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Matt Kailey has just returned from Acapulco. Out Front Colorado’s intrepid staff writer was flown, gratis, from Denver to Acapulco as part of that city’s effort to encourage tourism. “Denver is a target area.” Kailey explains. When he’s not darting around the world on press junkets, Kailey is better known as the author of 2005’s Just Add Hormones: An Insider’s Guide to the Transsexual Experience. The memoir, which will be released in paperback in June, follows Kailey’s transition from 40-something straight woman to the gay man he’d always known himself to be. Written for a general audience, Just Add is like a Trans 101 primer for those unfamiliar with the who, why, how and what of transsexual transition. “What I wanted to do [with Just Add Hormones] is give something that was non-threatening to outsiders—to people outside. I wanted it to be serious and political, but I also didn’t want it to be really threatening.” It is already eight years since he completed his transition and Kailey is now working on a follow-up book about life after transition and he regularly leads workplace trainings that help coworkers prepare for an employee transitioning on the job. He can be booked for consultation through his website. While a lot of FTMs come out through the lesbian community, Kailey acknowledges that as a straight woman, he was fairly obtuse about feminist issues and women’s rights. “[Now] I think I am almost, in a way, looking in from the outside and seeing things I didn’t see when I was a female; and seeing some discrimination and things that I didn’t acknowledge or realize as a female”. Kailey insists that transitioning from female to male, even for a gay FTM, isn’t a misogynist step. “I don’t think it is a rejection of femaleness at all in any way, shape or form,” Kailey argues. “And so many guys that I know, straight and gay FTMs are incredible feminists.” Identifying alternately as queer or as a gay transman, Kailey says, “I don’t see myself as a ‘man’. I’m 50-years-old. When you put me in a room with 50-year-old men, I am not one of them.” Kailey says many gay men have the misconception that gay FTMs are really women and some gay men are “afraid” to date FTM guys, “especially if they haven’t have genital surgery, because they are afraid that that makes them straight, that they have to give up their identity. And that’s just not true. Gay FTMs are gay men.” Even worse than those misperceptions, Kailey says, is the absolute invisibility of FTMs in the larger gay community. Kailey hopes that FTMs will eventually find their niche within the larger gay community. In the meantime, he says that as a gay transman he’s getting used to rejection.
“You get rejected when they find out you are trans, when they find out you don’t have a penis…I don’t have a penis. I still have a vagina and I know a lot of gay FTMs who do use their vaginas during sex. But we like to think of it as another hole of sorts.” Kailey isn’t planning to leave the dating game anytime soon. He has advice for potential suitors. If you are a gay man attracted to a transguy, Kailey says, and you want to get laid, he advises against using these lines: “I want to know what it is like to have sex with a woman,” or “I’ve never had sex with a woman—I’ve never had vaginal sex. Because that’s not a good way to hit him up.” FTM writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at jake@trans-nation.com.
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