Thomas Page McBee was ‘masculinity expert’ for Vice and the first trans man ever to box at Madison Square Garden. His essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, Glamour and Salon thomaspagemcbee.com @ThomasPageMcBee
Also by Thomas Page McBee
Man Alive
Praise for Man Alive
‘A sweet, tender hurt of a memoir . . . about forgiveness and self-discovery, but mostly it’s about love, so much love. McBee takes us in his capable hands and shows us what it takes to become a man who is gloriously, gloriously alive’
Roxane Gay
author of Bad Feminist
‘Empathy is McBee’s objective, the most important part of becoming real in one’s own eyes . . . we are born human; with hard work, we achieve humanity’
New York Times
‘By turns despairing and hopeful, exceptional and relatable. To read it is to witness the birth of a fuller, truer self. I loved this book’
New York Magazine
‘A vitally important book. McBee’s story harnesses the power of self-inquiry, of generosity, of a transformation powerful enough to address even the fallout from child abuse’
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Literate and witty . . . Valuable and engaging’
New Statesman
‘McBee’s beautifully written story is engrossing and brave, and rings with triumph’
BuzzFeed
‘A brilliant work of art. I bow down to McBee – his humility, his sense of humor, his insightfulness, his structural deftness, his ability to put into words what is often said but rarely, with such visceral clarity and beauty, communicated’
Heidi Julavits
author of The Vanishers
‘A story about patience, forgiveness, kindness and bravery . . . With this book, Thomas Page McBee has done exactly what we should all strive for: to tell our stories in ways that humanize rather than sensationalize’
Lauren Morelli
writer, Orange Is The New Black
‘Well aware that memory and identity rarely follow a linear path, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer the question, “What does it really mean to be a man?” Weaving past and present to do so, the book’s journey connects violence, masculinity and forgiveness. McBee has an intelligent heart, and it beats in every sentence of this gorgeous book’
Saeed Jones
author of Prelude to Bruise
‘Exquisitely written and bristling with emotion, this important book reminds us of how much vulnerability and violence inheres to any identity.
A real achievement of form and narrative’
Jack Halberstam
author of The Queer Art of Failure
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © 2018 Thomas Page McBee
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the USA in 2018 by Scribner,
an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 100 6
eISBN 978 1 78689 099 3
For my mom,
Carol Lee McBee,
who taught me how to fight
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
—Shunryu Suzuki,
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Me: “I wish you could experience how differently people react to me now that I’m a man.”
My brother: “I can’t imagine, but I can imagine.”
Contents
November 2015
According to the laws of physics and USA Boxing, this wasn’t a fair fight. But there we were, two guys past our primes, circling each other in front of seventeen hundred drunk onlookers in Madison Square Garden, that hallowed hall of American boxing.
Since July, I’d bled at the gums and screamed into pillows and almost quit. I’d failed. I’d temporarily, and to varying degrees, lost my mind, my hearing, and my friends. All so that a guy with seventeen pounds on me could beat bruises across my face, both of