It was easy to dismiss him for his bombast, but not his kindness, which was as relentless as everything else about him. Wherever I was that first week, he was right behind me, telling me I had it in me to beat him, even as he kicked my ass. After our third time in the ring together, I felt safe enough to blitz him, and when I nailed him in the eye, he hugged me. If an alien had landed in that boxing gym and had to describe the behavior of male humans, surely it would have concluded that we touched each other as much in love as in violence—that the former, in fact, inspired the latter. If anything appeared “innate,” it would surely be the affection between us.
Aggression comes from Latin: ad (toward) and gradi (walk). Its original meaning wasn’t “attack” but, just as Danny kept encouraging me to do, “to go forward.” “I’m just never going to stop,” Stephen said, explaining his style to me one day. “It’s the same way I approached my career, I’m just never going to give up. I got knocked down plenty of times, and I got fucked up plenty of times in the ring. I was a constant moving force, always coming forward.”
That, I understood. At home, I often felt inert, and isolated. But at the gym, Danny and Stephen and the rest of the guys called up that force in me, like magicians, and I allowed it—not, I realized, because it was gendered, but because it was necessary. To go forward.
In the ring itself, moving toward someone trying to hit me wasn’t about testosterone or muscles or boyhoods. Increasingly, I stepped into a coming jab—not ashamed, but protective. This too was all about context, after all: These men weren’t hurting me. They were showing me how to live.
What If I Fail?
* * *
The qualifying spar took place at the very edge of winter. If I couldn’t win, I told myself, as I walked through Chinatown early on Sunday morning, at least I wouldn’t die.
I knew I was of particular focus: I started late, trained less, sparred next to not at all, switched coaches the week before, and was matched at the last minute with a guy who had at least ten pounds on me. Danny reminded me, daily, that my only job was to “put on a good show.” But we both knew that if I couldn’t hold my own, I wouldn’t be cleared to fight.
When I arrived, Haymakers had shut Church’s down, so the regulars were gone. It was just us charity guys in our fancy gear, half-jacked and mostly male. Guys bounced on the balls of their feet. A lot of fighters talked cheerfully to their opponents, and coaches shot the shit along the walls, hanging back and watching.
Eric arrived and I made a split-second assessment: He was definitely heavier than me, though shorter, which meant I probably had better reach—an advantage. We both sported beards, and he wore a backward baseball cap. In contrast to the jovial mood, he sat by himself in stony silence. I, meanwhile, tried not to look as scared as I felt.
The vibe was strange, as most of the fighters seemed to struggle with the masculine expectation that required they both not take things too seriously (the “civilized” take: “It’s a charity match!”) and that they prove to the other guy how serious they really were.
Errol was also there, looking more somber than the rest of them, with Larissa. When he texted me to ask what he’d done wrong, I was sorry for the casual way I’d told him I’d found a new coach. It didn’t cross my mind that I was, effectively, firing him, and I hadn’t even had the decency to tell him why.
I was surprised at my own thoughtlessness, and the foreboding I felt seeing him. I’d assumed, as I’d been trained to, that he’d shake it off. He was a guy, wasn’t he?
But I could see, in his striving and perfectionism, the way he also did not quite belong. He’d been hard on me, but not unkind: he’d called me “champ” and checked on me when I was sick. He was even, when I’d dropped him, arranging a sparring session with a coach at a different gym, no easy task. It was easy to tell myself a story about how he’d let me down because he didn’t see me, but that wasn’t quite true.
Watching him huddled up with Larissa reminded me of the moment after our core drills, a week before our last training session, when Errol stopped me on my way to the locker room.
“If I was a bit of an asshole just now, I’m sorry,” he said. “I had a tough day.”
I’d been so stunned, I hadn’t responded. I could count on one hand how often a man had apologized to me, for anything. In that moment, when he offered a different side of himself, I hadn’t met him there. I hadn’t asked, though I still wish I had, what he meant.
