How do you prove that you are your gender? I was not the only man to be faced with that question, but my circumstances made it a less theoretical one. I contacted attorneys from prominent LGBT organizations who forwarded me email chains as they consulted one another, debating my options. Finally, they concluded that, if pressed, I should provide a letter from my physician, as well as my court-ordered name and gender change, all industrial-strength proof of my right to exist as the guy I was.
The name and gender on my passport looped back to letters written by the doctor who performed my top surgery, which was possible because of the therapist who wrote that I was, in his professional opinion, a man, and in acute distress because I did not look like one.
As I waited for Chris to call, I saw that my value depended on someone else’s being less valuable: another man, a woman, a trans person who did not “pass.” For me to really be a man, someone, somewhere, had to not be.
When the phone finally rang, I’d decided to not apologize for who I was. If my body broke the rules, then the rules were the problem.
“I don’t have a penis, at least not in the way you think,” I told Chris, my sense of vulnerability so exquisite, it alchemized into strength.
I imagined him frantically googling around, trying to understand what, exactly, I looked like without boxers. He was quiet.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this. I’ll take care of it.”
I don’t know if Haymakers ever notified USA Boxing about me, but Chris and I never spoke of it again.
• • •
The locker room was never more full of slippery, stinking men than during the 6:00 p.m. shift change, when it teemed with actual amateurs, training for the Golden Gloves or a circuit fight. As they undid their shoes, we charity fighters laced up. Our gloves gleamed dumbly, our neon sweat-wicking shorts like a team uniform.
I tried to see the golden cores within the men around me, but they were shadowed by the pageantry. The white guys from Queens mostly talked motorcycles and construction; the black guys from Brooklyn and the Bronx traded training tips; and the brown guys from parts unrevealed didn’t talk much at all. The bankers and traders and marketing executives, almost all white, were quick and silent. Only the rich guys who’d sparred the real fighters seemed relaxed. I studied them, wondering what it would feel like to catch the train a few stops uptown from Wall Street and do that hand-clasp, half-hug thing with the guy whose family had to move farther and farther away from the gym because the Saudi oil moguls you worked for kept buying investment apartments in Manhattan that sat empty, as if cratered by a gentle bomb, blasting all the not-millionaires farther and farther afield.
As for me, I could never truly be invisible. That became clear one hot night when, standing in my underwear and soaked in sweat, I tried to not pay any mind to the big guy staring at me as I pulled off my shirt. I thought (hoped) he might be interested in my tattoos, so I said nothing.
The guy, a kid really, asked me after what seemed like quite some time about the two smiling scars that ran across my chest. Though under hair, and covered with a tattoo, the scars were rough reminders of the surgery I’d had to fashion a body that made sense.
I’d met this kid before. I knew his life story because he’d launched into it late one night when we were the only guys left in the gym: How he got mixed up in drugs and almost dropped out of high school, then found boxing. He was nineteen now, living with his parents to save money and going to a state school. He’d quit drinking and smoking because he wanted to go pro, lost a hundred pounds, was a new man, shedding skin, like me. He was sweet, and open with me in a way I found familiar.
I don’t know. I thought, maybe, we understood each other.
Injuries were a primary discussion topic in the locker room: whose nose was broken, how long you needed to nurse a dislocated shoulder, who’d had too many concussions to still be out there, who had cauliflower ear, who’d fought through a broken finger, wrist, arm. So when he said, in front of everyone, in that dumb way of nineteen-year-olds, “What happened to you, man?,” there was an automatic, animal swivel of heads.
I thought about Emile Griffith, the reluctant champion welterweight from the US Virgin Islands, who was bisexual, but—out of respect, or decorum—no sportswriter dared write about his sexuality head-on. Griffith, whose notorious Madison Square Garden win against the Cuban boxer Benny Paret in 1962 left Paret dead and boxing in peril. Paret had called Griffith a maricón, a gay slur, at their weigh-in, and Griffith hit him so hard that he put him into a coma. Their fight, which was aired live, sparked a national debate—not about the brutality of homophobia, or masculinity, but boxing.
