After he was gone, I changed furtively in the locker room, listening to two dudes talk about a cross-country trip they’d taken on their motorcycles and hiding my nakedness by facing the wall of lockers while slipping quickly out of my shorts.
“You got a fight?” the smaller of the two guys asked me.
I flinched at the attention. “Yeah,” I mumbled, “just a charity one.”
“Don’t matter,” he said. The other guy nodded his agreement, and I couldn’t help the swell in my chest.
I had a fight! I walked all the way home, that night, thirty blocks, like the king of New York.
• • •
“The first jab better be a warning,” Errol said the next day. I pretended to be in less pain than I was as we practiced keeping our guards up, looking over our gloves, crab-walking around the ring, then turning into position quickly, so as to expose as little of our bodies as possible. This defensive style was cagey, smart. It was about staying safe by keeping your distance, always being ready, never letting down your guard.
I was familiar with the concept.
“I can see you,” Errol said, unnerving me, his gloves covering his face. Then he popped me on the side of the head. “But if you’re not watching, you can’t see me. If you can’t see me, you won’t be ready. If you’re not ready, you’ll get hit.”
I pushed through one more round, then another. He had me close out the night on the jump rope, which I immediately tripped over. Why are you doing this? I could hear my mom asking.
She always seemed to me larger than even the history I read about in school textbooks. She traveled on a Eurail pass with some girlfriends back when women didn’t do such things. She’d worked for Ted Kennedy and met his brother John when she won the Westinghouse Science fair in high school. Even after her marriage fell apart and she couldn’t find work; even after she moved to a depressing town near where she grew up in central Pennsylvania; even when she couldn’t stop drinking—she always seemed one step away from getting back on track, forever one turn away from her best self, the working-class high school girl tutored by the principal himself, she was that full of potential.
A medical “crisis,” her doctors explained to my sister and brother and me in the terrible hospital room a year earlier, is a crossroads where the patient either becomes healthier or dies. Mom, who, when she found out that her husband had been abusing me, put her hand on the center of my chest and told me I had a golden core that no one could touch. I knew I was at a crossroads too, fighting for the future that eluded her, working to become the kind of man we could both be proud of. She was in the ICU in September when the nicest doctor of all took us into a special carpet-lined room with a big wooden table and told us, plainly, that she would not live. When she died a few days after, she passed a mighty hunger on to me. Nine months later, it was within me, a hunger that lived.
“He’s taking his time with that jump rope,” some joker said, and my cheeks burned. My legs were heavy, but sweat poured off me like a second self, washing away.
• • •
It felt good to see the guys nod hello those first weeks of training, even if I was skinny and kept to myself. Soon everybody knew I had a fight, and that made me one of them. So what if I couldn’t even throw a straight right? At least I wasn’t there for the cardio.
But I was also wary of this new, oddly warrior-like ego. I fought not to fall under the thrall of these alphas and the pride I sometimes felt when they noticed me. Given the thrill I got when another boxer so much as spoke to me, I found it hard to imagine a teenager on earth who could be immune to the spell of male socialization.
My brother suddenly made a lot more sense to me. He was five years younger than me, an athletic, solitary kid, often spending whole Saturdays alone in his room after a long day at the YMCA, where he grew progressively more jacked, his muscles covering him like armor. On the ice, the man who raised us long gone, my sister, mother, and I watched him hit other boys in the face with little provocation. Later, his gear in the back of the minivan, we didn’t speak of bloody noses or body checks.
I knew that Brett’s fighting, both in and out of school, was almost always about me, my body, and the girls I dated in high school. He and my sister, Clare, were protective of me as if they sensed that I was not quite like them, even if we did not know we were half siblings, that their father was my stepfather, until we were adults.
“When I was younger, I was lonely,” Brett told me much later. It turned out that the sheen of our childhood, the legacy of his father, loomed as large in his masculinity as it did in mine.
He found solace in working out and played hockey as a form of protection against the boys around him as much as for enjoyment. “Within that hierarchy,” he told me, “I would earn their respect by just being authentic and being strong and getting up faster when I got hit. But I still wasn’t going to be invited to their parties.”
Despite Brett’s muscle, he’d long had a distaste for macho guys, and macho-guy stuff, no matter how mocked he was for it.
“At some point, I became pretty callous,” he said about his teen years. “At some point I wasn’t crying anymore.”
Becoming men had brought up the same question for both of us, the central worry of all sons of bad dads: How to be a man without being like our father?
It had never occurred to me, until I became a man, that my brother had felt trapped in his body as I had in mine.
• • •
Here’s another story about my brother: When I’d come out to him as trans over drinks back in 2009, before I started testosterone and when I still lived near him in Oakland, he’d hugged me. “You just make more sense as a guy,” he’d said.
Later that night, gin-loose, I’d asked him my very first dumb question about being a man: “What do you do when a guy says something sexist, or homophobic?” I figured if anybody knew how to react, it was him, after all those years he spent defending me.
