A Transman's Valuable, Empathetic Insights For Women On Being A Man

Max Wolf Valerio digs into male behavior, values and disconnects with women, with a lot of help from 'T' (Testosterone)

Public domain image from Pikist

There aren’t many sex transition stories I trust. Today’s switchers lack honesty, possessing zero understanding or self-awareness as to why they did it.

I favor stories from folks who transitioned before trans-fashionability. Dana Bevan’s The Transsexual Scientist convincingly writes she never felt right in her boy’s body, although she was romantically attracted to girls. She was born in 1948.

I read Max Wolf Valerio’s (née Anita) book The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from FEMALE to MALE. Valerio, who appears to have been genuinely gender dysphoric as a child and did not outgrow it, offers a poetic twist and sense of humour about himself lacking in today’s woketrans. Max began in the ‘80s, when sex change was less common, and F2M quite rare. Apart from his weird lesbian politics as a gay woman, there’s no kill-the-TERFs hate since America hadn’t yet gone idiocratic over immutable sex differences.

I’m always curious what it’s like on The Other Side. What can he teach me and other women—and men!—about experiencing manhood as a biological woman?

I spent a lot of time underlining text on the subway and trying not to laugh out loud sometimes, especially learning that men can’t smell their own strongly-scented pee very well because of testosterone.

‘T’ is the focus, as you might guess, and Valerio describes an awful lot of time in front of mirrors scrutinizing his face and body for T-induced changes.

What a diff’rence a male makes!

Valerio hails from a time when biological science wasn’t a social just-us clusterfuck. He writes extensively about T’s biological and hormonal changes, and its impact on his behavior.

“I feel more confident, expansive, cocky. It’s a pounding-on-the-chest kind of feeling, a swagger, a strut. Testosterone is an androgen, an up, pure raucous power.” He begins to grok risk-taking, boys turning wild tricks on skateboards, weaving in and out of traffic, jumping curbs. Testosterone is energy, something he says non-trans men never understand because they’ve never lived under the influence of estrogen. They have nothing to compare it to.

Hey, there’s a reason why women’s health and car insurance is lower in those states that don’t prohibit gender-based insurance discrimination.

James Dean stares into his immediate future. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 photo from John Irving on Flickr

And what about estrogen for wannabe women? Valerio cites transwomen who say they cry now more than once or twice a year. How they weren’t prepared for the influx of emotions, their greater concern for others. Estrogen, one transwoman reported, made her feel more ‘relaxed’ and likened it to a ‘tranquilizer’.

Hey dyke, you’re hot!

Valerio notes how his perception of women seem ‘softer’, ‘rounder’, ‘prettier’ after T. Their facial ‘edges’ become ‘smooth, sweet surfaces’. Even women with skin issues look more glow-y. Their voices are higher and more melodic, and, “I never realized how musical women’s voices are! Notes are sprinkled inside the words. I listen in wonder. Entranced.”

Wow. I’m clearly missing the music in my girlfriends’ voices. I will listen more.

Even butch lesbians become more ‘womanly’ than when he was Anita. Their feminine qualities become ‘painfully apparent’ and he wonders, Can it be I’m beginning to perceive women as men do?

As even plain or average-looking women become more feminine to Valerio, it becomes more difficult to communicate. “These women speak in another language, although they are moving their lips in a familiar way. I recognize the words, yet can’t quite grasp the meaning. An essential dimension has become hidden.” He doesn’t understand female conversation the way he used to.

Which leads me to wonder whether men aren’t as unconcernedly clueless as women think, or whether hormonally, they honestly can’t understand us the way we’d like them to. Which leads to another obvious question: If testosterone truly ‘clouds’ men’s minds in certain ways to understanding women, what is estrogen doing to blind us to them?

I don’t know that T is necessarily the culprit; this is Valerio’s individual experience. I question whether all these changes are T-induced, or whether he subconsciously conforms to culture (“This is how men act”). I’ve noticed over the decades that some men are better at understanding the female perspective than others; an old boyfriend from nearly forty years ago was particularly good at it, and asked questions no other man asked like, “What is it like to have a period? What is it like for a woman to have sex?” Try explaining colors to a blind person! Which I’ve done. It led me to ask what it was like to have a penis, and what it felt like to have sex. Men and women will never understand much about the other sex’s sexual experience, but it’s a beneficial exercise to try.

