“You’ve grown and changed. You have done a lot more work to be more emotionally present, to listen more, to be more open to suggestion. But it’s not like that person is lost.”
I lingered with her on the phone. I hadn’t let myself imagine that the women in my life might think I was a better person for becoming the man I am.
“I miss you,” I told her. I had pictures of holding her when she was born, my hair short, with me already insisting on pants. Growing up, she had the She-Ra castle, and I the He-Man one, and we played together in our way, beyond gender, with our dolls. She had understood my body, my place in the world, before either of us had a language for it.
Love for myself allowed me to stick a needle deep in my thigh every week. I’d not always remembered the people who still, every day, taught me how to believe in a world that was good, and forgiving, and beautiful, and that they needed me as much as I needed them.
Clare said that she was grateful that I was her sibling, in all my incarnations. “I had the privilege of growing up in a family where gender wasn’t necessarily taken for granted by everybody,” Clare said. “It really forced me to be, like, ‘Who am I?’ ”
Among the many answers, there was one we both knew for sure: she was my sister, and I her big brother—the only one.
• • •
“The definition of masculinity, whether you are ‘for it’ or ‘against it,’ is that it’s one-size-fits-all, and it’s bad: Violent, testosterone-driven, predatory,” Michael Kimmel, the masculinities studies professor, told me once. “I don’t think that’s true. The biggest misconception is that there’s one definition of masculinity and everybody subscribes to it.”
Deconstructing the man box and the harm it causes every body, male, female, and otherwise, begins with challenging that idea and offering, in its place, the reality of our actual bodies. To build equitable relationships and societies, to create a world free of unwanted violence, to tackle the masculinity crisis—we must first acknowledge how we each are failing, right now, to see the full spectrum of humanity in ourselves and in others.
The next day, I found myself thinking about all the ways I’d let others’ ideas of manhood shape me: the embarrassment of others when I cried, or the nods of approval when I said, “Yeah, I box,” the admiration for this black eye, this bruiser body, this silence in the year since my mom died, this “being so brave,” this “doing so well” in “acting so strong.”
Eating banh mis with the guys at a punk-rock Vietnamese dinner spot, I listened to Stephen talk about smoking cigars on a beach somewhere when this whole thing was over and noticed the look softening Danny’s face. “I’m really going to miss you guys,” he said. “We’re like family.”
Family, like gender, is contextual. Boxing didn’t make me more of a man. But, sitting across from Danny, I knew I was a better man for having met him.
These men had taught me how to love, with clearer eyes, the beautiful paradoxes I found in masculinity, the way it could hold a bloody nose and a hug, a sharp razor on the jaw under the tender watch of a barber, the muscle that must be carefully nursed to its potential, the body that could make a puppy or a child feel sheltered, cocooned.
Stephen would soon go back to Wall Street, Danny to supplementing his income by training women from the Upper East Side looking to mix up their cardio, and I to being the guy NPR called to comment on trans media visibility. But here, in these last days, no matter how minor our impending glory and how huge the divides of our daily lives, we had reached a transcendence, if only in passing.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Boxing was the beginning of a path, not a means to an end. That I knew for sure.
Danny interrupted my thoughts. “You got balls to do this, you know?” He sat across from me, then said it again, looking me straight in the eyes. Over noodles, my stomach yellowing with bruises, I nodded my thanks, understanding that my not, in fact, having balls didn’t matter to anyone anymore, least of all me.
• • •
Backstage at the Garden, coaches had shed their hoodies and Nikes for shiny shoes, collared shirts, and sweaters. They were reverent, watching us like nurses bedside checking a patient’s color, on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary: too much bravado from a quiet type, somatic complaints, telltale nervous tics, stooped shoulders. All us fighters gathered in our regulation shorts and tanks, and those of us who worried we’d showed up light took advantage of the snack platter while we waited to be weighed.
