The Strange Tutelage Of Truth Martini: Wrestling And The Art Of Identity

The Establishment
The Establishment
Published in
12 min readDec 9, 2015

--

By Colette Arrand

Illustrations by Nicole Daddona

Before the possibility of estrogen, my body was an object worth destroying.

II t was 2012 and I was a poet in suburban Detroit, a woman trapped — not as the cliché has it — in the body of a man, but by the limits of my hometown. I had no work, nobody to confide in, and no means of actualizing a transition that I had been thinking of as far back as my memory allowed.

I obsessed over my body. Fat. Masculine. An unstoppable force, hurtling forward into the wide-open space that a white, male body creates for itself.
I was an immovable object, immune to change. So I decided to harness this force.

I decided to send what little money I’d saved to a P.O. box owned by a man named Truth Martini. I decided to become a professional wrestler.

Truth Martini is a lean, whiskey-throated man approaching middle age. His arms feature tributary tattoos of his father and grandfather — desiccated portraits I mistook for Frankenstein’s monster — and his inked chest depicts the crucified Christ. He is also, unquestionably, the best wrestling instructor in the state of Michigan.

--

--

The Establishment
The Establishment

The conversation is much more interesting when everyone has a voice. Media funded & run by women; new content daily.