WindyCityMediaGroup.com – by Rachel Pepper
The transgender publishing world is exploding, and these two books, Just Add Hormones and Testosterone Files, are among the best of the recent crop. Both capture what it is like to be an F-to-M, that is, female-to-male, transgendered or transsexual man.
Matt Kailey lived as a straight woman for 42 years and then transitioned with hormones and surgery into a self-proclaimed transsexual, also becoming a gay man in the process. His book, Just Add Hormones, is the more analytical of the two, and perhaps more clinically informational. Kailey deftly explains so many things that a non-trans person might question?such as how a trans-man picks a new name, how trans-men retrain themselves to become more masculine and why trans-men are often more chauvinistic than straight men ( basically, because, despite living as women previously, they now must ?reject all things feminine before, during, and after the transition.? ) Kailey also places the struggle for trans rights squarely into the lesbian and gay movement, with his chapter on TransPride explaining his vision of an all-inclusive queer pride movement.
Yet, Max Wolf Valerio?s Testosterone Files struck me as more heartfelt. Weighing in at 343 pages, Valerio?s book is meaty, detailed and emotionally gripping. It chronicles the years in the late 1980s he spent considering and then beginning his transition, and takes us gradually up to the near-present days of his life as a straight man. In 1989, Valerio had his first testosterone shot, and is now well known as one of the first and most visible F-to-Ms in San Francisco?s swelling transgender community. A writer and performance artist, Valerio has also been the subject of several films, including Monika Treut?s 1992 short film Max and a later release, Gendernauts.