Amateur - Thomas Page McBee

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others who haven’t fallen in line. It was not unlike boxing, where “real” fighters were distinguished from weekend warriors in the locker room by our willingness to get hit in the face. The “real” fighters ignored the “fake” ones, not blessing them with their attention, which is why it was almost embarrassing how much I appreciated two guys in particular, real fighters, who affectionately ragged me most nights.

      They were a duo of white construction workers, meaty and nearing middle-aged, who took a shine to me for some reason, even though I rarely spoke. Pulling on their dusty work boots as I suited up, they traded gripes about their union, foremen, and job sites, pausing to greet me whenever I showed up with a jolliness I assumed at first was sarcastic. It wasn’t.

      Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that their interest in me was based in something false, some agreement I’d entered into by not making myself more fully known. I suspected that the men I typically surrounded myself with censored themselves in my presence because I was so publicly trans—a simple Google search will give you a pretty good biographical sketch—and so I waited at the gym, with morbid curiosity, to either be “discovered” or for my passing to lead me someplace shadowy in myself.

      One night, early on, that moment came. It was a Wednesday, and I was late, changing quickly to meet Errol while the two dudes, teasing each other with a sharp edge that felt dangerously close to breaking into a fight, called each other “faggot” repeatedly. I’d not heard men who weren’t gay use that word since high school. I sat rigid on the bench, in the middle of lacing my shoes, shocked into the dawning awareness that my brother was right: I would not speak, I could not, even as they repeated the word over and over, because they were bigger than me and if I spoke, I was sure they would see me for what I was, and I was afraid of them.

      • • •

      The more I worried over how much I had to appear “real”—real as if I’d had a boyhood spent in scuffles, real as if I knew the language of fathers and sons—to survive in a boxing gym, the more I simultaneously wondered over the strange expression.

      The phrase real man is at least a century old, which is when it first appeared in print in the United States. Back then, lower-status men worked the land, while richer ones kept a wistful eye on the rugged bodies that they considered themselves “better than.” But the concept, if not the phrase, exemplified later by the admiring eyes of tuxedoed ringside fight fans who fantasized about hopping in the ring themselves, is the key to a much older story. The tension between the civilized world and a more “virile” masculinity dates at least as far back as Julius Caesar, according to race historian Nell Irvin Painter.

      Her book, The History of White People, explores how white men invented race and, in doing so, made whiteness synonymous with the masculine ideal. White Western men have been insecure about achieving—or losing—masculinity, twinning that loss and gain with violence, throughout all of history. Strangely, the idea of the real man has also always been nostalgically classist. According to Painter, Julius Caesar fawned over the warrior-like qualities of his “uncivilized” rural neighbors, a common attitude among powerful men in antiquity. He also believed as many men did that “peace brings weakness” and “saps virility.”

      I thought, with growing concern, of that man on Orchard Street, and the guys in the locker room. I thought of the bouncer, recently, who grabbed me roughly by my collar because he mistook me for someone else, and the rough agitation that rose through me at this insult, the worst kind of pride. 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.

      No wonder I felt like a hologram of myself. I’d been learning, through some cultural osmosis, how to be a real man, after all.

      • • •

      Larissa, a freckled attorney who had that can-do sunniness familiar to me from my time playing soccer with women in high school, was Errol’s other trainee, and she outperformed me, a lot.

      Still, she cheered me on as I struggled to make sense of what was happening when Errol smacked me in the ear, the temple. Errol said I asked too many questions. My therapist said I “needed to get in touch with my anger.” He told me that was how I would “learn to trust life again.”

      I hadn’t been the same since Mom died, that was true.

      It occurred to me, those first weeks of training, that the man on Orchard Street tried to fight me because I too was looking for a fight. I had ventured, somehow, deep into the “man box,” a sweltering and bandaged thing, a mummy’s wrap around my body and the bodies of almost every man I know, stitched with the brutal language that ensures conformity, the outline of muscles pushed into being under the weight of “boys will be boys” and “real men” and “man up.”

      A man box, drawn in the crude three-dimensional style of grade-schoolers everywhere, is used by sociologists and activists in a classroom exercise. Boys are asked what words or phrases go inside it, and what should be left out of it. What they choose is a troubling primer in male socialization: Do not cry openly or express emotion. Do not express weakness or fear. Demonstrate power and control. Do not be “like a woman.” Do not be “like a gay man.”

      But sometimes the box is squared as an office or bounded more invisibly, the tight corners scripting the jocular camaraderie at the back of the bar. Sometimes it is an icy enclosure holding a pair of lovers apart in a bedroom or is framed within a television or a phone or a movie screen. Sometimes it’s not a box, but a ring, iced or roped. And sometimes it’s the slow circles men make around each other in a street fight.

      “Men tend to fight when they feel humiliated, when they feel shamed,” sociologist Michael Kimmel told me. (Kimmel was writing books with titles like Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men before the economic “masculinity crisis” and its fallout.) “You don’t fight when you feel really powerful,” he said. “You fight when you feel like your power is being challenged.”

      I assumed that fighting for my right as a trans man to be seen as “real” would be a big part of this story: but it quickly became clear that all men proving their “realness” did so through fighting the policing and shaming of other men, sadly often by shaming and policing them back.

      What made me feel “real”? When Errol tied my glove on for me or poured water in my mouth, or when I tripped over the jump rope and had to begin again. I felt real when I asked for help, when I failed, when I was myself.

      I did not want to become a real man, I realized. I was fighting for something better.

      • • •

      Chris seemed worried, watching from the ropes in his motorcycle jacket. He huddled Errol and me close to him after we ran our drills, smiling as always and yet somehow also not smiling. They both hovered over me, Chris with his artful scruff and Errol with his precisely shaved head. Chris said he was still looking for an opponent for me, with the fight just four and a half months away.

      “You need to get this guy sparring,” Chris told Errol. “Now.” I tried to hear the protectiveness in Chris’s voice, and not the edge of it—the serious ring of fear.

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