“Not a second goes by that he’s not eating,” Chris said to Danny, who looked uncomfortable in his dress pants and sharp gray sweater. The queasy energy of the gathering group was making me jumpy, so Danny and I hung out in a bunkerlike hall away from the others, fighters and their coaches brushing by us as they made their way between the weight and changing rooms. I took Chris seriously, inhaling two liters of water, two peanut-butter sandwiches, and two bananas in thirty minutes.
At weigh-in, I stripped down to the roomy boxers I’d bought just for this occasion.
“One thirty-five point four,” the ancient USA Boxing official called out.
I did it, I thought. The goal had been to get as close to 140 as possible, and to at least hit 135. Somehow, I’d followed through on every impossible promise I’d made.
“You’re prepared mentally,” Danny said, as the doctor listened to my heart and then handed me the pen to sign the waiver. I saw the words but didn’t need to read them, knowing them, understanding them, trauma and death. These words had brought me here, and this was the language in which I could, finally, face them.
Chris pulled Danny and me into the hallway and said the refs had agreed to let Eric and me fight no matter the weight differential, as long as he showed up. He was an hour late. Danny had offered to fight me instead, “like an exhibition,” but the officials said no.
“No matter the weight differential” was an unusual ruling. Professional boxers weigh in the day before a bout, famously starving and sweating themselves as light as possible, then gaining multiple pounds back in the hours before the match. The thinking is that it’s easier to shed water and then put it back on, while going up a weight class means having to add power along with weight.
Assuming Eric showed up heavy, the biggest danger was getting knocked out. But that wouldn’t be the worst failure, and neither would losing—it would be, on this very last occasion, not fighting at all.
I waited Eric out in the changing room with Kenny, Stephen, and some other guys. The tone was strangely grim. Stephen seemed especially subdued, huddled into himself, watching fight videos on his phone.
To keep me busy, Danny asked an old-timer to wrap my hands with the regulation gauze and pads. This special technique is meant to better protect a fighter’s hands from boxer’s fracture, and the production took a good fifteen minutes.
Most people don’t realize that boxing gloves are weapons. You train and spar with sixteen-ounce gloves, which look and feel like marshmallows and do the least amount of damage to your hands and the face of the guy who’s helping you get better. But fight night requires the much-lighter twelve-ounce gloves, which are guaranteed to cause black eyes, bloody lips, and broken bones because they are socks for your fists, and your fist is a precise missile that you have trained to bloody and break things.
But I wasn’t thinking about weaponry just then. I was thinking that, all day, men had taken care of me. I’d spent the afternoon at the barbershop, getting my hair cut by a new guy, who correctly read my mood and used his clippers in total silence. I relaxed into the chair, and when he put the hot towel across my eyes, I closed them.
“What do you do?” the old guy wrapping my hands asked. He touched me with such gentleness, I almost cried. “Writers are great fighters,” he said when I told him, surprising me.
“Really
?”
But he didn’t have a chance to explain. “He’s here,” Danny said, returning from Eric’s weigh-in. He was ninety minutes late. All the guys in the room cheered his arrival. “So it’s happening!” I said, sweat already forming slick lines down my back. Stephen, in an open dress shirt, reached out and hugged me.
“What was his weight?” I asked Danny.
“I don’t know,” he said, which was clearly a lie, “but I’m not gonna tell you when I find out.”
Eric, I learned much later, weighed in at 152.4 pounds.
• • •
In the ring, the fighter is entirely alone—without teammates, the rules upheld by a single referee, the match scored subjectively by three strangers. A fighter spends those rounds exposed: Blood drips from lips, eyes swell shut, arms grow weak and heavy. I was there, I understood, because I wanted all of me to be seen.
But I was there, also, because people helped me get there: the guys in my corner, my coach, my partner, my sister, my brother, my mother, my friends. I needed a lot of help, and my life changed when I learned how to ask for it.
“The number one shame trigger for men is being perceived as weak,” shame researcher Brené Brown told Redbook in a 2012 interview. She described men who say they give their partners “enough” to be perceived as open, but hold back total honesty out of fear of being judged.
