Once, when Danny was late to meet me, a graybeard, chicken-muscle guy I’d never seen around tottered over to where I was working the bag, pulled off his own glove, and lifted my elbow an inch. “Your hook is crooked,” he said. There were a lot of old guys like him at the gym, guys in fedoras and tracksuits, guys who’d stayed in Las Vegas suites with champions or wanted you to think they had.
“I’ve been watching you,” he said. “You’ve got a lot of heart.” This was boxing’s biggest cliché and its sweetest compliment. I didn’t know what to say. He patted me on the shoulder and hobbled back to his own bag, and for the next few minutes I could hear his sharp exhale as he hit and hit and hit, believing in his punches, telling a new story in the face of his own blatant decay. He had heart too.
My weakness, my advantage, was that I was a beginner, and so I was better positioned to see everyone’s vulnerabilities, including my own. I was not ashamed of what made me myself, but I was learning how to protect it. It reminded me of the coyote I spotted once, in San Francisco, walking across a parking lot in broad daylight as if it were a dog. It wasn’t a dog, was the thing—it knew it was a coyote. I was the one who was mistaken.
In Native American folklore, a coyote can be both a trickster and a hero. Sort of like a fool, my favorite card in the tarot. I had him tattooed on my chest, merrily falling off a cliff.
“To call a man a fool is not necessarily an insult,” said the philosopher Sam Keen, “for the authentic life has frequently been pictured under the metaphor of the fool. In figures such as Socrates, Christ, and the Idiot of Dostoyevsky we see that foolishness and wisdom are not always what they seem to be.”
I was a fool, that was my advantage. The fool, the Roman proverb goes, is always beginning again.
Why Won’t Anyone Touch Me?
* * *
I came home late with bruised eyes and ribs and crawled into Epsom-salt baths. I came home late, mealymouthed, and hung my damp hand wraps over the shower and my sweat-soaked shirts and shorts and socks and even underwear all over the apartment. I came home late and made protein shakes and egg sandwiches and rejoiced in the sweetness of the present moment: the vibrant green of the plants, the feel of the mattress on my back, the sandalwood incense that clung to the sheets.
I made boxing my church, and it calmed me.
Jess said boxing made me less volatile, which surprised me because I hadn’t realized she knew I had been so angry in the first place, but I thought with regret back to that day on Orchard Street, and the fights she and I’d had since my mom died—the sort of shadowy events where my maleness translated in a way I didn’t understand.
The rules had changed, and so had I. Before, I was a softie, quick to apologize, generally more concerned with keeping the peace than proving a point. Now, I had to work harder to not take things personally, mostly because the translation of hurt or fear or anger through my new body created an impression that often baffled me.
Nowhere were the limits of masculinity more apparent to me than in my most intimate relationships. My abiding fear remained for years after I began injecting testosterone that I would be made strange, and that in my strangeness, I would not be loved.
Though I had been supported by friends and family, something had indeed dimmed. Pretty much everyone treated my body as if it were radioactive. It was easy to blame it on repressed or explicit homophobia in men, or straight women friends’ latent concerns about sending the wrong signals in our suddenly cross-gender friendships, but that didn’t explain the family members who did not hug me after my mom died, or why, in boxing, guys I barely knew swatted my ass, or draped an arm around my shoulders for minutes at a time. The code of how and why I was and wasn’t touched was a mystery to me.
My interest in being held hadn’t waned. I couldn’t make sense of what lack of touch had to do with gender. It seemed, to me, a core hunger of being human.
• • •
Of course, that hunger wasn’t about physical touch exactly—nor was it unique to me. But it was still stunning to discover that boys are not always starved for it.
In Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, a book by researcher Niobe Way based on her decades of work with adolescent boys, a fifteen-year-old boy describes his best friend with the flowery language often associated with teenage girls: “You have this thing that is deep, so deep, it’s within you, you can’t explain it. I guess in life, sometimes two people can really, really understand each other and really have a trust, respect, and love for each other. It just happens, it’s human nature.”