I thought of Griffith often, how his fight happened just years before the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. Griffith, who told friends that the world wasn’t ready for him. Griffith, passing. Sometimes, refusing to shield myself from the men around me, I saw Griffith, who hadn’t initially wanted to be a boxer, but a women’s hatmaker, looking on. Griffith, who was attacked as he came out of a gay bar in 1992 by a group of men who beat him with bats and chains. The world wasn’t ready for him. He was right.
If I was to be a man, I needed to believe in the possibility of a different kind of masculinity, an expansion that included me. But how?
On the other hand, what was I supposed to do? If I told you that my towel fell, and the whole group of them turned on me, even if you thought it was wrong, would you be surprised?
It was not my shame to take on, and yet I mumbled, shamefully, “Car accident.”
And everyone turned back to the work of pulling on or off socks, or tying shoes, or packing bags. The guy’s friend hit him roughly in the arm and said, in my defense, “Don’t you know that’s rude?”
So, as the weeks crept on, what initially felt like a choice to remain “undercover” for the story increasingly highlighted the central tension of my life—when would I stop passing as the man others expected and just be the man I was?
• • •
Chris showed up at Mendez with some good news: they’d finally found a match for me. Though there wasn’t another fighter as inexperienced or light as me in the Haymakers roster, Eric Cohen’s scheduled opponent turned out to be especially good, so they decided to rematch him with another charity fighter who’d also picked up the sport particularly fast. Eric was more my speed, Chris said, brokering a deal. Even though Eric was over 150 pounds, he and I just needed to get within ten pounds of each other, so if we both aimed for 140, we’d surely hit within the ten-pound range.
I grinned through rising panic. Errol looked stricken. The fight was four months away.
“So, let’s get this guy sparring,” Chris said, in that same warning tone he’d used with Errol the last time. “Like, immediately.”
Chris had his hand on my shoulder, and the two of them exchanged a look blunt with worry. In the background, men bled and hit and sweated, expelling themselves from themselves. Every one of them, whether they knew it or not, was looking for something they’d lost.
Oh, but I knew.
After Errol walked away, Chris called me over. “Listen,” he said, leaning toward me. “While I’ve got you, just a heads-up. I told Eric that you were trans—I hope that’s okay. I didn’t want it to be a surprise for him, reading your story.”
“Oh.” My vision sharpened, a shock of anger tightening my jaw.
“No one else knows, and I won’t tell anyone.”
“Cool,” I said, affecting detachment.
“Errol would be totally cool if you did tell him, you know.” Chris looked at me meaningfully. “Nobody gives a fuck.”
Whether Chris was right or not about Errol, I walked home that night, thinking about the edges of my own man box, tightening.
• • •
It is not easy to face the long shadow of assimilation in the United States, which is as old as the nation itself; in fact, James Baldwin referred to the refusal of “all other ties” and “an
y other history” as “the making of an American.” It is so much a part of our national history to pretend to be what we are not in our striving that many of us no longer see what we have lost.
“Race is an idea, not a fact,” Nell Irvin Painter wrote in The History of White People. Regardless, race evolved through a collective complicity where virtually every wave of “white” immigrants learned to shed their old cultures. These “expansions of whiteness,” Painter argues, included more and more immigrants and ethnicities until only “people of color” were left behind. My own family background, Czech and Polish on my mom’s side and (according to genetic testing) Ashkenazi Jew on my father’s, surely involved multiple generations of fierce assimilation into “whiteness,” a lineage of abandoning customs and traditions in the hopes of greater “tolerance.”
Still, “not everybody passes,” Painter, a woman just two years older than my mother, told me. “It’s like what Simone de Beauvoir says about being a woman: you’re not born into the role, you have to learn it.”