He shrugged. “It depends on how many guys there are, and how big they are.”
“Oh,” I said, and we never spoke of it again.
But every night, changing in the Mendez locker room, I understood more clearly what he meant. Boys become “real” by proving their masculinity to other men, mostly through taking risks and dominating others who haven’t fallen in line. It was not unlike boxing, where “real” fighters were distinguished from weekend warriors in the locker room by our willingness to get hit in the face. The “real” fighters ignored the “fake” ones, not blessing them with their attention, which is why it was almost embarrassing how much I appreciated two guys in particular, real fighters, who affectionately ragged me most nights.
They were a duo of white construction workers, meaty and nearing middle-aged, who took a shine to me for some reason, even though I rarely spoke. Pulling on their dusty work boots as I suited up, they traded gripes about their union, foremen, and job sites, pausing to greet me whenever I showed up with a jolliness I assumed at first was sarcastic. It wasn’t.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that their interest in me was based in something false, some agreement I’d entered into by not making myself more fully known. I suspected that the men I typically surrounded myself with censored themselves in my presence because I was so publicly trans—a simple Google search will give you a pretty good biographical sketch—and so I waited at the gym, with morbid curiosity, to either be “discovered” or for my passing to lead me someplace shadowy in myself.
One night, early on, that moment came. It was a Wednesday, and I was late, changing quickly to meet Errol while the two dudes, teasing each other with a sharp edge that felt dangerously close to breaking into a fight, called each other “faggot” repeatedly. I’d not heard men who weren’t gay use that word since high school. I sat rigid on the bench, in the middle of lacing my shoes, shocked into the dawning awareness that my brother was right: I would not speak, I could not, even as they repeated the word over and over, because they were bigger
than me and if I spoke, I was sure they would see me for what I was, and I was afraid of them.
• • •
The more I worried over how much I had to appear “real”—real as if I’d had a boyhood spent in scuffles, real as if I knew the language of fathers and sons—to survive in a boxing gym, the more I simultaneously wondered over the strange expression.
The phrase real man is at least a century old, which is when it first appeared in print in the United States. Back then, lower-status men worked the land, while richer ones kept a wistful eye on the rugged bodies that they considered themselves “better than.” But the concept, if not the phrase, exemplified later by the admiring eyes of tuxedoed ringside fight fans who fantasized about hopping in the ring themselves, is the key to a much older story. The tension between the civilized world and a more “virile” masculinity dates at least as far back as Julius Caesar, according to race historian Nell Irvin Painter.
Her book, The History of White People, explores how white men invented race and, in doing so, made whiteness synonymous with the masculine ideal. White Western men have been insecure about achieving—or losing—masculinity, twinning that loss and gain with violence, throughout all of history. Strangely, the idea of the real man has also always been nostalgically classist. According to Painter, Julius Caesar fawned over the warrior-like qualities of his “uncivilized” rural neighbors, a common attitude among powerful men in antiquity. He also believed as many men did that “peace brings weakness” and “saps virility.”
I thought, with growing concern, of that man on Orchard Street, and the guys in the locker room. I thought of the bouncer, recently, who grabbed me roughly by my collar because he mistook me for someone else, and the rough agitation that rose through me at this insult, the worst kind of pride. Do not let yourself be dominated. Do not apologize when you are the one inconvenienced. Do not make your body smaller. Do not smile at strangers. Do not show weakness.
No wonder I felt like a hologram of myself. I’d been learning, through some cultural osmosis, how to be a real man, after all.
• • •
Larissa, a freckled attorney who had that can-do sunniness familiar to me from my time playing soccer with women in high school, was Errol’s other trainee, and she outperformed me, a lot.
Still, she cheered me on as I struggled to make sense of what was happening when Errol smacked me in the ear, the temple. Errol said I asked too many questions. My therapist said I “needed to get in touch with my anger.” He told me that was how I would “learn to trust life again.”
I hadn’t been the same since Mom died, that was true.
It occurred to me, those first weeks of training, that the man on Orchard Street tried to fight me because I too was looking for a fight. I had ventured, somehow, deep into the “man box,” a sweltering and bandaged thing, a mummy’s wrap around my body and the bodies of almost every man I know, stitched with the brutal language that ensures conformity, the outline of muscles pushed into being under the weight of “boys will be boys” and “real men” and “man up.”
A man box, drawn in the crude three-dimensional style of grade-schoolers everywhere, is used by sociologists and activists in a classroom exercise. Boys are asked what words or phrases go inside it, and what should be left out of it. What they choose is a troubling primer in male socialization: Do not cry openly or express emotion. Do not express weakness or fear. Demonstrate power and control. Do not be “like a woman.” Do not be “like a gay man.”
But sometimes the box is squared as an office or bounded more invisibly, the tight corners scripting the jocular camaraderie at the back of the bar. Sometimes it is an icy enclosure holding a pair of lovers apart in a bedroom or is framed within a television or a phone or a movie screen. Sometimes it’s not a box, but a ring, iced or roped. And sometimes it’s the slow circles men make around each other in a street fight.
