Michelle Dumaresq Raises Hell

You Are Here:

Home >> Michelle Raises Hell (cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine April 2004

Page:

Michelle Raises Hell (cont.)

WHEN I FIRST MET Dumaresq, in October 2002, she was punching the clock Flashdance style as a foreman welder at a North Vancouver metal shop. It was quitting time, and her bike was locked inside her 1988 Pathfinder, a rig with more than 185,000 miles on the odometer and a sticker on the hatch reading GIRLS KICK ASS. Her lager-blond hair was pulled into a ponytail, her neck ringed with a silver bike-sprocket necklace, her hands masculine, with thick pipe-fitter fingers. She apologized for not wearing her usual pearl-pink nail polish.

At five foot nine—taller in her boots—Dumaresq is handsome. Her weight fluctuates between 170 and 180 pounds, and she is hockey-goalie solid, her coveralls concealing modest, nearly new breasts. Her jawline is strong, her eyes the fluid green of chainsaw oil. When she smiles, she reveals an elfin gap—she chipped a tooth on a trail called Higher Ground, she'll tell you, right next to one called Dentist. "Estrogen," she explained to me, "is not a performance-enhancing drug."

Dumaresq tossed my bike on top of hers and steered toward the North Shore. "They all know my story," she said of her fellow metalworkers. "They're great guys and are cool with it." Vancouver is a liberal city, but this is a metal shop with heliarc welders and forklifts and truckloads of aluminum tubing. "You can't cry here; it's unacceptable," she added.

At seven, Michael was jumping his banana-seat cruiser off ramps in his driveway. At 12, he had a wardrobe of girls' clothes.

Michael Brandon Dumaresq was already a metalworker when he had his gender-reassignment surgery, at age 26. (According to Anne Lawrence, a Seattle physician specializing in transgender issues, since the 1960s an estimated 4,000 people have undergone sex-change surgery in Canada, compared with 15,000 in the U.S.) "I wasn't gay," Dumaresq says, "but I've known since I was four or five." Michael's parents, Art and Judy, had their own accounting business, and he grew up with a younger brother and sister. At seven, he was jumping his banana-seat cruiser off ramps in his driveway, in the hilly Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. At ten, he was trying on his mother's dresses. At 12, he had a new BMX bike, a plywood quarterpipe in the front yard, and a secret wardrobe of girls' clothes.

"I had a good time being a boy," Dumaresq says. "It was lots of fun. I'm just not a boy." After high school, where he was captain and right wing of his hockey team, Michael took a job at a Burnaby metal shop; at 18, unbeknownst to his family, he walked into his doctor's office in his work boots. "Here I am," he said. "I'm a girl. Fix me."

"They told me to go away," Dumaresq says. "I explored on my own and basically grew up a bit." Four years later, Michael went back and began a regimen of the testosterone blocker spironolactone to prepare for surgery. In 1996, on an operating table in Montreal, he became Michelle Jacquelyn Dumaresq. Jacquelyn was what his mother, who was there for the surgery, would have named him had he been a girl.

Some things didn't change for Dumaresq. Freeriding, for one. The day before, we'd met up with her posse—guys in their thirties and Canadian as bacon and Celine Dion—at Seymour's, a pub near Mount Seymour, home of such famous trails as Bogeyman and Severed Dick. The party was well under way. Someone filled a pint glass as Paul, the group's comedic ringleader, razzed Dumaresq: "You know what makes you a real girl? You're late for everything." She grinned.

Dumaresq came out to the boys in 2001. There had been rumors on the North Shore, and one night at Seymour's she told them. "Their reaction," she says, "was like 'OK—but we're still going riding at 4:30, eh?' "

Four-thirty, and we were: Dumaresq, myself, and her friend Rob Moysychyn, a machinist dressed in downhill pants and armor, with a long ponytail and an earring. It had rained, and Mount Seymour was a fog-capped world of ferns and moss. Dumaresq danced down the slick trail like a wood pixie, performing wheelie drops off rock faces, high-wire acts along fallen cedars, corrective slides atop wet ladder bridges that rose, twisted, and dipped like melting zippers in a Salvador Dali painting. Her bike, a duct-taped beater with crude dual suspension, compressed hard on each transition—she is expert at the tranny—then released her back to the kinetic lay of the trail.

Here on the North Shore, Dumaresq's friends don't seem to give a fart in a gale that she used to be a man; they just want to ride. "Michelle's my most normal friend," Rob told me in the bar, après-ride. "I can't believe that my most grounded friend used to be a guy."

Page:

•	Subscribe to Outside and get a FREE Gift!

•	Give the gift of Outside Magazine!

•	Subscribe to Outside Online's free weekly e-mail newsletter featuring gear reviews, fitness advice, galleries, podcasts, and more.