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Outside Magazine April 2004
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Michelle Raises Hell (cont.)

"PEOPLE THINK YOU just go to the doctor, get your balls cut off, and start racing against the women," Dumaresq told me the first time we talked. "That's just not true. I didn't ask for all this attention. I didn't want to change the world; I just wanted to race a bicycle."

Dumaresq seems drastically ambivalent about being a transgender poster child—and who could blame her? Her celebrity comes from having her gonads docked. She tends to shun mainstream media, dodging invites from Connie Chung, Bryant Gumbel, ESPN, and HBO. "I'm not gonna be the next Tonya Harding," she says. "Forget it." But she has no problem starring in a Canadian documentary about her life called 100% Woman, which hits festivals in August.

Nearly everywhere she goes, she's got to shoulder the trans monkey. At one California race last year, I heard a kid bragging that his buddy had parked next to the "shemale." When the British magazine Dirt ran a story on a 2002 World Cup race at Mont-Saint-Anne, Quebec, its correspondent reported, "The trans-gendered thing that raced finished somewhere in the back." Dumaresq shrugged when she read it, but I could tell the blow hurt.

She's got an agent, Rich Vigurs, a 36-year-old Vancouverite with a stable of talent that includes a musher and the two best Hacky Sackers in the world. She has small sponsorships from the Web zine North Shore Mountain Biking and Santa Cruz Bicycles—they gave her two bikes, including a factory-mint V-10 with seven inches of travel up front and ten in back—but, as Vigurs explains, "there's no money involved in her contracts. I suspect she's using ketchup packages to make soup." Still, he insists, she's raced for only three years. "We really haven't written the story yet. There's gonna be some cool possibilities making their way through the pipe."

"The term I like best is that I'm 'normalizing' transgender people in sports," Dumaresq says. "There is no one else out there. Renée Richards is not a role model." She is adamant that, unlike Richards, she did not sue for the right to race: She simply asked. Her inspiration, rather, is 32-year-old Missy Giove, who dominated the American downhill scene for close to a decade. Giove is, as Dumaresq admiringly puts it, "a very out, hardcore dyke." In other words, she doesn't apologize for who she is.

Dumaresq's perspective continues to shift. "The title 'transgender' itself doesn't really fit any longer," she told me last year. "You're only trans while you're living in transition. Why am I still calling myself that? Transgender is a medical term. This is not a medical condition. It's not the same feeling anymore."

Most notably, she has a girlfriend. Dumaresq has had boyfriends before, including one she met in the supermarket over a bike magazine and who dumped her when she told him her history. Her new love interest also competes, though in a sport closer to the hearts of the Canadian masses: hockey. "Beer-league hockey," says Dumaresq, who's been training in her girlfriend's league, where few people know her story.

There's still that wistful hope: Maybe the controversy will fade. "In ten years' time, no one will give a shit," Dumaresq says. "Somebody had to come forward. It just happened to be me."


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