Now we looked at each other from across the gym like awkward exes. This was his second year coaching, and he’d only get new clients if alumni of the organization had good experiences. I didn’t know what his plans for himself were, or if my actions had compromised them.
It occurred to me then that perhaps all of those silent movie moments between fathers and sons were the natural by-product of bodies built on honor and its antecedent, shame. To tell another man how you feel is too risky—if it fails, you’re left exposed. It struck me as impossibly sad that, so often, near silence was the only witness men could provide one another without being policed. Why didn’t I know this man I’d spent dozens of hours with? Why didn’t he know me?
When we caught each other’s eyes, I wish I could say that I walked up to him, that I found the right words, that I was the man I wanted to be. But I avoided him.
Finally, he approached me. “Hey, champ.” It was a grace, a well-placed phrase—brave. I saw him with sudden clarity: Errol, who somehow taught himself to box much later than the other guys, then fought in the Golden Gloves. We were both outsiders, both fighting to be here, and he’d shown me more about how to navigate this world than I realized. If only we could have talked about it.
• • •
Meanwhile, as we waited for the matches to begin, the charity had us record promotional videos in the back room to play on the JumboTron on fight night. We each hit the heavy bag and shadowboxed in the ring and did sit-ups while two guys with video cameras trailed us, creating a montage that would later be set to silly, dramatic music with the voice-overs announcing who we were and what we were fighting for. Standing in line to record my message, I was self-conscious, struggling to take myself seriously as I imagined the handheld-camera video of me walking down the darkened hallway from the locker room to the gym floor playing in the Garden.
Mostly, I didn’t know how to explain my presence. I cared about “knocking out cancer,” as I overheard someone else say in earnest, but I couldn’t figure out a sound bite that would capture what drove me into this surreal world. Eric went ahead of me, and when he was prompted by the guys behind the camera in the back room—“What are you fighting for?”—I heard his answer: “I’m fighting for my father, who was diagnosed with throat and mouth cancer about a year ago, and for all the other improbable victories out there.”
I wondered if his dad would be at the fight, and what it might be like to see a man who taught you to shave, and who cared for you, die. I thought of my own stepfather, the only father I’d known, and felt the sting of orphan’s grief that, I realized, also possessed so many of the men around me: men with dying dads, bad dads, disappeared dads.
I wasn’t sure if beating me was one of the “improbable victories” Eric referred to, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him—when he shuffled past me, he didn’t look my way. I was suddenly uneasy.
“When men fight, they have to believe that the target of their aggression is a legitimate target,” Michael Kimmel, the masculinity-studies expert, explained. In Eric’s unreadable sullenness, I couldn’t get a sense of what knowing that I was trans meant to him.
“Did you ever wonder why so many men who believe that testosterone propels men’s violence, why they beat their wives up but not their boss? Your boss makes you feel like shit, your boss is an asshole—why don’t you beat him up? Because he has power over you, that’s why. He’s not a legitimate target.”
A “legitimate target,” Kimmel said, is someone men feel entitled to dominate—someone seen as weaker
, someone who has less power than them. For the worst sort of masculinity to work, “real men” prove their worth by targeting people they can beat. Real men win. And the losers?
I tried to shake off the thought.
“I’m fighting to destroy cancer,” I said abstractly, when it was my turn. The guy who followed clapped me kindly on the shoulder. I appreciated the gesture, even as I realized that my discomfort looked, perhaps, like a run-of-the-mill case of the nerves when, in fact, it was a more complex anxiety. I didn’t belong here, among these hedge fund managers and Golden Gloves winners. How could anyone think I did?
As Eric pulled on his cup, I scanned the posters of Ali and the newspaper clippings papering the walls, worried that the idea of being publicly beaten by me might antagonize Eric beyond what the people in this room had prepared for. That was the subtext, conscious or not, of why he’d needed to be informed in the first place. I didn’t know him at all, but I knew that I was a potential humiliation for any man whose masculinity was measured in shame.