My surprise at this confused me. Hadn’t I had similar relationships at that age? Why had I not even known about the intimacy boys shared? Where were the coming-of-age movies and novels that mined the real depth of their friendships? And in an era in which the former surgeon general of the United States calls loneliness an “epidemic” because of its links to ill health and even increased risk of premature death, why do so many men who were once boys, boys who may have seen their love of their close friends as “human nature,” struggle to maintain any friends at all as adults?
According to Way, a psychology professor at New York University, everything changes between sixteen and nineteen (this age range also coincides with a rise in male suicide rates). That’s when boys learn that to be too close to guy friends is, she said, abruptly labeled “girlie” and “gay.”
Within this limiting context boys learn that violence is the only way available to them to bond. “In a messed-up society that doesn’t offer them opportunities for healthy connections, they go into unhealthy connections,” she told me.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the oft-incompatible extremes of the boxing gym—kindness and violence—gave fighting, oddly, a sheen of sanctuary. Because no one was worried, I guess, about being perceived as girlie or gay, I rarely found my masculinity being policed by the other fighters. The trade-off made me sad.
“If you raise people to go against their nature, which is to be loving, connected human beings,” Way said, “if you raise them to believe that somehow there is something wrong with that part of their humanity, why are we so surprised when many of these humans grow up and act crazy?”
Why indeed? Way’s words provide an unsettling context to a disturbing piece of boxing history: a 2002 press conference where a wild Mike Tyson screams, “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot,” at a reporter who suggested that Tyson needed a “straitjacket.”
If you watch the video on YouTube and freeze the frame, you will see the startled reactions of the men around him, the promoters and hangers-on, shocked that Tyson—the kid with a lisp and glasses from Brownsville who learned to fight the day an older bully broke the neck of one of the pigeons Tyson had so tenderly raised, the teenager without parents, plucked from juvie by a washed-up coach, Cus D’Amato, who moved him into his mansion upstate and transformed him into the most ferocious fighter alive (“I was like his dog,” Tyson said), the fighter whose every punch was “thrown with bad intentions,” who said D’Amato trained him to “be totally ferocious, in the ring and out”—the men around Tyson appeared positively shocked at what he had become, as if he were an anomaly and not, like Frankenstein’s monster, a man built of a long line of masculine expectations, as if he were not behaving exactly as he’d been designed to.
“I’m not an animal anymore,” he said in 2005, after cutting short his last fight. “I don’t love this no more.”
In a 2008 documentary he said, “I just want to be a decent human being. I know I can be.”
But in 2013, Tyson told reporters that he was on the “verge of dying” from alcoholism, and that he’d been lying about being sober. “I hate myself,” he said to a silent room, stripped of bravado. “I’m a bad guy sometimes, and I did a lot of bad things. I want to be forgiven.”
He told the Guardian in 2014, “I surrendered.” He was five months sober, and he spoke plainly about his grief over the 2009 death of his four-year-old daughter,
Exodus. He cried.
“Maybe I’m making progress,” he told the reporter. But he was forty-seven years old by then. Mike Tyson, whose self-definition and conditioning has revolved entirely, and for our entertainment, around the opposite of “surrender.”
Has he changed? In 2015, he was one of a tiny minority of black celebrities endorsing Donald Trump for president. He told the Daily Beast that he was drawn to Trump’s drive to win and saw—correctly—that they shared something fundamental in their approach to the world.
“We’re the same guy,” he said, defining toxic masculinity better than any sociologist I spoke to. “A thrust for power, a drive for power. Whatever field we’re in, we need power in that field. That’s just who we are.”
“I want to be forgiven” is such a different sentiment from the resignation of “That’s just who we are.” In Tyson’s comic and brutal self-awareness, he is an inconvenient and complicated reminder of the depths of the worst parts of masculinity.