“Men tend to fight when they feel humiliated, when they feel shamed,” sociologist Michael Kimmel told me. (Kimmel was writing books with titles like Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men before the economic “masculinity crisis” and its fall-out.) “You don’t fight when you feel really powerful,” he said. “You fight when you feel like your power is being challenged.”
I assumed that fighting for my right as a trans man to be seen as “real” would be a big part of this story: but it quickly became clear that all men proving their “realness” did so through fighting the policing and shaming of other men, sadly often by shaming and policing them back.
What made me feel “real”? When Errol tied my glove on for me or poured water in my mouth, or when I tripped over the jump rope and had to begin again. I felt real when I asked for help, when I failed, when I was myself.
I did not want to become a real man, I realized. I was fighting for something better.
• • •
Chris seemed worried, watching from the ropes in his motorcycle jacket. He huddled Errol and me close to him after we ran our drills, smiling as always and yet somehow also not smiling. They both hovered over me, Chris with his artful scruff and Errol with his precisely shaved head. Chris said he was still looking for an opponent for me, with the fight just four and a half months away.
“You need to get this guy sparring,” Chris told Errol. “Now.” I tried to hear the protectiveness in Chris’s voice, and not the edge of it—the serious ring of fear.
Errol’s solution was to throw me in the ring with Larissa, whom I didn’t want to hit in the face, even with pulled punches. The unwritten rule of sparring was that guys were only ever matched with women in the ring to practice defense—even in boxing, the code stayed the same: a man was never to hit a woman, period. Anyway, she was better than me, and I felt unsettled by the image of her head reverberating off my glove in front of the men around me, even as she yelled, “Hit me!”—as if we were in Fight Club, her glee unrestrained as the other fighters walked by, staring so hard at me my throat flushed red.
Mercifully, Chris finally interrupted my sparring with Larissa one night by hopping in himself. He’d kept up his training since his own match two years earlier, but despite the fifty pounds and six inches he had on me, he approached me with restraint. I still only knew two punches well enough to deploy them: the jab and the straight right. Chris smiled at me through his mouthguard, but my heart still thundered in my throat. I was, to my frustration, genuinely terrified by his size, frozen by his flurries of punches.
Larissa watched and yelled cheerfully for me to “go downstairs” and hit Chris with a body shot. “His ribs are open!” she hollered.
It struck me that I was a man more scared of men than she was. Maybe she’d mastered a skill I lacked, or maybe no man had ever used his body as a weapon against her, as my stepfather had against me, until I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and his began.
“Now up top!” Larissa said. I hit Chris harder. I was mad at myself for resenting her instructions, for all of the ways I was failing so publicly, for thinking of it as failing, for letting it all get to me, for not knowing how to let it go. I couldn’t get my body to move the way I needed it to. In frustration, I hit Chris as hard as I could in the stomach and saw him cringe. It was a dick move.
It was strange and disappointing, I thought, pulling off my gloves, to see the worst parts of culture jutting out of my psyche like a glacier, knowing I’d only begun to uncover the mass that must lie beneath.
Chris, sweaty, knocked gloves with me as we drank some water.
“Look, in boxing, training is the same for all of us,” he said. His sheen of honesty made me believe him. “First, you learn not to react in fear. And then you learn how to again.”
“Fear is natural, your reaction is natural,” Errol agreed.
I could feel my eyes get wet. I nodded.
“And I will drill it out of you,” Errol said, patting me on the shoulder, before leaving to join Larissa, who, as usual, had it in her to go yet another round.
Am I Sexist?
* * *
It didn’t take long to understand why the Wall Street dude took clients to hit the heavy bag. While I was surely the shittiest fighter at Mendez, showing up at work with a cut on the bridge of my nose had an immediate effect.
“Hey, champ,” guys said with teasing tones that baptized me cool. Walking through our open office with my giant duffel bag, yellow gloves dangling jauntily from the handle, it was seductive and strange to feel so powerful for doing so little. Unlike Before.
Before, my beardless, androgynous body was troubling, unprofessional. I was once explicitly asked not to meet with important clients at my nonprofit job, as the very sight of me might “send the wrong message.” I never hardballed a salary negotiation either. And I wasn’t ever hired, as I was years later, for my “potential.”
Before, I related to the struggles of my female friends partly because I saw the laughable fallacy of equity most clearly at work, where I was treated like one of them.
I could pinpoint the exact turn. Six months into my transition, back when I was still working in Boston, testosterone made my voice low. Really low. So low that I was almost impossible to hear in a loud bar or a cacophonous meeting unless I spoke at a ragged near shout. But when I did talk, people didn’t just listen; they leaned in. They kept their eyes focused on my mouth, or down at their hands, as if to rid themselves of any distraction beyond my powerful words.
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