Amateur

by Thomas Page McBee

  The first time I spoke up in a meeting at the Boston Phoenix, in my newly quiet baritone, I noticed that sudden, focused attention and was so uncomfortable I found myself unable to finish the sentence. The crew of rowdy journalists quieted and turned toward me, a body that was newly sprouting hair and muscle that looked, for once, familiarly male to everyone.

  I learned then that I had stepped into a new order of things: everyone in the room waited, men and women alike, for me to open my mouth.

  Since that vacuum of silence first made itself known to me, I’d thought I was an ally to women at work. But the experience with Larissa at the gym made me wonder if, somehow, I’d become part of the problem instead.

  • • •

  Larissa’s good-natured goading threatened me because, despite a lifetime of knowing exactly how it feels to be treated unfairly by virtue of my body, I’d been upset to be publicly shown up by a woman.

  The question wasn’t if I was sexist, but how.

  I’d promised I’d face truths, even ugly ones. At work, disturbing patterns came into focus. I kept a tally of how often I tried to get my points across in meetings—a practice I’d honed aggressively in my Before body that had a different impact now. Whom did I talk over more often? Women, at a rate of three to one.

  Even worse, as I assessed myself honestly, I saw the many subtle ways I took men just a little more seriously. I was quicker to respond to their emails and messages, more concerned with their perceptions, and more swayed by their arguments.

  I thought, inevitably, of Mom laughing in frustration at the “silly” things she’d had to do to be “nonthreatening” as a manager at General Electric, such as the nights she hosted dinner parties for the wives of her employees in whatever remote boondock she’d been sent to, befriending the women with her famously good cooking after a long day overseeing their husbands.

  And I thought, painfully, of Larissa, hitting that speed bag. She was likely practiced at fighting twice as hard as her male colleagues to be taken seriously. She was unaware of my history. To her, I was just a guy with the gall to think I could learn in five months what had taken her a year.

  The truth was, I’d not asked her for advice, despite all she knew, just as I had not once considered that my sister, who called to check in on my training every now and then, never reminded me that she’d been taking boxing classes for years, that she’d sparred and won.

  Regardless of my Before body, I had still somehow inherited a bias common to a lot of men. To understand how it operates in the workplace means knowing that it often seems innocuous, according to Caroline Simard, a researcher at Stanford. She and her colleague Shelley Correll analyzed two hundred performance reviews within the same large technology company and found that women were more likely than men (57 percent to 43 percent) to receive what the researchers termed “vague praise”—feedback not tied to any actual business outcome (“You had a great year”). Men were more likely to receive praise connected to their actual contribution to the company. Performance reviews may seem like a relatively benign, bureaucratic measure, but Simard told me they are a powerful indicator of a cluster of similar biases that, taken together, hold women back.

  Surely, generally, this behavior is not conscious—which is precisely the problem. “Even when we think we can evaluate rationally,” Simard said, “bias leads us to errors in judgment.” These “errors in decision making” result in the thousands of subtle behaviors performed unquestioningly by almost everyone of every gender.

  The reach of such bias was troubling and pervasive, but as clear to me as the awful new way I found I could silence rooms that day at the Boston Phoenix. Since my transition, I felt viscerally that the world was designed just for me. I was reminded of Eddie Murphy’s seminal 1984 Saturday Night Live skit “White Like Me,” where he goes out in New York in whiteface and discovers a secret world of privilege. In one scene, after the only black man on the city bus gets off, all the white people on board pour champagne and dance, as jazz plays merrily. “Slowly I began to realize,” Murphy says later in voice-over, after a white clerk won’t let him pay for a newspaper, “that when white people are alone, they give things to each other for free.”

  At the very least, I received a lot on credit. My voice was just the start. I loved my work and—like many people in my age group—finally found a professional groove in my thirties, when I understood more about who I was, but that wasn’t all. The friction between my body and the world around me was gone. Being a man was easy in exactly the places not being one had been hard. Every day, I was rewarded for behavior that I was previously punished for, such as standing up for my ideals, pushing back, being fluent in complex power dynamics, and strategically—and visibly—taking credit. When I proved myself, just once, it tended to stick.