Valerio lost his dyke detection, which he says men lack overall, even when she’s dressed very dykily and looks quite masculine. Men, he feels, perceive the femaleness in women regardless of how they identify or present themselves. His F2M friend Will reported the same: He had a harder time recognizing dykes, and they both felt like they’re losing their gaydar. Before transition, reports Will, “…20% of the women looked attractive, and now 80% of them do.”

So. Guys chase skirts because they’re attracted to nearly everybody! Including dykes. Oi!

While Valerio discovers a new-found love of heavy metal, thrash rock, hardcore metal and rap, he finds relief from his female mood swings, with emotions ‘not as close to the surface.’ (I have to admit: That must be nice!) The “little-known secret of female to male sex change,” he explains, is that the default human condition in the womb is everyone starts out female. It’s why, he explains, “..it’s so much easier to pick things up from there.”

I’ve noticed (mostly from YouTube) that F2Ms seem much more convincing and ‘passable’ than many M2Fs. A thin man with delicate bone structure (a ‘prettyboy’), can often ‘pass’, but otherwise, most ‘transwomen’ look like chicks in drag.

Chaz Bono, née Chastity Bono. By Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Valerio identifies, indirectly, one of women’s most damaging psychological weaknesses: Caring so much what other people think. Valerio sought validation more for his maleness before he transitioned. He loved when people commented that his voice sounded deep, but once it deepened further with T, he no longer cared what people thought of his female voice.

Oh, if only we could care (a little) less what others think!

Consider how women censor themselves around their friends, don’t assert themselves, stress out about something said either by herself or someone else. Guys don’t worry about this stuff, and they get over it. One doesn’t need to shoot T for that, it’s something you can work on, but it may be more hormonally based than we think.

What’s for dinner?

Valerio’s sex drive kicks in big-time with T. He understands the need for just ‘getting off’ without having a relationship. He understands when Tom Snyder interviews Camille Paglia and says “Women didn’t understand what sex was to men.” He called it “food”.

Maybe I should ask that aforementioned ex-boyfriend about this, since we’re still friends and in fact were texting the other day. ‘Food’? Like, you have to have it to survive? Valerio doesn’t explain why it makes sense to him so I Googled it. The best explanation I found was a Reddit thread in which it was put in the context of a relationship. Sex feeds the relationship the way food feeds the body.

But, I’m not really sure that’s what Snyder meant.

The fraught homophobia of the men’s room

The public restroom chapter was why I had such a hard time not laughing on the subway. It’s so much easier to take a pee in the ladies’! We lack that ‘nervous homophobia’, “a nearly palpable tension that precludes more than a minimum amount of socializing.”

So I guess guys aren’t shooting the breeze while they’re shoulder-to-shoulder aiming for the urinal cakes. Valerio says men also take a lot of time in the bathroom sometimes, they just spend it alone. In the stall.

Okay, no news here if you’ve ever lived with a male but in public restrooms too? Whatever they’re doing, he says—Reading? Jerking off?—they’re “…taking their own sweet time with their pants down below their knees.” He wonders if the guy is dead from an overdose or a heart attack, or still hasn’t come. Even the graffiti is different. Women might scrawl helpful advice for each other—’ARNOLD IS A GREAT FUCK, KURT’S DICK IS HUGE’ (I’ve only ever seen warnings on who’s allegedly an asshole) but he notes that women’s bathroom graffiti is mostly political (yes)—dialogues between squatters on twelve-stepping, battered women and lesbianism.

What do guys write about while they’re Bombing The Bowl? “COME HERE SATURDAY NIGHT, GET HARD, GET SUCKED. TOM LOVES BIG DICKS UP THE ASSHOLE. I LIKE TO SUCK OFF STRAIGHT MARRIED MEN, ESPECIALLY THOSE WITH BIG FEET AND TIGHT BUNS” [Are they really that specific?] with a phone number. Next to the mirror, there’s a dick drawing spurting droplets.

Geez, no wonder there’s an aura of homophobia in the men’s, and that’s before you even get to the gay club.

If that sounds like an inner sanctum to the way men really behave in a female-free environment, just wait til you get to the gropefest chapter on the Church of Saint Priapus, which ain’t yer granddaddy’s church (or maybe it was and you never knew!) It’s a strictly no-women-allowed space to get groped and sucked off through a ‘glory hole’ in absolute anonymity. Men touch each other, squeeze together, grab, yank, twist, whatever they can. Two strangers approach each other, stop, look into each other’s eyes and jack off together. Some are just there to watch. Not a lot of talking, not a lot of noise. Just men standing around with their family jewels exposed, waiting to see what happens. Most women have no clue how this works and most would not like to be in a room with other women masturbating together or eating a random, anonymous vagina through a hole in the wall, although I’m sure there are exceptions. By and large, it’s just not what turns women on.