Of course men are weak, and sad, and lonely. We are lost, and unsure, and scared. And we are all the more those things for how hard they are to say.
I put in my mouthguard, the teeth marks perfectly matching my teeth. I boxed my shadow, which was also me. Stephen, perhaps troubled by the quiet, abruptly stood up on a chair and began reading a Tyson quote off his phone.
“ ‘I’m afraid of losing,’ ” Stephen read in a strong, sure voice. “ ‘I’m afraid of being humiliated.’ ”
I made brief eye contact with Danny, then we both watched Stephen because he needed us to.
“ ‘But I was totally confident,’ ” he went on, his white dress shirt flapping, still open over his bare chest. He was more than one self at once too. “ ‘The closer I get to the ring, the more confidence I get. The closer, the more confidence I get. The closer, the more confidence I get.’ ” It sounded, the way Stephen said it, like a prayer or a spell. I thought about Tyson’s memoir. The most triumphant moment, the bravest he’d ever been, hadn’t been in the ring, but the moment he decided to quit. That’s the Mike Tyson story that never gets told. He fought because what he really wanted was to be loved. Plants will always grow toward the sun.
“ ‘All through my training I’ve been afraid of this man,’ ” Stephen read, gaining steam, raising his arms in the air. I could picture him as a boy, gathering the other kids to him. “ ‘I thought this man might be capable of beating me. I’ve dreamed of him beating me. I always stayed afraid of him.’ ”
Then Stephen paused. “ ‘The closer I get to the ring, I’m more confident.’ ”
Outside the door, they called the guys for the sixth bout.
“ ‘Once I’m in the ring,’ ” Stephen said, looking right at me, “ ‘I’m a God! No one can beat me.’ ” He gave me a thumbs-up, this moment a gift in the way he knew to give it; then I wiped my eyes with my gloves, the little damp spots proof of a life beyond and within this one.
Then they called my name.
Why Do Men Fight?
* * *
Danny looked at me with raised eyebrows as the spotlights roamed the crowd. “You ready?” It wasn’t really a question.
Just as on that last night of hard sparring, I felt my own hot breath, the muscles in my chest, the squeeze of my fists in my gloves. I was scared, and I was a fool, and I was ready—and so I jumped. That jackrabbity motion had driven Errol crazy in the beginning of my training, the being “light on my feet,” a nervousness that never totally disappeared. I jumped up and down the whole way to the ring, my fist in the air, wanting to show myself the sheer force of my will, the will that pushed me to fight after only a few months of training, and the same will that kept me alive in the face of the men who had tried to destroy me.
I could hear the rumbling of the crowd, taking notice. Danny laughed as the cheering grew louder. I hopped like a madman, up and down, my hands in the air, feeding off the crowd. Thousands of people hollered for me as I climbed into the ring, a wave of sound.
When I’d left the apartment, Jess did not tell me to be careful but wished me luck instead. It was a measure of adulthood, I thought, carrying my bag down the stairs, that no one was around anymore to worry over my body in the way a mother does. What a burden and a freedom to be the sole person in charge of my safety, to risk what I wanted of it, and to be trusted to survive.
I am not sure I’ve ever felt more fearless than I did hopping up and down to the fight song, approaching the ring in the center of Madison Square Garden. If something terrible happened to me, I thought, looking at the stretcher, I would not regret it.
Right before the bell rang, I looked out in the crowd for Jess and my sister and brother-in-law, who’d come in last minute from Boston to watch. I saw them, and the coworkers and friends who’d also bought tickets, off in the middle distance, far from the fat-cat ringside tables. I waved, hearing my name, and felt a shiver through the whole of my body, the whole of my life. Here I was, the man I was when I stopped being afraid of the man I was becoming.
• • •
The fight was set for three rounds of three minutes each, with one-minute rest breaks in between.
