Max Wolf Valerio (born February 16, 1957, in Heidelberg, West Germany) is an American poet, memoir writer, essayist and actor.
[2] Valerio has researched his heritage and inferred that a significant number of his paternal ancestors were crypto-Jews who had become conversos but secretly handed on Sephardic Jewish traditions.
Valerio lived in many US states including Maryland, Washington, California, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, as well as in Canada, and again in Germany as a child and teenager.
[6] In 1988, after discussions with a friend and roommate who was formally transitioning from male to female, Valerio realized that he was transsexual and began considering a sex change.
[6] Max found the FTM Organization in San Francisco run by Lou Sullivan and started attending meetings.
Valerio says in The Testosterone Files that "Lothstein's book is damning" and that he "paints the transsexual men he is working with as psychopathic, borderline, fractured, pathetic".
[6][7] Valerio's memoir The Testosterone Files describes the psychological, physiological, and social transformation that occurred in the first five years of his transition from female to male.
In the prologue, Valerio uses an in-depth narration of what it is like to be a transsexual to allow his readers to understand the trials and tribulations that one experiences when going through a sex change.
The third section, "After Testosterone", is one written so that the readers can feel Valerio's emotional, social, and perceptual transformation from female to male.
Valerio narrates his perceptual experiences of not yet having bottom surgery, but being physically male otherwise [2] The book ends off with his discovery of his Adam's apple that has grown from the testosterone which signifies his excitement and recognition that this transition was exactly what Max needed to be happy with himself.
[8] When Valerio identified himself as a lesbian, he was able to learn about the idea of feminism, became involved with left-wing radical politics and was able to have a deeper understanding of the female identity.
[9][clarification needed] Valerio was a part of the American Indian Movement and participated in marches and visited the Pine Ridge Reservation when it was under siege by the F.B.I after the Wounded Knee Occupation.