His is not a comeback story. It’s a cautionary tale.
• • •
Against the ropes has become a metaphor for near defeat in everything from love to business, but in boxing, like life, fighters with good defense can absorb blow after blow, gathering strength in their bodies even as they are laid bare, energy building until they roll out and attack with a deadly combination. Against the ropes is the crossroads of crisis, and the best fights are won by defying the odds.
Against the ropes, like when Mom died. Jess and I had just started dating, and she watched me navigate extended family, power of attorney, medical directives, the ammonia in Mom’s brain. Jess took my phone calls from the hospital cafeteria, laughed at my stories about sneaking my mom illicit grilled cheeses. They met once, in that terrible nursing home in Pennsylvania, and Jess listened to Mom tell beautiful stories about my brother’s hockey career and his art, because she thought I was Brett. I didn’t correct her, saving the stories for him, all of the things she’d never told him, locked up inside her. As we left that day, Mom emerged from the fuzziness of her brain to tell Jess she loved her. Jess without pause said, “I love you too.”
Jess told me that she knew she’d marry me because of the man I was then. I had never wanted so much to give up, not after a childhood of sexual abuse, not after being mugged at gunpoint, not during my transition, when almost everyone I knew fell away like shed skin. I would stand on my roof, smoking illicit cigarettes and talking to myself or my mom, and think maybe I should jump right off it. Against the ropes: I called my best friend from childhood, my new friends in New York, my therapist. I asked and I asked and I asked for help in my male body, and my anger relaxed against the bodies that held me up.
“Come forward,” Danny said over and over, but what I heard was that I needed to fight.
He pressured me back onto the ropes, again and again, until I saw the opening, and I surprised myself by doing what he’d taught me: rolling, coming around the side, hitting him straight and hard in the head. Coming alive.
“There we go!” he yelled every time. “There we fucking go!”
In sparring I became “Tommy”; I consented to violence that was designed to keep me safe; I asked for help in fighting for my body; and other men readily agreed.
Vulnerability was a choice, a risk, an intimacy, both in the ring and out. Like confiding in Danny that I was nervous I’d freeze up, or when Jess held my head in her hands, studying the purple hue of my first real shiner, and asked, “What happened? Are you okay?” I fought the urge to peacock or shrug it off, but I didn’t.
Would I freeze? Would I fail, in front of hundreds of people? Danny had put his arm around me earlier and said, “You won’t.”
I put my arm around Jess in an echo, not pretending to be brave. “I’m scared,” I answered her honestly. “And also I’m okay.” I was afraid that this admission would make her less attracted to me.
But she loved me, I had to believe, all the more for it.
• • •
Desire is a paradox for everyone, but for most of my life, my body was desirable only when I pretended to be something I wasn’t.
“You’re like a guy, but better,” said the girl in tenth grade—whose boyfriend was the captain of the soccer team—right before we made out. The next year, I dated our homecoming queen on the sly. That narrative—a guy, but better—got me through college, where I grew into my own brand of swagger, binding my chest and spending an entire summer as a barback at Meow Mix, New York’s now-defunct, legendary lesbian bar. My type was the woman who not only dated men, but was unhappy with them.
That was a lot of women.
Back then, my masculinity felt cleaner and clearer to me, a solution, not a problem. Being an interloper let me remain recognizable (“like a guy”), while avoiding all the baggage that gender entailed (“but better”).
Growing up, I had little empathy for men. Their problems were trivial when compared to those of the women in my life who, like me, had been sexually abused by a parent, or raped, or coerced into sex. Every woman I knew was sexually harassed with obscene regularity. No wonder they wanted to date me, I thought. It wasn’t hard to be decent and loving, and certainly it was possible to go an entire lifetime not raping or harassing anyone. The “nice guys” I was friends with struck me as whiny and oversensitive. I was “nice,” I thought, and I didn’t have any trouble getting a date.
