Max Wolf Valerio

Max Wolf Valerio (born February 16, 1957) is an American poet, memoir writer, essayist and actor whose work focuses on the experiences of transgender men.

Valerio's 2006 memoir The Testosterone Files, in which he describes his own transition, was a finalist for the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature. Valerio has been featured in multiple documentaries and films about gender identity and transgender experiences.

Early life and education Valerio was born on February 16, 1957, at a US Army hospital in Heidelberg, Germany. His father, who is Hispano from Taos, New Mexico, served in the United States Army for 20 years, which caused their family to move frequently in the United States and Europe.

Valerio has researched his heritage and inferred that a significant number of his paternal ancestors were crypto-Jews who had become conversos but secretly handed on Sephardic Jewish traditions. Valerio is a Treaty Indian and also enrolled in the Kainai Band (Blood Band), Treaty 7, in Alberta Canada. His mother (née Shade) is from the Kainai Reserve, also known as the Blood Reserve. The Kainai are members of the Blackfoot Confederacy.

As a child and teenager, Valerio lived in US states including Maryland, Washington, California, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, as well as in Canada and Germany. In 1988, after discussions with a friend and roommate who was transitioning from male to female, he realized that he was transsexual and began to consider a sex change. both of which are regarded by LGBTQ+ groups and contemporary transgender scholars as exceptionally transphobic. He then found the FTM Organization, run by Lou Sullivan, and started attending meetings. Valerio was amazed by the other female-to-male trans people he met and started to identify as a trans man.

In 1989, Valerio initiated his transition from female to male.

Valerio was a part of the American Indian Movement and visited the Pine Ridge Reservation while it was under siege during the Wounded Knee Occupation.

In 2006, Valerio published a memoir chronicling the first five years of his transition, entitled The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male. The book is organized into three parts: "Beginning," "Before Testosterone," and "After Testosterone."

Plot In the prologue, Valerio uses an in-depth narration of what it is like to be a transsexual to allow his readers to understand the trials and tribulations that one experiences when going through a sex change. Valerio says that transsexuals are not simply just a branch of lesbian or gay. He asserts that "transsexual identities must be defined and expressed on our own terms". In Valerio's opinion, transsexuals' voices and experiences, until more recently, are "unheard and incompletely imagined". Publishers Weekly gave it a mixed review, labeling it a tough book. Jacob Anderson-Minshall, in a review for Windy City Times, praised the book's account of Valerio's transition and its controversial argument that sex differences are primarily caused by hormones rather than socialization.

Film and video

Valerio was first profiled by documentarian Monika Treut for the 1992 film Female Misbehavior, in which short film MAX shows him talking about the first steps of transitioning, including his experience of perceptual, emotional and physical change with testosterone. He is one of seven transgender individuals featured in her 1999 documentary Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities. Twenty years later, Treut revisited several of the subjects of Gendernauts, including Valerio, in follow-up documentary film Genderation (2021).

Works

Poems Exile: Vision Quest at the Edge of Identity (2009) The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces (2019)

Chapbooks Animal Magnetism (1984 [pre-transition])

Anthologies This Bridge Called My Back (1981 [pre-transition]) Male Lust (2000) The Phallus Palace (2002) This Bridge We Call Home (2002) Manning Up: Transsexual Men on Finding Brotherhood, Family and Themselves (2014)

Books The Testosterone Files: My social and hormonal transition from female to male (memoir, 2006) Includes short film MAX (1991) featuring Valerio