Amateur - Thomas Page McBee

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myself apart from women especially, so concerned with being perceived as a threat that I’d become a ghost instead. I’d accepted these prices of admission at first, but lately every day felt like a struggle against a bad translation. What had happened to me?

      Done with the charade, I turned away from the angry stranger on Orchard Street, but he clotheslined me as I attempted to move on, his meaty arm stretching out across the length of my chest scars, matching with odd precision the reminder of the technology that allowed me this moment, this rich reward of being “in the right body” at last.

      I could smell a mint on his breath, and the confirmation of liquor beneath it. It was late afternoon. I looked at him sadly. “Give. Me. Your. Phone,” he said, emphasizing each word, as if he sensed my empathy and wanted to destroy it.

      He and I both waited for me to do something. But what? He had seventy-five pounds and five inches on me. Was I to hit him? Could I? I studied the dart of his eyes. I could, if I had to.

      A base and primal instinct grabbed me as I waited for him to twitch. It felt terrible and good to give into it. I stared at him, calculating the distance between us. He wobbled, and then smiled viciously when I flinched, telegraphing the kind of masculinity that I knew, that I could smell, compensated for some deep maw of insecurity. It was hard to tell, as it always is, if he was the kid who got bullied or the bully himself. Still, a part of me wanted to live out that worn masculine narrative of risking my body to prove my right to exist in it.

      You are a child of the universe, read the poem my mom had given me in a birthday card long ago, you have a right to be here. Grief whistled through my chest. My phone buzzed, disrupting our dark reverie. It was surely Jess, asking after me. I wanted to be upstairs with her, eating ice cream in that narcotic new-love bliss. Why was I down here, making my body a weapon instead?

      I was a man, that much was clear. But, years after I became one, I still wondered what, exactly, that meant.

      • • •

      It wasn’t lost on me that others were asking the same question.

      The first few years I’d injected testosterone coincided with a period of anxious headlines about men in economic turmoil. Post-recession, a surge in suicides, drug addiction, and even beards were all blamed on a broader insecurity about the massive loss of jobs and the shake-up of male-led households after the crash. It was dubbed a global “masculinity crisis.” (This idea, not new in academic circles, now caught fire in popular culture.) In the United States, the story went, men were (sometimes reluctantly) becoming stay-at-home dads, or going back to school in traditionally female-dominated fields such as nursing, or—to avoid doing that—moving back in with their parents and playing video games all day. It was, according to a 2010 cover story in The Atlantic, “the end of men.”

      A certain sort of man—white, rural, older—it seemed, was disappearing, and dying, and killing, and overdosing. These men did seem to be in crisis, in the broadest possible sense. But it did not appear to be the end of the masculinity, at least not to me. From the moment the testosterone kicked in, nearly everyone around me was invested in educating me in how to ape the strong-and-silent stereotype of the man whose reign was “over”—a socialization that involved relentless policing by strangers and friends alike, and across gender, geographic, and socioeconomic lines. Whatever compelled these instructions, they seemed core to manhood itself, and maybe that’s why I became obsessed with chronicling the “masculinity crisis”—both the unfolding economic fallout that stemmed from a fundamentalist gender narrative linking masculinity to work, and the way I found its many echoes in my own experience of dislocation in this body. Because of my conditioning, I suspected that the “crisis” was far more complex than people understood, that its root cause was far deeper than class and race and “tradition,” that the bedrock of the crisis was inherent in masculinity itself, and therefore it encompassed all men, even the ones who felt they successfully defied outdated conventions. It was, after all, the men who read books on emotional intelligence and wore tailored shirts who often advised me, with the casual, camouflaged sexism of the urbane, to treat dating like warfare, or to dominate meetings with primate body language.

      It seemed to me that being in crisis was a natural reaction to being a man, any man, even if that wasn’t precisely what anyone else meant.

      I started thinking about all of this back in 2011, the year I first injected testosterone. I’d just landed my first full-time journalism job as an editor at a newspaper in Boston, following the headlines with macabre curiosity from the United States to the United Kingdom and eventually as far east as China. In the United States, the story morphed quickly into the now-familiar tale of class and generational stratification: Poorer men were being “left behind” by the rise of education rates for women and the trend away from marriage in lower income brackets.

      Meanwhile, well-off “makers” in cities dressed like lumberjacks and dabbled in bespoke artisan crafts to reconnect with old-fashioned, hands-on work, but with attitudes toward masculinity that many men insisted were radically different from previous generations. Millennial guys seemed, to the sociologists and anthropologists who studied them, to have attitudes toward women that portended a new era of equity—especially at work. But the reality was, indeed, far more complicated. Later surveys and studies would suggest that Millennial men as a whole turned out to be as “traditional,” and even less egalitarian, in their attitudes toward gender as their fathers—which made experts eventually posit that growing up with fathers impacted by the masculinity crisis made them more, not less, resistant to gender equality.

      But that came later. Back in 2013, about a year before that disappointing story began to emerge, I lost my journalism job in Boston to massive layoffs. I was living cheaply enough to subsist on freelance and contract work, so I chose optimism, casting around for story ideas about men who seemed to be using the crisis as an opportunity to challenge the negative aspects of manhood. And they were out there: Men were more engaged fathers, experts said. Rap stars and pro athletes came out. Bromantic comedies about the platonic love between friends beat out traditional, more sexist buddy comedies at the box office. I needed those stories, needed those men, taking solace in the idea that I wasn’t the only guy seeking a different answer from the one I’d found in the models that had shaped me, growing up in a small town outside Pittsburgh.

      But the more I felt at home in my body, the more my discomfort with what was expected of it deepened. Later that year, I moved to New York and spent most of my free time on terrible first dates I couldn’t afford with women I couldn’t figure out. I wasn’t sure how to tell them I was trans, or if I even should, but I also didn’t understand how to transcend the surprising traditionalism that masked our every interaction.

      As I struggled to make sense of my place in the world, the economy improved and certain cultural shifts around fatherhood in particular did seem to take hold, but the masculinity crisis raged on. Men I grew up with killed themselves. As an opioid epidemic surged, social media bifurcated Americans. I could see the splinter in my own feeds, where I found a reader-ship for my stories, but trolls tweeted at me in response to nearly everything I wrote. “You’re not a man,” they said, over and over. “And you never will be.”

      It was 2015. Everyone told me to “not read the comments,” but it all—the policing, the dating, the sexism, the trolls, the Millennials, the opioids, the “makers”— it all seemed connected. I couldn’t shake the idea that this larger masculinity crisis held in its bitter center a truth that reflected something important and terrifying about what we talk about when we talk about men. All men. Something bigger than a generation, or a political moment, or an economic crash—a story about masculinity that we all, every one of us, has been taught to believe.

      • • •

      “Maybe, instead of looking for the men you want to be, you need to face your worst fears about who you are,” Jess said, early in our courtship. She wondered if my notions of masculinity were unrealistically “romantic.” I wasn’t so sure she was right, but her invitation to examine my fears so terrified me, I tried to avoid thinking about it, until my run-in with the man on Orchard Street clarified her wisdom. There he was, finally, my awful mirror: when he balled his fists, I balled

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