None are born understanding themselves to be a man or an American or straight or white. We become the bodies we have, the sum of history moving through us, quickfire, like a sickness or a rebellion.
“How many men are there in the United States of America?” she asked, rhetorically. “There is no one answer for all of them. Some of them are recovering misogynists, and some of them are not recovering. We can’t sweep them all together in a lump and say, ‘Oh, this will never be done,’ or ‘Oh, we’re just getting started,’ or ‘Oh, this is done,’ or ‘Oh, we’re getting better.’
“Keep at it,” she said.
• • •
And so I did. The night Chris told me I’d gotten the fight, I walked home feeling out of sorts. Not until after I’d showered and eaten my training-day second dinner had what I needed to do become clear to me.
I found Jess in bed, reading a book on the tarot and waiting up for me. She wasn’t happy, I knew, with the schedule, but she also told me that she was surprised to find that she liked the way boxing steadied me. The near-daily hard workouts, plus the fifteen miles I was required to run every week, had tamed the wildness that dogged me since before that day on Orchard Street, a hollowing that began when Mom died.
You’re present, Jess had said.
I hung my drenched hand wraps over the shower door to dry, which she noted with her eyes. I did many things that drove her crazy, but she was graceful enough to tolerate my obsessive interests because she got on her own “kicks”: handmade herbal tinctures and IKEA-hacked dressers, probiotic cleanses and solo trips to Bogotá. She could clean a microwave without scrubbing, make candles as nice as those $65 ones in boutiques in Brooklyn, and holistically cure our pets of any illness. If I asked her if something was possible, her answer was always yes.
“I want to quit,” I announced.
“Do you?” she asked, with curiosity. We looked at each other. She was in bed because there was nowhere else to sit in our tiny studio. I sat on the ledge of the only accessible window, taking stock of this starter life we’d built together, this sense that we were collaborating on a much bigger beginning. In this moment, I knew, she trusted me to be honest with myself.
“No,” I answered her. I thought of Errol’s reluctance, whatever the reason, to put me in the ring, as the lack of faith in me that it was. “I need a new coach.”
Jess nodded as if she’d been thinking the same thing. “So, get one.”
• • •
I called Chris the next morning. I felt a new clarity: the hot need to protect my body, this body, from undue harm. It was the same feeling that had guided my transition, and my flight from my stepfather, and my sense that men could be better than what I’d learned in those hours alone with him, his hot breath against my baby thighs.
I could sense Chris’s hesitation. It would have been easier, and probably smarter, for him to cut me loose then. I wasn’t going to be raising any real money for the organization. Plus I would be undertrained, no matter how hard I worked. What if something happened to me? It would be a PR disaster.
“I know I can fight,” I told him, actually believing it for the first time. Maybe he heard something in my voice, because he said he would set me up with his old coach, a sunny twenty-six-year-old from the Bronx, Danny Mangual, over at Church’s gym in downtown Manhattan.
“You’ll like Danny,” Chris said confidently. “He builds you up.”
I looked out the window of my walk-up, and I could see the man I’d once been, getting chased up the block by the guy in the white T-shirt. It seemed impossibly long ago that I’d thought I could learn to fight and that it would, somehow, make men less of a mystery to me. What I’d really wanted was to become less of a mystery to myself.
The thing about boxing, everyone says, is that you can’t hide who you are in the ring. But what they don’t tell you is that you also can’t hide how you feel. I’d lost my way, and it felt profound to admit that this was part of a larger wave of life events I couldn’t manage alone. I wasn’t sure which changed me more, testosterone or Mom’s terrible end. Both manhood and grief seemed to have turned off and on parts of me without my consent.
“Thomas?” Chris said, and I remembered that he was there. He said he would take me to meet Danny himself. It was unorthodox, switching coaches on such short notice. I knew Chris would have a lot of explaining to do. “See you tomorrow, buddy?”
