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By MARIEL E. ADDIS

As a guest columnist, the Gazette grants me one essay per month. In the current, fast-paced, news cycle since Jan. 20, 2025, every time I come up with an essay theme, or even fully write a prospective essay, some new “thing” pops up on my radar that I feel I need to address and I’m back to the drawing-board.

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 I sometimes look in the mirror at my unclothed body and think, “This is me!” I go to the closet and think, “These are my clothes!” I go to my workplace and think, “This is my job and these are my coworkers!” And I think of all the many people I know...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

“I drove through the valley in a car with no name ...” I can imagine these lyrics applied to the music from pop rock group America’s famous 1970s hit to describe my recent adventures in my dad’s 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88.The car, purchased new by my...

By MARIEL E. ADDIS

 From the time I was little, I have loved bikes. This, even considering what a horrendous sense of balance I had as a kid, and in some ways still do. Going from training wheels to just two wheels did not come easy for me, but once I got it down, I was...

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...