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By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 If you’ve been closely following the current news about the presidential race, you have probably heard candidate Donald Trump say that public schools are conducting transgender transition-related surgeries on students. If you’ve got more than a dozen...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 In the early 2000s, while living in Kennebunk, Maine, I took a real estate class and got my associate Realtors’ license. I was hoping to parlay real estate into a new career, but I was too nervous to give up a good-paying engineering job for a job...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

My tagline says I that grew up in Northampton, left the area, and came back 16 years later. Despite the hiatus, I have lived in Northampton for total of 43 years, and kept a tab on it for those absent 16 years. There is a lot I can say about...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 How can I, identified as male at birth, say I am female? It is a good question and all I can say is it is the way I see myself, but it is not some made-up feeling, nor is it because I couldn’t hack it in the male world.From what I have read on gender...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 I wrote a piece about my bestie Samuel a while ago. Samuel is my now 6-year-old black cat; I adopted him back in 2018 from the T.J. O’Connor Shelter in Springfield at 9 weeks of age. He came to live with me one week to the day before I underwent...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 When I came out, and even when I began my male-to-female transition, I couldn’t quite imagine the way my life would turn.Before transitioning, I was very private. I was not a particularly vocal advocate for social justice, although I always...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 When I first heard John Lennon’s masterpiece “Imagine,” and heard the line “imagine no religion,” I thought, “How awful is that; religion is a good thing!” Probably in junior high at the time, I couldn’t understand the significance of the line. I do...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

In February, I had to endure reading a heart-wrenching story about a non-binary high school student severely beaten in a high school bathroom in Oklahoma. Nex Benedict, the student, was taken to the hospital not by ambulance, but by their grandmother,...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

It was 2016, the last year of the Obama administration. It was an election year with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the presidential ballot. I don’t have to remind you who won.Most of us, at least here in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, had...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

My mom passed in 2008 at the age of 70. She had suffered for a number of years with early-onset Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and had been in nursing home care the last years of her life.I had come out as transgender to my wife a year and a half before...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

Imagine for a moment, getting a new name, a new gender, a “new” body, and a closet full of new and different clothes. Now, imagine experiencing life with both a heightened level of both emotions and physical sensations. While it seems like something...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

‘I’m Mariel and I love my tools.” Clapping can be heard from other members of the tool owners’ support group.When I announced my transition in January 2016, I think some people thought I might trade in my tools for a makeup kit. Nothing is further...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

It is hard to believe, but I think my initiation into “femaledom” is finally complete. On what must have been its fourth day in theaters, I went to see the new Barbie movie.A long-time female friend of mine organized the outing, and I went to the film...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

Now, I could write about the upsetting judgment by the Supreme Court indicating that free speech and religious rights supersede the civil rights of individuals, namely those in the LGBTQ+ community, but I won’t. I could talk about how Moms for Liberty...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

I am a Gen-X’er. I am among the first of the new models to come out. The Mustang and the Beatles beat me and my peers to the scene by mere months, both being introduced the year prior. Probably due to being the first of my generation, I feel a lot of...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

Ever been mad as hell and scared to death at the same time? Well, lately I have been, and it is not a great or happy combination.I watch the news on TV, listen to NPR on the radio, and see seemingly countless news items on Facebook, primarily from red...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

The brief bio that has graced the end of most of my Gazette essays mentions how I left the area for 16 years and returned in 2013. Some may wonder where I was during those 16 years.After brief stints in Wakefield, Rhode Island and Olean, New York, my...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

I had the pleasure of seeing former Valley resident Dar Williams perform at the Bellows Falls Opera House last weekend. I have to admit that I was largely unfamiliar with much of Dar’s work, but I felt that, based upon everything I had heard about...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

Unless you’ve being living under a rock, you are probably well aware that Prince Harry has a new book called “Spare.” While I don’t intend to purchase or read the book, by all accounts, it is a written version of what Seinfeld character Frank Costanza...