Eleven minutes can be a very long time. Someone in the world, right now, will use the next eleven minutes to have sex, cook dinner, end a relationship or start one. Eleven minutes is long enough to fire someone, conduct a civil marriage ceremony, and for just about anyone to run a mile. An eleven-minute death would be excruciating to witness. My first testosterone shot, injected by a nurse-practitioner in Boston, took approximately eleven minutes, including teaching time. It was the time, in total, between when my mugger tackled me in Oakland, held a gun to my head, and let me live. In 2009, French free diver Stéphane Mifsud held his breath underwater for an unfathomable eleven minutes and thirty-five seconds. Eleven minutes can destroy civilizations.
At the bell, I leaped toward Eric and hit him with a jab just as he counterpunched over it. But I got in a few other nasty head shots before moving out of his range, and that first, crucial exchange was mine. That was the plan, to take him in round one, to let him know that the man he’d sparred two months ago was gone, and to introduce him to who was standing in his wake.
Eric, meanwhile, mostly stood still, watching me curiously as I charged in, hit, and got out. To come forward, I found I had to marshal up every reason I could think of to hit him in the face: that illegal hold when we sparred, the face he made when he looked at me, his being late, and heavy, and the entitlement and the sneering and the bad sportsmanship.
He moved slowly, barely keeping his gloves up as I punched through them. The crowd’s cheers grew louder, in that primal way of people who smell blood. I hit him but eventually I was not hitting him. I was hitting my stepfather, and the doctors who didn’t tell me how sick Mom really was, and the surgeon who said curtly that Mom didn’t qualify for the lifesaving liver transplant, and the nurses who ignored her cries of pain at the Medicaid nursing home until we forced them to send her to the ICU, and she was right that she had to go, because she was dying. I hit him for the months after, the silence, the way I’d hid from her photos because remembering that she was dead did, in fact, feel like getting punched in the face.
I hit him four times for every haymaker he tried to land. I hit him because I wanted to show him that I would not be intimidated by his weight, or strength, or boyhood, or the way he’d nearly taken my head off when we sparred. I hit him to prove something to my own worst self, my shadow.
And, for a brief moment, I was eclipsed by it.
I could feel Eric’s pride tanking as he tr
ied and failed to pressure me, to lean into my punches, to get me on my heels. I was a blur, coming in with dozens of blitzes and pushing him back, back, back, until all he could do was cover his face, cornered, and the bald referee had to separate us. He turned toward Eric, hand out: One, two, three, four—
I put my gloves in the air and danced around Eric, like a real asshole. I was the sweat dripping off my arms, the goose bumps on my legs, the hardening of the muscles in my jaw, the light on my face, the swelling of my lip, the force of my will, the fact that I was not dead.
The referee quit counting and motioned Eric toward the center of the ring, a gesture that said, Start fighting back or this is over. Eric obeyed, coming out of the corner and cracking through my guard a few times with that vicious right, but I kept hitting and hitting. I sweated and panted from the clean effort of outscoring him, fair and square. As a ring attendant pounded out the gavel that indicated the ten-second mark, Eric threw himself into me, and I hit him with another combination that knocked him back into the ropes.
The bell rang, high and sweet, and I returned to my corner, my body nearly collapsing against Danny’s.
“There we fucking go,” Danny said. “That was beautiful. We’re in his fucking head.” Danny pushed me by my shoulders down onto a stool in the ring and poured a bottle of water over me. “We need to be in his head. See how fucking tired he is mentally? We got this fight.” Danny studied me. “Don’t show that you’re tired.”
I could feel my head ballooning with pain, my eyes squinting closed, my rage dissipating.
All my life, men have hurt me. It wasn’t noble, but the worst part of me wanted to learn how to hurt them back.
If I’d begun boxing to face the shadow of the man I could be, then I was really facing him now: I knew I was capable of violence, just like anybody else. What did I want to do with it?
• • •
Eric’s eyes, dead all of round one, were bright again. Whatever his coach had said to him, whatever hot shame or righteousness had been stoked in the sixty seconds between rounds, he was a different man. He didn’t look lethargic, or defeated, or even defiant.
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