LITMIR.BIZ

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us so different, and you’d be right.

      “Hey!” the man shouted, and that wickedness coursed through me even as I marshaled the self-control to turn and walk away, tracking his ever-louder footfalls, leading him toward Seward Park, where at least there were parents and children playing on the slides, New Yorkers who, I hoped, would tend to me if I was knocked to my knees in front of them.

      Moms, I mean.

      “Hey!” he shouted, as we approached the corner, and then, more menacingly, “Asshole!”

      A group of roughhousing boys, quieted perhaps by a real-life scene of what they playacted, turned to look.

      I was embarrassed. I wanted to be held. I wanted to drink tea in a living room warm with sunlight in a world I could understand. I wanted a life I would never again have. I looked at the man with the sweaty forehead and dusty beard, and I let an acidic rage bloom in the place of all I’d lost, coloring my tone such a ragged mess I didn’t recognize my own voice. “I. Did. Not. Take. A. Picture. Of. Your. Fucking. Car.”

      He backed away with his hands up. “Okay, okay,” he mumbled. “Jesus.”

      I leaned against a wall. Something had to change.

      • • •

      In my corner of New York, the masculinity crisis was increasingly taken for granted—something happening to other men, far away.

      “Men keep trying to fight me,” I told my friends, my brother, my coworkers after that day on Orchard Street. Most people shrugged. Weird, they said. What could you do?

      It was 2015, when I began this book, and we were looking toward the future. When I said I was writing about masculinity, people didn’t react as they did at the start of the crisis—more and more, they smiled politely and changed the subject. I understood. A lot of people felt as if we had been talking about a certain kind of man for long enough. It was easier to believe that we lived in the age of progress, and that progress would just keep moving us all forward on its tide. President Obama illuminated the White House in rainbow light, after all, and Beyoncé was on the cover of Vogue’s September issue. Transparent was a critically acclaimed show on Amazon, and Hillary Clinton had just officially announced her intention to become the first woman president of the United States. But underneath the smooth momentum, I could feel the rumbling, like plates moving.

      It occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t just being trans, but the precise timing of my transition that allowed me to see what other people didn’t. The rules that newly defined my life were not futuristic: Do not let yourself be dominated. Do not apologize when you are the one inconvenienced. Do not make your body smaller. Do not smile at strangers. Do not show weakness. The kumbaya narrative of a world without borders, driven by change, wasn’t the whole story. I could see it every day, in the way my body got shaped, read it in the headlines, feel it in the edgy encounters I had with man after man: something terrible was always already happening.

      Maybe, instead of looking for the men you want to be, you need to face your worst fears about who you are.

      Soon enough, nations would be beset by a wave of authoritarian leaders, including the election in the United States of Donald Trump, a man whose campaign for higher office against the first female major party candidate was, in many ways, an open referendum on bodies and the rules regulating them, especially the recent social and political gains made by those whose existence challenged the long reign of white masculinity: women, trans people of all genders, and people of color. Soon enough, a wave of harassment and assault allegations would topple Hollywood executives, actors, and titans of industry. These men weren’t dinosaurs. They were everywhere, all along.

      But back in 2015, in the weeks and months after that day on Orchard Street, as friends shrugged off my question, the crisis within and beyond me continued its slow boil. So I began to look for a new way to shape my own becoming. I was itchy, compelled in the same way I’d felt, pre-testosterone, when I saw a vision of a man bearded and shirtless, sitting at some future kitchen table, and I knew in my gut that it was my destiny to become him.

      Why do men fight? I began to see the question as a proxy, a starting point, for what I initially thought of as a very personal experiment: If I shone a light on the shadowy truths about how I’d come by my own notions of what makes a man, could I change the story of what being a man means?

      Which is how I found myself, less than two months later, boiling a mouthguard in my kitchen, priming it for my bite.

      • • •

      The brutal intimacies of boxing—between coaches and fighters, and even between opponents—are part of our cultural narrative, and I imagined they might help me address the question of male violence with some ritual and containment. I was a longtime fan, fascinated by Mike Tyson’s steroidal press conferences, and the Rumble in the Jungle and the Brawl in Montreal and the War, but mostly by the literary quality to what struck me as a compelling allusion and troubling metaphor for my own experience of manhood: two men, stripped and slowly ground down to their essences in front of a blood-thirsty crowd in a wounding ballet of fists and a losing battle with time. There was an honesty in that violence, a kind of grace that both referenced and eclipsed my more toxic notions of masculinity. I couldn’t think of a more visceral way to face it.

      I’d pitched a feature story about the men who elected to fight in white-collar charity matches, and the guys who trained them, to my bosses at Quartz. Through a buddy who’d done the same fight a couple years before, I signed up to train for a cancer-fighting charity called Haymakers for Hope.

      As I was nervously loading up on sweat-wicking gear and boxing shoes, I couldn’t have guessed how much my struggle with toxic masculinity would eventually lead me to zoom out, asking questions about my own body in space that required me to chase increasingly urgent economic, environmental, and political implications of the masculinity crisis I’d suspected was connected to me, all along.

      But, then again, I had been reading the psychologist Carl Jung, who, after World War II, long consumed by the question of what made people evil, or complicit in evil, settled on a single, elegant explanation. He believed that ostracizing any aspect of the human experience, however ugly, created a “shadow” of our rejected bits that we drag behind us. If we do not see that the shadow belongs to us, we project it onto others, both individually and as a culture. To face and own what most disturbs you about yourself, Jung believed, is among the central moral tasks of being human.

      I began this book because, though I could not articulate it then, I understood that I could not know why I wanted to break that man’s teeth on Orchard Street without understanding, in turn, why he wanted to break mine.

      In pursuit of that night under the bright bulbs of the most famous boxing ring in the world, I spoke to executives and academics, but I also interviewed my siblings, and Jess, and the men who punched me in the face and allowed me to hit them back. I tried to look at masculinity with a beginner’s mind, and I asked questions even when I was embarrassed, or when my mouth was full of blood, or when I was afraid of looking stupid, or lost, or weak. Especially then.

      Why do men fight? This is the story of how I found the answer.

       PART I

       Summer

      Five Months until Fight Night

       Am I a Real Man?

      Mendez Boxing gym was wedged between anonymous buildings in the Flatiron, under one of those ubiquitous green Manhattan awnings that signal perpetual construction. Though it was just a few blocks north of the office in Union Square where I worked as an editor, I’d never been within a two-block radius—the miracle of living in New York is the way you fashion and refashion each bit of it, until you’ve somehow made it your own. I circled the block, fashioning it, three times before finally heading in, looking foolish in my brand-new Adidas boxing shoes, pulled-high athletic socks, and neon yellow shorts. “Yeah?” the

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