  “We assign more credibility and expertise to men,” Simard said. And by “we” she means all of us. Harvard researchers designed a test to gauge your personal inclination toward bias. If you’re anything like me, you’ll also fail it.

  I didn’t know, until I was a man, how to pretend to know more than I did, how to behave as if I were an expert when I was a beginner. But I did not have to know.

  My conditioning began the day I silenced a room just by opening my mouth.

  • • •

  In this liminal moment, a couple of weeks into my training, I saw how much Jess had been right all along. My “romance” with masculinity, if understandable, had blinded me to what I wanted to see most: my shadow. Being a man unwilling to face the worst parts of masculinity guaranteed that I was passively part of the problem. The phrase I’d heard many men say when confronted with negative male behavior flitted defensively through my head: But I’m not that kind of guy!

  But wasn’t I? As various characters Jess and I met at Brooklyn cocktail parties asked, incredulous in those first few weeks of my training, why I felt the need to not only box, but fight in Madison Square Garden, warning us about head injury, they looked to Jess as if it were her job—as a woman—to stop me. She would gaze calmly back with that unnerving, placid stare that on a man would be read as aggressive, but on her was “mysterious.” She would often catch my eye. See?

  Jess was the exact wrong audience for this approach. She wasn’t afraid of risking her body for whatever she believed in. She told me on our first date that she’d just returned from spending a year in Thailand on an illegal visa, working with human rights groups on the border. While I trained for my fight, she’d sometimes be off the grid, working at a grassroots community center run by truly heroic women in Malawi, and I would quell my rising panic as she boarded planes with the image of her serene face, looking back at my battered one.

  Anyway, I came to see that the question of why I was doing this wasn’t ever genuine. The doctors and journalists and grad students and account managers wanted to know, but only in Jess’s presence. Not a single man, if we were alone, asked me to explain myself. Sometimes, even, I would feel a wave of envy pass over a conversation with a guy mining me, in that masculine way, for details about the training: the hours, the intervals, the routine. I had never been the subject of male jealousy before, not over my body and what it could do, and there again I felt a problematic pride swell my chest. He’s thinking that I know how to punch him in the face.

  Another pattern: the junior reporter that held my gaze as he explained an idea for a story while mostly ignoring the woman editor beside me; the all-male panels at conferences; the advice asked of me by my women friends, the heartbreaking familiarity of the questions: How do I convince my boss to pay me as much as the men I work with? How do I convince myself that I’m worth it?

  Now I saw it all: the women who stayed up editing after their kids had gone to bed; the women who organized the birthday parties and the book clubs; the women who made the coffee; that it was almost always a woman who acknowledged that I’d helped with a story frame or pitched in on a weekend.

  Jess was right. I just had to be willing to look.<
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  • • •

  When I hear the phrase women’s work, I think of Mom, growing up in a small town in central Pennsylvania in the 1950s, the daughter of a mechanic and a homemaker. If she pursued higher education at all, she was expected to attend a teachers college. Even after she got into MIT on a full ride, her father wouldn’t provide the financial paperwork necessary for her to attend. So she went to Penn State and earned her degree in physics, then her master’s degree, all on her own. She eschewed a limiting script about what being a woman meant, like many other women in her generation.

  You have a golden core, she said. And nobody can touch it.

  “Your upbringing made you a person who, regardless of gender, sounds sure of themselves and is willing to take a risk and fail,” Jess said, holding my hand on our couch one night. “That’s how your other siblings are too, and how your mom wanted you to be. You’ve had those qualities your whole life, and you’re just being who you are, but how people see you now changes things.”