“Thank you,” I said. After we hung up, I wiped away silent tears, put on my sneakers, and ran along the glittering East River, finally hitting a six-minute mile like a man who believes in new beginnings.
PART II
* * *
Fall
Two Months until Fight Night
Am I Wired for This?
* * *
My new gym was on a side street a couple blocks from the new World Trade Center, in a part of Manhattan that I never visited. To get there from my apartment, I cut through the red and gold of Chinatown, then past the Office of the City Clerk on Worth Street, among bridges and grooms in gowns and jeans, in another New York.
I crunched through the rice littered by the exit and then, farther on, passed the African Burial Ground National Monument, the site of the remains of hundreds of the estimated fifteen thousand Africans who were “buried” in this area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, back when yet another New York had a bustling slave trade. I passed an IRS office and a Chipotle and a Duane Reade built on top of mom-and-pop shops built on top of Native American land. I passed the R and W and 2 and 3 subway arteries, the teens in pristine Nikes and the middle-aged women on smoke breaks from city jobs and the bankers barking into phones in suits worth my rent.
Church Street Boxing may have been across the street from the Four Seasons Hotel, but it shared with Mendez a proudly no-frills front. There wasn’t even a desk, just instructions to buzz in. After the typical New York garble, the door unlocked for me, the mundaneness of my fresh start interrupted only briefly by cardio-types flying up and down the stairwell to the basement. The sweaty group in headbands was part of Church’s popular after-work fitness business, which I later learned clogged the gym most evenings to the annoyance of training fighters. I hustled past the sweaty flock, and the selfie-worthy sign that said, in greeting, FIGHTING SOLVES EVERYTHING, and pushed open the door.
The guys behind the reception desk tucked next to the basement door were jocular and goofy and welcoming, signing me in and then pointing out Chris, who stood, just as before, next to the ring. The gym was smaller and the bodies more varied than at Mendez, and despite its lack of windows, it had a brightness that put me at ease. All around us, the walls were papered with photos and newspaper clippings and fight posters of former Church’s boxers and trainers. Men everywhere had their arms around one another: a guy and his coach in a magazine profile, an amateur who’d gone pro and his squad in a candid shot, an older guy right in front of me talking low to a younger one who looked exhausted but alert, a
nd Chris, who was currently pulling me in for a hug.
“Hey, buddy!” said Chris, in his uniform of Adidas sweatpants and a Haymakers T-shirt, both arms around me, none of that side-hug bullshit. Then we watched two guys who’d just hopped in the ring spar loosely, without the seriousness required at Mendez. The smaller one was like a bulldog, rushing the slightly bigger guy, who moved fluidly beneath his swings.
They both pulled punches and paused from time to time to talk. The bigger one touched the smaller guy’s headgear with his gloves at the end of each break, affectionately, though he looked like the younger of the two. At the end of a couple rounds, they took a break for water. “There you go,” the bigger one, clearly the coach, said. Then he spotted me. “Yo, is this Tommy?” No one had ever called me that before, but I nodded. Sure, I was Tommy.
“Let’s get you in the ring, brother,” he said easily, handing me his sweaty headgear and a cup to put on. He was handsome in a baby-faced way, a sprinkle of a beard over what I would learn was a near-permanent grin.
“I’ve not sparred much,” I told him, bracing myself for his reaction.
“Well then, let’s go,” he said. “No time like the present.”
“This is Danny,” Chris told me redundantly, somehow already tying the padded headgear around my skull as Danny tightened my gloves and squared the knots, then fished through my bag for my mouthpiece and put it, gently, into my mouth.
“Everybody’s scared the first time,” Chris said, leaning in close. He’d told me once that his first proper spar, his knees buckled. “You’re having a rush of adrenaline. Just push through it.”
“We’re going to spar every night to get you ring experience.” Danny looked me in the eyes to make sure I understood. “It’ll get easier, and you will get used to it.” He held up his hands as if they were mitts. “Jab.”
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