When I began my transition, I thought I could still be “better,” even if I traded being “like a guy” for becoming one. What I wasn’t prepared for, when I began injecting testosterone, was the way the filter of my body changed everything.
“You’re a feminist?” dates asked, eyebrows raised. I knew exactly how it sounded.
So began the worst dating year of my life. In attempts to telegraph that I was not a threat, I systematically torpedoed first dates and bungled flirtation. Before, I amplified my masculinity into a wry performance. Now, I made myself smaller, afraid to spook my Tinder matches, always doing the wrong thing, unable to marionette myself into the right moves, baffled by etiquette I’d never learned, everything a minefield. “Who pays on the first date? No one really knows anymore,” a Wall Street Journal headline read, capturing my panic. I overthought everything. The gender pay gap made splitting the bill feel unfair, but I did not want, either, to further the antifeminist presumption that I would pay. “The asker pays,” a gay friend said simply, trying to help. But that seemed like a relic from a different life.
Then there was the weirdness of dating apps and the strange shame of my dick and how I’d explain it. I tried telling women on the first date. Before the first date. On the third date. “Everybody gets rejected, that’s dating!” people said unhelpfully. I dated women who’d been with trans men, but found those encounters just as baffling. Before, I was used to my body breaking the rules of a language I didn’t need to speak (“but better”). My newness made dating more like a game of telephone. I tried on different selves, cribbed from movies and TV shows, becoming further from the truth with each effort.
A few months into my new dating life, a well-meaning friend I’d known for a long time advised me that I was being “too vulnerable” with the women I went out with. We were in a gay bar, and my awkwardness in this new body had clearly erased the confident first kisses and the flirty straight girls of my old life.
“It’s not sexy,” she said simply. My Before self in the initial stages of dating—forward, confident, romantic—felt predatory now. That vulnerability my friend clocked on me was just my desire for connection, stripped of pretense.
So I quit the dating apps and stopped trying to impress straight women who I worried would be ultimately scared off by my junk, anyway. If I didn’t find someone who wanted to touch me and really touch me, I figured, I wouldn’t be touched at all.
• • •
Recently, I was on a panel about masculinity and feminism. Toward the end of a long conversation about bystander interventions, a woman raised her hand
to comment, “This whole time we’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about the men I’m drawn to: motorcycle-riding, big-muscled jerks who love to argue with me about everything I believe in.” After an awkward silence, she pressed on, “I don’t understand how anything will ever change if I keep dating the exact kind of man I don’t want to see in the world.”
A few people nodded. I told her I understood exactly.
Sarah DiMuccio, an American researcher and PhD student at New York University, published a paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity that offered a simple, cultural definition of that type of manhood that stuck with me. Comparing the Danish idea of masculinity with the American one, she found that the major difference between them was that in Denmark, men said to “be a man” meant not being a boy.
American men said that to “be a man” was to not be a woman.
That is, Niobe Way says, where all the trouble starts. If being “feminine” is the opposite of being a man, then many qualities that Americans associate with women (such as empathy, which shows up in boys as well as girls) are not just frowned upon, but destroyed in boyhood. “You’re only a man by not being a woman,” Way told me. “That’s basing someone’s humanness on someone else’s dehumanization.” I thought of real men, and passing. I knew this America intimately.
Even people who study masculinity aren’t immune to the same toxic narratives they work to take apart. DiMuccio, who is from the United States, has a Danish fiancé, and said she struggled for some time with his disregard for American machismo. Yet, like many of us, that’s not how she thought she’d react: “If someone asked me, ‘Would a sensitive guy turn you off?,’ I would never have said yes. It actually took me a long time to turn off the socialization that I didn’t even realize was there.”
I thought of the woman who’d told me I was too vulnerable, the failure it implied, the long dry spell that followed. It was a terrible calculus, but a life spent alone seemed better to me than one lived dishonestly. I didn’t date again for a very long time.
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