“Tommy,” Danny said, appearing beside me, tightening my gloves. “It’s just another day of sparring, all right?” He knocked my headgear playfully with his fist.
Keep it in perspective, Mom said, and I nearly fell over, her voice as clear as the wallop of adrenaline, surging through me.
Danny, assessing me, held up his hands again, as on that first night. “Jab.”
I did.
“Cross.”
I did.
“Great. Feel all right?”
I nodded. It wasn’t true, but it had to be. Danny held the ropes apart for me, and even though I wondered if this whole thing was a mistake, I was an object in motion, and so I stayed in motion, a principle of physics I learned as a kid. I was a beginner grabbing the ropes, I was a body pushing through.
• • •
We were paired with our future rivals for two rounds, four long minutes. The Haymakers leadership surrounded the ring, taping the match with their phones. Danny, Larissa, Stephen, and Errol looked on as I bounced up and down. Eric stared at me blankly as the bell rang.
It was, predictably, a disaster.
Within ten seconds, Eric hit me so hard I saw shimmers of light. I was nervous, jumping around, wasting energy, while he controlled each round from start to finish, chasing me around the ring. A few times, he held me against the ropes with one glove and hit me, again and again, a straight right to the face.
Between the coaches and fighters and Haymakers staff, probably fifty people were in the gym, but I couldn’t hear a thing: No hollering, no cheering, nobody jumping rope. It was near-silent as Eric charged me. I was, I realized, not just losing.
I was being beaten.
Errol’s face, worried, smeared across my peripheral vision. But a moment later, near the end of the first round, Danny caught my eye and smiled.
It’s just sparring, he mouthed, and I nodded back.
I can do this, I thought, just as Eric lunged toward me and I tripped over my feet and fell dramatically to the floor.
It was humiliating and, by the rules of a charity fight, it was a knockout. I bolted back up, pushing myself off the mat with my gloves and shook it off like a dog. It hit me physically, a bodily response to threat: I actually wanted to fight.
I could hear Danny yell from my corner of the ring, “You all right?”
I waved him off. All I had was my strong jab, my shaky right, a week of sparring, and my confidence. The worst had officially happened. I swung wildly at Eric until the bell rang.
Danny told me to keep it up, pouring water into my mouth. I was surprised to see that the other fighters had gravitated to the ring, and I saw a few friendly faces, guys who worked or trained at Church’s, who’d come in early on a Sunday not to work, but to watch. When the bell rang again, some of the men I knew shouted directions at me: “Up top” or “His ribs are wide-open.” I felt lighter, not like a failure at all. I hit and hit and mostly missed. But the guys watching weren’t embarrassed for me. They were cheering me on.
I looked Eric in the eyes even as he hit me. However bad I was, my hands flew, like a chaotic flurry of birds, in Eric’s general direction. I did not hate him, and I did not win. But I didn’t give up either.
Afterward, I half crawled out of the ring, and the old-timers and the coaches gave me high fives. I was awash with adrenaline making me sick, just as Chris had told me it would. “That wasn’t, like, my proudest moment,” I said, even as I realized that it was.
Danny, meanwhile, looked at Eric with utter derision, and I felt such affection for him I wanted to cry.
“You did great,” he said. “This dude, Eric, has got no skill. He’s telegraphing every move.”
We were silent for a moment, contemplative. I was slick with sweat, still ragged with fear, and happier than I’d been since the terrible last weeks of my mom’s life. I felt her beside me, asking lightly with those raised eyebrows of hers what the hell I was doing, but she was always already on board. She had taught me how to dream myself into being.
“I’m not worried,” Danny decided. “You fell down, but you got up.” He looked at me approvingly. “That’s the story of what just happened. That, we can work with.”
• • •
Fighting every day softened violence in a way that demystified it. It came as a relief to me to learn in real time that summoning “aggression” was less about the other guy than accessing the fight in myself, the very human will to live.
Still, my male body didn’t always communicate that dawning awareness in the way I intended.