  She was right. We were all a reflection of our mom’s mask of self-assuredness, the “fake it until you make it” face she’d surely put on in room after room of men in ties making jokes at her expense. All of the professors and small-town busybodies determined to undermine her. She rocketed out of the life that was expected of her, and taught me to do the same.

  • • •

  Back at the gym, the “romance” that Jess worried I was having with masculinity unraveled with sweet relief, like the wraps I pulled off my pruned hands most nights.

  Errol put Larissa and me in the ring again. This time, I no longer felt ashamed, even after somebody hooted. She looked at me, ignoring it. I saw in her the women I worked with, Jess, my mother, my sister. I saw myself Before, the person I wished I’d been, regardless of the body I had. The person I wished I were now.

  “Come on,” Larissa said, giving me a chance to be him, “gloves up.”

  As a group of leering guys gathered to watch us, I saw that she wasn’t attempting to humiliate me. She was well aware of the unconventional optics of our sparring. She was simply choosing herself over protecting my masculinity.

  We touched gloves, and I felt a rush of affection for her as the bell rang. She pulled out her mouthpiece and said, “Hit me.”

  Somebody clucked disapprovingly.

  I put up my guard, shaking my head, and so she came in with a couple solid jabs, then a hard left hook.

  “Thomas, get moving,” Errol called.

  “Come on,” Larissa said.

  So I hit her back—jab, jab, and a shitty straight right that still nailed her pretty good. I dropped my hands.

  “Why are you stopping?” Errol yelled.

  I pulled my mouthguard out. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” she garbled through hers, but with a steely edge of warning.

  “There’s no stopping in boxing,” Errol said.

  I put my fists up, and Larissa came at me so hard for the next two rounds I ended up hanging off the ropes, gasping for air. I could see men who’d been watching drifting away, shaking their heads. What was worse than hitting a woman? Being beaten by one. But I was relieved to find that I didn’t care.

  Larissa smiled at me, a real smile. “You’re getting there.”

  “You’re kicking my ass,” I answered, because it was true, and because she was my partner.

  She punched me in the shoulder, and when the bell rang, she clobbered the hell out of me again, respecting me enough, I saw, to no longer hold anything back.

  Am I Passing?

  * * *

  But something was still strange about the sort of man I was at the gym, and it had to do with passing.

  Passing, in America, brings to mind desperate stories of blacks passing as white in order to escape slavery or the oppression of Jim Crow but, as Stanford historian Allyson Hobbs wrote in her book about racial passing, A Chosen Exile, its history encompasses and extends beyond skin color: “The poor passed as the rich, women passed as men, Jews passed as Gentiles, gay men and women passed as straight.”

  In the broadest sense, Hobbs told me, passing exists because we categorize bodies into social binaries like race, class, and gender, and where there are binaries, there is usually reward (economic, social) and a price (family, community, identity) to crossing over to the “other” side. “Part of what makes passing so much about loss is that the stakes become really high,” she said, noting that you “have to have the binary” for passing to become a meaningful strategy.

  I am a man, and so I was not “passing” as someone I wasn’t in order to gain status and privilege at the boxing gym, or when I walked home alone at night, one of many bodies moving through Manhattan without context—but I understood it. I couldn’t telegraph the reality I’d lived: the tomboy years or the queer bars that followed. Testosterone made me recognizable, but the price had a flattening effect.

  “I had no idea you were trans,” said a date, a coworker, a new friend, a woman at a reading. The tone usually betrayed the real meaning: Admiration indicates that I’ve succeeded in getting away with something. Disbelief meant they felt duped. Sometimes, people don’t even have to speak: I feel in their appraisal a search for a different face beneath my beard, a sign of a life Before. The notion that gender is a birthright is hard for many people to shake, and I am uncomfortable proof that it’s not. And if it’s not, what is it, exactly?

  It was hard to pull apart the strands. I looked in foggy mirrors as guys smacked themselves with cheap cologne beside me, feeling expansive and safe, each “he” a benediction. I understood that I was, finally, being seen.

