The Surgery. Ugh, nothing like a slew of capital ‘The’s’ to seriously aggrandize everything. Anyway, I got thinking about this and have a few bits to share.

My first…

Gay marriage devalues heterosexual marriage and transgender women devalue the womanhood of cisgender women. Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever started a post on such an inflammatory note! OK, before you get the pitchforks and torches out, I have not gone over to the dark side and still firmly planted on this side of the rainbow. The Oz side, not the dreary black and white Kansas one. We have all heard those types of statement before though, haven’t we? Let’s talk about that for a…

I know this constitutes serious self abuse already (not the Biblical kind where some bearded old patriarch wacked off into a fire), but I just had to scroll down to the comments section when I saw another CNN article about Fallon Fox. In case you aren’t aware, Ms Fox is a highly trained female fighter in the MMA who recently came out as a post-operative MTF transsexual. The legally mandated amount of hoopla around this revelation was achieved in typical media soap-opera fashion. To ensure…

This past Saturday I had the pleasure of finally meeting in person the fabulous Dr Christine McGinn. Yes ladies and gentlemen, it appears as though I’m going to make one of my New Year’s resolutions after all! I can’t remember what the rest were, and clearly too lazy to scroll down the page, even though I took the trouble to link to the post here. That’s OK though, because out of all of them, this was the biggie and the rest will come in time.

Late in the winter, I finally got off my…

Yes, I’m still on the damn bathroom issue. Apparently, I just need to get it out of my system before I get back to my usual level of humor, that pun excluded of course. Go ahead, groan, now let’s move on people. In my last post I referred to the trans girl, Coy, in Colorado who had been using the girl’s room, but then banned and asked to use separate but unequal facilities in a compassionate attempt to make her feel like a mutant freak. Apparently 6 is the right age to really drill home how…

It’s as much about what you see as where I can pee. Well, and a lot more, but one thing at a time. I know we have talked about “The Bathroom Issue” before, but it’s high time we revisit this fun little topic once again. Very recently we had the trans girl in Colorado who was granted separate but unequal accommodations after being kicked out of the girls room. Apparently it’s never too…

After much searching, I finally discovered something that is arguably more painful than facial hair removal, or any hair removal for that matter. I can’t remember feeling this level of distress since that craptacular 3 days of work between the time when everyone found out about me and I began coming to work dressed as myself. Yeah, that was pretty bad and all, but this is far, far worse. Curious?…

The fuse is lit, the snooze is broken, the point of no return is half a mile back, and the expiration date draws nigh. I think more than a few trans people are aware already of what I’m talking about. That point of time, now on the visible horizon and approaching rapidly, where we will lose the ability to function in accordance with our natal genders. It’s a pretty freaky time to be sure, and one that is different for every one of us. Some reach it through slow deterioration, or needful…

“No you’re not, you’re a guy” Oh, the words we so love to hear, especially when someone’s gaze at the same time is focused 30 degrees below our chin. Because I managed to go several months now without mentioning ‘Glee’, the writers responded to the doubtless flagging viewership and decided to shove something in there guaranteed to inspire me to write about. Well, probably not, but I’m glad they brought it up anyway as this horribly cold March is leaving me grasping at straws to come up with…

Now, I’m not one to go ragging on my sisters all the time (shush you, “all” the time is a little extreme you know), so I thought today would be a good time to start looking at some of the really great positives that we get to experience in transition. Almost every one of us who went down this road got to the starting line, looked at what lay ahead, and simultaneously lost today’s breakfast and yesterdays dinner at the same time. Wouldn’t it be nice then if we made it easier on our sisters…

Don’t you just love it when people pull this little analogy out when the topic of transgender children comes up? “Hell, I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up, so this is the same thing. He has boy chromosomes, so he’s a boy. That is a FACT!” Yeah, I’ll get to the chromosome thing in a later post because that requires a little more thought to declare it bunk and I’m tired this morning. Let’s look at the astronaut argument for now while I sip on some delicious Scottish Orange Pekoe tea…

ne of the striking similarities I’ve seen in both the trans community and in pubescent girls is the love of posing for photographs. If you have a female relative who falls into the latter category, and happen to be friends on Facebook, I have no doubt you are inundated with endless posed pics of them trying to look cute, sexy, fun or even just silly. Not surprisingly, at least to me, I often see many trans Facebook friends doing the exact same thing.

Before everyone thinks I’m getting…

There is just something special about being part of a very small minority and living in constant worry of pissing off other members of your niche minority simply by choosing the wrong words. It’s one thing when an ignorant portion of the greater world population uses slang and terminology designed to be hateful, but when we start bickering amongst ourselves about these things, I feel we missed the boat all together. I think we should talk about this because I’ve been seeing way too much of…