“Check out my jab!” I said proudly to Jess one night, practicing in the bathroom mirror.
“A man on the street followed me for blocks today, saying, ‘I want to fuck you and to kill you,’ ” she said, pointed but not unkind. I lowered my fists. She didn’t like when I shadowboxed at home, even in play. She did not want to be reminded that I could be a man worthy of fear.
I understood. One night, walking down Second Avenue, I tensed up at the heavy footfalls of a man coming up behind me. I was alone on my side of the street, and despite my boxing training, I did not formulate any sort of plan for fending him off. Instead, my body locked in place, collapsing back into a night in 2009 in Oakland, when a man tackled me to the ground on 41st Street and held me at gunpoint for ten long minutes. Later that summer, he shot two other men in two separate robberies, killing one. He let me live, I’d come to believe, because when I spoke, my then-higher voice betrayed that I was not yet male. Now, as this panting man drew near, I stood still, waiting for whatever terror was to come. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, he was in front of me, striding away in his Nikes and sweatshirt, looking like the guys I trained with, looking like me on one of my biweekly runs.
Jess’s comment reminded me of that moment, and another. Running along the East River in my own hoodie-and-track-pants uniform at dawn, I’d been too absorbed in making my time to notice that the woman ahead of me was the only other person around. I closed the space between us, thinking that I had another shot at a six-minute mile, thinking of the shower I’d take when I got home, thinking about the sunlight on the water, the boats under the bridges, everything but how it must have felt for her to hear me coming as we approached the most desolate part of the running trail, until I was just a few feet away and she looked back, a quick assessment, and I saw a panic in her face so familiar it rocked me, and I slowed my pace to a near stop, until she was far away again. I stood at the spot where I’d once thrown a letter to my mom into the East River, watching the water and wondering if it was possible to break your own heart.
The next time I found myself behind a woman running alone, I thought, I would do what I wished men had done for me: I would announce myself. “Passing on your right!” I’d call. I would be careful to give her a wide berth. I would be aware that my body was, for much of the world, a weapon until proven otherwise.
People sometimes think that being trans means I live “b
etween” worlds, but that’s not exactly true. If anything, it has just created within me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow.
• • •
I bought a bigger gym bag to lug around all the things I had to carry: sixteen-ounce boxing gloves for sparring, twelve-ounce gloves for hitting the pads, wraps, socks, shorts, shirt, running shoes, boxing shoes, sweatpants, water bottle, sweatshirt, mouthguard, headgear, jump rope. It was like holding a whole other life alongside my workbag, with its laptop, packed lunches, and notebooks.
At work, I kept up my tally of whom I talked over, and why. I asked my coworkers for feedback. At the gym, I spent hours each day learning how to slip and use the latent energy to counterpunch. At work I focused on collaboration. When I ran meetings, I opened with a question so that everyone else in the room felt safe to speak. At the gym, I learned that each of my inhibitions could be surmounted, whether it was lifting ten more pounds or summoning the energy for a final flurry at the end of a long round.
I was quieting, rooted to the ground, and less impulsive about making a show of it. I ran five miles in forty-five minutes and saw that I had underestimated myself. I was relentless on the speed bag. I saw my flaws as mutable facts, like shadows brought to light.
When I wasn’t at the gym, I watched YouTube ballets of men hitting men. I saw the transcendent beauty in all of it: Muhammad Ali moving his massive body with feverish grace; Manny Pacquiao’s infectious, crazed energy; Floyd Mayweather’s caution and tactical intelligence; Mike Tyson’s bravado, his madness, his insistence on himself. Each man had a weakness that he’d turned into an advantage: Ali’s inability to demonstrate the “right” form also meant he reinvented the language; Pacquiao’s small size gave him speed and heart; and Tyson—well, the man said it best: “I can’t be beaten unless I do it to myself.” His brutality could compensate for his short reach, but he was his own worst enemy and his biggest fan.
And mine?
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