LITMIR.BIZ

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blared over a bell that rang out every three minutes and the constant thwap of men hitting bags, mitts, each other. I did not run a six-minute mile, but I did run three miles in twenty-five minutes, driven by adrenaline and pure terror through a hazing that lasted two grueling hours. Afterward, from the floor, I watched other men’s sweat condense on the ceiling and fought the urge to vomit, feeling proud of myself and strange for feeling proud of myself.

      “You’ve got short arms, but decent strength,” Errol said, from somewhere above me. I couldn’t see him through the sweat stinging my eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then he was gone.

      I hauled myself up, and Chris and I sat on the bench kitty-corner to the ring in what actually was companionable silence for a minute or two, but mostly because I couldn’t breathe. We knew each other only vaguely, and mostly from social media. We weren’t, however, actual friends. Not that Chris seemed to make any distinction.

      “You did great,” he said, smiling sunnily. That wasn’t exactly true, but I’d take it.

      “Listen, don’t tell Errol I’m trans, okay?” I asked, once I could catch my breath again.

      He looked at me curiously, but told me not to worry about it. I meant to tell him it was to not compromise my reporting, but a part of me knew that wasn’t exactly true. As we watched a guy across the way do one hundred sit-ups, pause thirty seconds, then do one hundred more, I realized how scared I was. I wore my insistence that I be taken seriously, an inheritance from Before, differently on this body. With nobody challenging me anymore, that drive now just looked like standard-issue male confidence. I felt an acute awareness, sitting next to Chris, of the inches and muscle the other guys had on me, and within their bodies the potential for my own spectacular failure.

      After he was gone, I changed furtively in the locker room, listening to two dudes talk about a cross-country trip they’d taken on their motorcycles and hiding my nakedness by facing the wall of lockers while slipping quickly out of my shorts.

      “You got a fight?” the smaller of the two guys asked me.

      I flinched at the attention. “Yeah,” I mumbled, “just a charity one.”

      “Don’t matter,” he said. The other guy nodded his agreement, and I couldn’t help the swell in my chest.

      I had a fight! I walked all the way home, that night, thirty blocks, like the king of New York.

      • • •

      “The first jab better be a warning,” Errol said the next day. I pretended to be in less pain than I was as we practiced keeping our guards up, looking over our gloves, crab-walking around the ring, then turning into position quickly, so as to expose as little of our bodies as possible. This defensive style was cagey, smart. It was about staying safe by keeping your distance, always being ready, never letting down your guard.

      I was familiar with the concept.

      “I can see you,” Errol said, unnerving me, his gloves covering his face. Then he popped me on the side of the head. “But if you’re not watching, you can’t see me. If you can’t see me, you won’t be ready. If you’re not ready, you’ll get hit.”

      I pushed through one more round, then another. He had me close out the night on the jump rope, which I immediately tripped over. Why are you doing this? I could hear my mom asking.

      She always seemed to me larger than even the history I read about in school textbooks. She traveled on a Eurail pass with some girlfriends back when women didn’t do such things. She’d worked for Ted Kennedy and met his brother John when she won the Westinghouse Science fair in high school. Even after her marriage fell apart and she couldn’t find work; even after she moved to a depressing town near where she grew up in central Pennsylvania; even when she couldn’t stop drinking—she always seemed one step away from getting back on track, forever one turn away from her best self, the working-class high school girl tutored by the principal himself, she was that full of potential.

      A medical “crisis,” her doctors explained to my sister and brother and me in the terrible hospital room a year earlier, is a crossroads where the patient either becomes healthier or dies. Mom, who, when she found out that her husband had been abusing me, put her hand on the center of my chest and told me I had a golden core that no one could touch. I knew I was at a crossroads too, fighting for the future that eluded her, working to become the kind of man we could both be proud of. She was in the ICU in September when the nicest doctor of all took us into a special carpet-lined room with a big wooden table and told us, plainly, that she would not live. When she died a few days after, she passed a mighty hunger on to me. Nine months later, it was within me, a hunger that lived.

      “He’s taking his time with that jump rope,” some joker said, and my cheeks burned. My legs were heavy, but sweat poured off me like a second self, washing away.

      • • •

      It felt good to see the guys nod hello those first weeks of training, even if I was skinny and kept to myself. Soon everybody knew I had a fight, and that made me one of them. So what if I couldn’t even throw a straight right? At least I wasn’t there for the cardio.

      But I was also wary of this new, oddly warrior-like ego. I fought not to fall under the thrall of these alphas and the pride I sometimes felt when they noticed me. Given the thrill I got when another boxer so much as spoke to me, I found it hard to imagine a teenager on earth who could be immune to the spell of male socialization.

      My brother suddenly made a lot more sense to me. He was five years younger than me, an athletic, solitary kid, often spending whole Saturdays alone in his room after a long day at the YMCA, where he grew progressively more jacked, his muscles covering him like armor. On the ice, the man who raised us long gone, my sister, mother, and I watched him hit other boys in the face with little provocation. Later, his gear in the back of the minivan, we didn’t speak of bloody noses or body checks.

      I knew that Brett’s fighting, both in and out of school, was almost always about me, my body, and the girls I dated in high school. He and my sister, Clare, were protective of me as if they sensed that I was not quite like them, even if we did not know we were half siblings, that their father was my stepfather, until we were adults.

      “When I was younger, I was lonely,” Brett told me much later. It turned out that the sheen of our childhood, the legacy of his father, loomed as large in his masculinity as it did in mine.

      He found solace in working out and played hockey as a form of protection against the boys around him as much as for enjoyment. “Within that hierarchy,” he told me, “I would earn their respect by just being authentic and being strong and getting up faster when I got hit. But I still wasn’t going to be invited to their parties.”

      Despite Brett’s muscle, he’d long had a distaste for macho guys, and macho-guy stuff, no matter how mocked he was for it.

      “At some point, I became pretty callous,” he said about his teen years. “At some point I wasn’t crying anymore.”

      Becoming men had brought up the same question for both of us, the central worry of all sons of bad dads: How to be a man without being like our father?

      It had never occurred to me, until I became a man, that my brother had felt trapped in his body as I had in mine.

      • • •

      Here’s another story about my brother: When I’d come out to him as trans over drinks back in 2009, before I started testosterone and when I still lived near him in Oakland, he’d hugged me. “You just make more sense as a guy,” he’d said.

      Later that night, gin-loose, I’d asked him my very first dumb question about being a man: “What do you do when a guy says something sexist, or homophobic?” I figured if anybody knew how to react, it was him, after all those years he spent defending me.

      He shrugged. “It depends on how many guys there are, and how big they are.”

      “Oh,” I said, and we never spoke

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