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VOLUME 106 ISSUE 63 // NOVEMBER 16, 2012
LIFE ON HIS TERMS ROBERT ALCARAZ/ARIZONA DAILY WILDCAT
For UA graduate student, conquering life’s transitions was just the beginning
A
GREG GONZALES
s a kid, Michael Woodward owned the biggest G.I. Joe collection in the neighborhood. In high school, he participated in a Junior Miss Pageant. Michael, a UA graduate student studying public health, was born in 1964 and grew up in Indiana as a girl. “The whole time,” he said, “it never felt like it was my life.” He competed in the pageant because it was something he felt his mother wanted him to do. “Some of the biggest struggles I had with my mom were about me not being girly
was a graffiti campaign about me in the bathenough, or feminine enough,” Michael said. room and the girls’ dorm. I ended up moving “I think a lot of people experience that, but I off campus just because know that trans people do I was so uncomfortespecially.” able in the dorm and By the time he was in My mind was not feeling like I fit in college, he had begun going a thousand there.” identifying as a lesbian different places. I He dropped out and was a part of what he didn’t know I could several times before called the lesbian separattake testosterone and graduating because he ist movement. But he still change my body. felt alienated from the felt out of place. campus and his peers. “When I was an underWhen Michael was grad living as a female, 36, a friend pulled him you know, the black aside and told him that she was going to begin leather jacket and kind of butch-dyke look, hormone therapy to transition from female I was harassed in the dorm,” he said. “There
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to male. It was then that he realized that he wasn’t a lesbian. He was a man. “It wasn’t until I was 36 years old that I had this other option,” he said. “That’s a long time to know something was wrong but not know what.” Finding that out was exhausting. “My mind was going a thousand different places,” Michael said. “I didn’t know that I could take testosterone and change my body.” That was 13 years ago. Since then, Michael has had a double-mastectomy, a hysterectomy and has continuously undergone hormone therapy.
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