Saint Priapus, Valerio reports, is raw, tense male sexuality unchained. It’s the most extreme male realm. They don’t have to tone themselves down or act a certain way to get jacked off, blown or laid. They objectify each other (objectification, Valerio reports, comes with the T) and are ‘cruising with an abandonment that borders on cruelty—a lustful, cruel rooting out of desired body parts.”

The differences between male and female sexuality are no starker than at The Church. There’s no equivalent ‘glory hole’ at even the craziest lesbian sex clubs for anonymous licking, although there’s talk of safe sex techniques. At Saint Priapus, the only safe sex is a prohibition against anal at the height of the AIDS crisis. There’s more talk and sharing at lesbian sex clubs. Emphasis on ‘fairness, safety, and civility’.

Other themes

Valerio explores over-judgemental feminism and the fact that some women ‘do seem to be trying to spoil the party sometimes’ with too much analysis, too many rules, over-exaggerated accusations of sexual harassment and abuse, and demands for male accountability. I don’t agree with him on his inclusion of feminine emphasis on the ‘c-word’, commitment—after all, we want what we want and should hold out for it, but I can certainly appreciate his point of view on crazy-ass feminism.

I don’t like those chicks either!

He notes how much more authority he’s automatically gifted for being male. He’s offered managerial positions without any experience which never happened as a woman. He notes the affection in male kidding around, which to women looks more insulting or abusive than it is. More uncomfortably, he writes with understanding, if not condoning, of rape and why some men might be prone to committing it. He describes a female coworker he’s attracted to, explores the aggression with which he wants to just take her. “I want to fuck her so bad, grab her and throw her down on the floor and fuck her so hard so strong…I have to stop and take stock. This feeling is different in intensity from anything I’d known before in its pleading for release.”

He doesn’t justify rape, but expresses understanding in why some guys ‘lose it’ sometimes. And wonders why men don’t more often. “Rape and plunder. Take.”

It’s uncomfortable to read, to think that perhaps some men really do feel sexual urges that strong. I’m more inclined to listen to an ex-female like Valerio than a biological man here; you never know when men are justifying it to themselves. After all, doesn’t that define the history of rape as a criminal act? Men blaming the woman, how’s she’s dressed, knowing she ‘really wants it,’ is playing hard to get, and hey, don’t all women have rape fantasies? Lesbian Anita was immersed enough in misandrist lesbian politics to know that rape is a violent sex act that can never be condoned. But it’s a bit frightening to believe that the urge to fuck another human being is so strong that some are willing to act upon it, especially with the tacit understanding that feminist culture collaborates to protect rapists from accountability.

One more interesting tidbit about being a man we don’t understand: As we complain about having to move through life constantly aware of the potential for male violence against us, the weaker sex, we are mostly unaware that men live the same way too. Man-on-man violence is just as quotidian as casual male-on-female violence. Men threaten to kick Valerio’s ass if he gives them the finger or bumps into the wrong guy at the wrong time. He had zero awareness of this before he became a man. He says he’s been “mugged, punched in the face, and threatened on more than a few occasions. I’ve had to learn a new code of conduct,” but also describes chasing a guy for blocks for impatiently hanging up a pay phone Valerio was on since, apparently, the other guy needed to use it.

I will never fully understand what makes men tick but I feel a little less ignorant, and more empathetic. I’ve always known they don’t have it as easy as misandrist feminists imagine; the haters on both sides don’t understand we’re all just struggling to wake up alive the next morning. I want to be less judgemental and more sympathetic to my counterpart humans; I wish and hope men will do the same for us. My perception, especially from online dating, is that men never seem to learn or desire to understand women better; please feel free to debunk me in the comments! I would love to be proven wrong about this.

The Testosterone Files is a wicked good read without the politics, female-hate or the incessant narcissism one finds in modern transfolk. Loved it. Recommend it!

When I’m not laughing remembering the best ladies restroom graffiti I ever saw—“What is it about taking a dump that inclines women to write on the walls about the man who most stimulates their hormones?”—I help women and others reclaim their power here at Grow Some Labia.