LITMIR.BIZ

       Why Am I Doing This?

      Why do men fight? What makes some of us want to get hit in the face? What makes others show up to watch?

      What makes a man?

      When I first began injecting testosterone, I was thirty years old and needed to become beautiful to myself. I clocked my becoming primarily in aesthetic terms: the T-shirt that now fit me, the graceful curl of a biceps, the glorious sprinkle of a beard. I loved the way men looked, and smelled, and held themselves. I loved their lank and bulk and ease, their straight-razor barbershop shaves, their chest-first centers of balance. I loved the quiet efficiency of the men’s restroom, the ineffable physical joy of running alongside my brother, the shadows we cut against the buildings we passed.

      I loved being a man in that I loved having a body. I had surgery to reconstruct my chest; I stuck a long needle into the meat of my thigh each week; I changed my name and my place in the world—all so I could quit hiding behind pulled-low baseball hats and rash guards, free to pull off my shirt and jump right into the waves.

      The joys I found at first were daily, simple, and rooted in the warm physicality of a new freedom—toweling off after a shower and catching a glimpse of my flat chest in a foggy mirror; the way clothes suddenly fit my squarer shoulders and slimmer hips. The extra muscle mass that squared my walk, broadened my hands, my calves, my throat. I touched the dip of my abs, half-naked in the bathroom, and the muscle and skin synced in the mirror. I turned, and he turned. I smiled, and he smiled. I expanded, and so did he.

      Stories about trans people, when we hear them at all, often end with such shining symbolism, meant to indicate that the man or woman in question has succeeded, in the transition, in the grand task of finally being themselves. Though that’s lovely, and even a little true, in the same way a pregnancy or a near-death experience can act on the body like gravity, reshaping our days and memories and even time around its impact—it isn’t where my story ends. Not even close.

      I am a beginner, a man born at thirty, with a body that reveals a reality about being human that is rarely examined. Most of us experience gender conditioning so young—research shows it begins in infancy—that we misunderstand the relationship between nature and nurture, culture and biology, fitting in and being oneself.

      This book is an attempt to pull apart those strands. It also became, as I wrote it, a kind of personal insurance, a way to track and shape my own becoming in a culture where so many men are poisonous.

      I too come from a long line of poisonous men.

      • • •

      As the testosterone took hold and reshaped my body, its impact as an object in space grew increasingly bewildering: the expectation that I not be afraid juxtaposed against the fear I inspired in a woman, alone on a dark street; the silencing effect of my voice in a meeting; the unearned presumption of my competence; my power; my potential.

      I could feel myself forming in response to conference calls and tollbooth workers and first dates. I was like a plant in the sun, moving toward whatever was rewarded in me: aggression, ambition, fearlessness.

      So I shrugged into men’s T-shirts, which suddenly and beautifully fit, trying to pretend that I wasn’t stuck between stations, the static giving way to errant pieces of concerning advice I picked up along the way, a mounting dissonance I pushed aside until an otherwise ordinary spring day when the troubling gap between my past life and my new body could no longer be ignored.

      • • •

      To the strangers nearby on Orchard Street, the scene must have seemed innocuous. I looked like any other Lower East Side white guy in his thirties: tattooed, skinny, in sneakers and sunglasses. But I was just four years on testosterone. My beard, complete with errant gray hairs, telegraphed a life I hadn’t yet fully lived.

      Plus, my guard was down. I’d just left Jess, my new girlfriend, upstairs in my apartment, the promise of an empty evening spread out before us, and I was on my way to the bodega for ice cream when I clocked that the new restaurant with the beautiful front window had finally opened up next door. With a learned confidence I texted, “I’m taking you here tonight,” alongside a photo I snapped of the “modern British” spot, capturing—in the glarey bounce of my accidental flash—its impossibly cool new denizens, framed by that window in a soft and romantic light.

      “Hey!” I looked up, catching the gooey spring light through the trees like a breath before going under, knowing, in the way of animals, that I’d surrendered my night to the big-bicepsed guy in a white T-shirt coming my way. “Are you taking a picture of my fucking car, man?” he shouted, his voice strangely hoarse.

      I studied his approach, the moment expanding already into something bigger, people dumbly moving out of the way, gawking but not interfering. This was the third near scuffle I’d found myself in, in as many months. It was otherworldly the way an otherwise-idyllic moment could suddenly tip toward violence. As he came into focus, I locked up with dread.

      A queasy fear wavered through me.

      The Before me wanted to run, as I had run from my stepfather as a child, this stranger and the man who’d raised me sharing, momentarily, the same scary, bald menace.

      “Hey!” the stranger said. He had dark, wavy hair and a blurry mass of tattoos on his forearm, and the unkempt look of the newly divorced. He seemed drunk.

      I intuited that he wanted attention, that he hoped to not only cause a scene, but to leave the exchange with black-eyed proof of it.

      Men don’t run. The unwanted thought appeared in my brain, through the static.

      And so I heaved a great sigh and turned toward him because that’s what men do. I asked him in the lowest tone I could rumble “What in the fuck” he wanted. He pointed at a bright red Mercedes parked in front of the restaurant—the kind of car that looked like a dick. Sweat clung to his face, too much for the chilly afternoon. I took in the wildness in his eyes and was surprise to feel both scared of and sorry for him. What would Mom say? Keep it in perspective. The voice was so precisely hers, it was as if she were really next to me. Thomas, she warned me, when I balled my fists.

      He looked haunted, I thought, relaxing my hands.

      “I was taking a photo of the restaurant in front of your car,” I tried, softening my tone a bit, breaking the rules of the scene. “I want to take my girlfriend on a date there.” I remembered, at the last moment, not to add an upward lilt to the end of my thought.

      “I saw the flash!” he growled, beyond logic, a man committed to his part.

      That was the worst of it, I realized. He couldn’t even see me.

      I could be anyone.

      • • •

      “Men don’t hug,” my uncle told me, extending his hand on a warm day a few years before. It was offered kindly, my new life a stream of unsolicited advice, a guide to the construction of a passable masculinity.

      He wasn’t wrong. Jess was often the only person who touched me. It struck me that this unfriendly, unshaven man before me now needed human contact.

      I too knew what it was like to be near-mad with that sort of need. I may have learned through dumb practice to walk with my chest out, just as I’d trained myself to limit exclamation points in my correspondence, but I felt all the absences

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