  But seen as what? Though it was a relief to no longer experience a rebellion at the sight of my own face, moving through the world in my Before body had grooved my brain, and operating as if that weren’t so—as if those grooves had instead been worn by thousands of wet towel snaps and gay jokes—felt as dissonant as looking in the mirror had once been. There was no language to describe my whole self that didn’t put me in danger. I passed in that I allowed others to believe I had sprung, fully formed, into the man that stood before them.

  Passing is, after all, a social phenomenon. I did not “pass” when I looked at myself, but I passed when others prescribed to me a boyhood I’d never had. I passed as the man others saw, and I did not dissuade them of their vision of me. I was, like everyone, passing as my most coherent translation. It was a blanket of familiarity that I put over myself, and it kept me safe.

  I watched other guys pass too. At Mendez, a wrinkly old-timer coached a skinny, knob-kneed sixteen-year-old, and we all heard the sort of standard-issue clichés his coach issued him, a slow drip of “It’s not how good you are, it’s how bad you want it,” and “You can run, but you can’t hide,” and “You don’t play boxing.” Other guys whispered that the kid was overtraining, but he was so underfed and nervous that the other men encouraged him in his becoming. He bloomed under that love, and he was always there, grimacing as he ran on the treadmill, sparring guys he had no business sparring, nodding along dopily to his coach’s relentless words. He was as scared as I was, as scared as the guys who’d learned to better hide it, and I was uneasy watching him grow his manhood like a second skin, a cover over his whole body that eventually rendered him haughty and strong.

  “It’s very confusing to be encouraged and groomed within normative masculinity,” sociologist R. Tyson Smith, author of a book on professional wrestling, told me. “You hear these things, like, ‘Never start a fight, but always finish a fight.’ How do you do that?”

  How do you do that? I returned to the idea that the opposite of passing was failing. Coming by that failing honestly expanded the idea of what being a man meant. I thought about it when I bit into my mouthguard, and when I broke the unspoken code and shut the stall door in the locker room bathroom. I thought about it when I couldn’t find it in myself to hit Errol hard, even when he asked for it. What had Errol ever done to me?

  Nowhere d
id I feel the pinch between my passing self and my actual lived body more than in the dank, toilet-paper-strewn space of the changing room. There I was most aware of my scars and private parts, the distinct ways I failed to pass, if anyone really looked. The locker room, a parade of fragile parts so readily on display, shocked me: the fleshy penises, the yellowed ribs, the furry butts.

  Fuck them, I thought, growing bolder, dropping my towel briefly before pulling on my shorts. My acts of rebellion went unnoticed. Ultimately, a tragic sort of grace kept me safe: My body was unimaginable. Homophobia dictated that men never glance at my dick or admit it if they did. I pulled my boxers on, and the men who’d averted their eyes respectfully seemed to see me again. A few even nodded at me as I grabbed my bag to leave, a visible man rendered invisible in my hairy sameness.

  • • •

  Still, Haymakers and I went back and forth regarding whether to notify USA Boxing, the governing body of amateur boxing, that I was trans. I was a potential liability in Haymakers’ relationship with the regulators, who, I got the impression, were already a little gun-shy about sanctioning fights between boxers who were often older, in worse shape, and lacking in the professionalism that serious fighters had years to steep in.

  Like most people I know, I generally have an allergy to talking to people I don’t know about my genitals. Nevertheless, others’ lack of imagination caused me quite a bit of trouble. My dick, the most sensitive of all my parts, physically distinguished me from the other men, and that alone almost kept me off the fight card altogether.

  After a particularly long, painful night at the gym, I had a long, painful email exchange with Chris (failing) to clarify the sticking point in the regulations, a rule that trans people undergo “surgical anatomical changes . . . including external genitalia changes and gonadectomy.”

  Since I did not have gonads, I could not have them removed, I explained. Chris, clearly confused about what exactly I looked like naked, suggested a phone call. With dread, I agreed to it.