SELF-MADE MAN #17: REAL MEN

If masculinity could be defined by a quick Google search or a drive down a billboard-studded highway, then a “real man” is a paradox, captured crudely at the uneasy intersections of faith, love, public service announcements, politics, and advertising. Real men love God, buy American, work hard, don’t hit women, have integrity, stay faithful, wear pink, don’t wear pink, are kind to animals, fight to the death.

What makes a man? When I started testosterone, I posed this winking refrain, but the notion of “real men” still stung, each joke T-shirt and black-and-white bus-stop admonishment a nick on my heart. No one’s a “real man,” I figured, but most definitely not me, with my weekly shot and unique plumbing.

What makes a man? As I grew stronger and more confident, the question remained the crux of my core anxiety. I didn’t want to be a “real man” if what was meant by it was the hypermasculine ideal or the reactionary response. I’d spent 29 years struggling against a bad translation. I wanted to be my own man, to comb my hair with Brylcreem, to tailor my jeans, grow a beard, wear a shirt: This is what a feminist looks like.

 ***

We all get the message of what a man is meant to be but, unlike feminism’s unbraiding of the ideal feminine, hypermasculinity sits like an elephant on steroids, stinking up the living room. It’s complex to examine what being a man means because most of us, whether we realize it or not, are committed to a monolithic answer.

We might pretend we’re not all engaging with the mixed-message at the heart of our every interaction: we value masculinity in all bodies because we value men more than women. Conversely, those of us who’d like to disengage with patriarchal, problematic stereotypes of maleness, even a little bit, are undermined and satirized, bullied and belittled. Every man I care about is troubled by other men, but there’s still a Stockholm-syndrome-feel to the framing:  a shrugging, “That’s just how guys are.”

That’s just how guys are.

I’ve been on testosterone for 16 months. After the muscles bloomed, after my beard began to appear, after my calves widened and my jaw squared, after I mastered the politics of the men’s room, after I learned not to take personally the newly cool greetings of women strangers; a pattern began to emerge. The elephant was real, trumpeting its answer to what makes a man?Here I was, becoming one, forming at bars and backyard barbecues and work meetings; confronted at every turn with an expectation and whether or not I would meet it.

What makes a man? Here I was, not the question but the answer.

 ***

My brother and I grew up in a house where one man’s failure defined masculinity for both of us. Our father, who abused me, was domineering and manipulative, double-crossing and compulsive. Later I would come to see that he was also lonely, lost, and scared, a link in a chain of male violence that ended, turns out, with me.

“Men!” my mom would say, a single word that held the universe of her rage, everything we needed to know in the way it was bathed in acid. In elementary school, my little brother would sometimes tear up his room, blank-eyed and sleepwalking. After years of bullies,
B went to the gym and grew chiseled, played varsity hockey, then American Dreamed his way into a dot-com. In college, he made a bronze sculpture of grown men crouched with his arms around his knees. “You remember?” He asked me once, and it was the kind of man he became that allowed me to believe in something better than our father.

Now he’s sensitive and muscle-bound, successful and stylish and, like me, a little brooding. I told him last April, in a bar in the Mission, of my plans to take testosterone, back when I also lived in San Francisco. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was more nervous to tell him than anyone else. That’s a lie. I was nervous to tell him for the ways I’d grown up projecting my father onto his little-kid frame, seeing their similar grins as proof something dark. We’d thrown around a baseball, beat each other up, gone to the movies, but we’d also fought bitterly. I sat in that bar waiting for his “I told you so.” He knew intimately the ways I’d misunderstood myself.

He smiled wide, shrugged. “I’ve been saying my whole life that you’re a guy,” he said.

That was that. We ordered another round, he reported some work trouble, and we were like the brothers we were meant to become, if I’d only been paying attention.

***

Last I saw him, this summer at our grandmother’s funeral,
B looked at me meaningfully and said, “Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t look totally different.” I swear he was teary eyed.

Still, a sticking point for us is his interest in the destiny of biology, the reassuring, essentialist refrain of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Sometimes his understanding of me feels limited by hormones and science, the framework that helps him understand his maleness. But as he tells me how terrified he was of becoming a “monster” growing up, I begin to understand the comfort of biology. Being a boy, the strange rush of testosterone, the two-faced dad: he worried he was broken, much in the way I did. In his worldview, there’s room for me, and he’s eager always to compare lifting strategies. “You’re so cut you need a Band-Aid!” he joked on a recent picture I posted on Facebook.

I feel it, too, the need to make muscle to guard the pinkest, most scared parts of myself. I watched him spend hours at the Y and come home calmer. There’s something to pushing all that anger and confusion into a weight that can bear it.

“I felt this shame growing up,”
B told me a couple weeks ago, when I told him I wanted to write about us. “I remember sitting in the van with you guys when you told me what Dad did to you, and I felt dirty. I felt, ‘That’s my father,’ one; and two, ‘I’m his son.’ It was the beginning of this whole thing for me when I felt ashamed.”

“I struggled with the fact that I was a guy. I think it’s been a lifetime struggle,” he said. It makes me curious how many men are fighting similar fights, shadowboxing the worst aspects of maleness, trying to grow something sweet from the toxic waste of inheritance.

I asked him how he feels about other men, if he’s suspicious of them in the way the world has taught us to be suspicious of ourselves.

“A guy that doesn’t show any emotion? That’s scary.” I think of our father, his silence, his far-off stare. I think of how, almost always, naming what scares you is the primary way to avoid becoming it.

“I’m very up front with people,” B said, as if an answer. “They know how I feel.”

***

Before I transitioned, the struggles of the men in my life felt gritty and strange to me, a little unwashed. They’d get uncomfortably vulnerable over beers, easily crushed about fathers and exes especially, like animals without shells. It was a little foreign and often so raw I’d leave wondering how it was possible that the young women I knew seemed so much more resilient in reclaiming their identities in a world of intense violence and inequity, while the men seemed genuinely baffled as to how to make it all add up to something meaningful.

How naïve, I see now, to think the crush of gender expectations only affects the most obviously oppressed.

My best friend in high school, a wiry eccentric whose religious parents didn’t know he was gay, was my first exposure to a man wrestling with masculine expectation. Late at night, stoned in his beat-up Camry, he said he felt alien next to his jock brother, afraid to disappoint his father. He was hilarious and well-liked, John Waters meets Robert Smith, but it was clear that a girl of a similar stripe would have an easier time finding a template through which to translate herself. Hell, even before I was on testosterone, I was treated by pretty much everyone as a dude without much issue, while the many interesting and sweet men who marched through my life, arriving on cue in Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, seemed to always be head-butting masculinity’s brick-wall boundaries.

So the crushed-shell seemed to me, eventually, to be about claustrophobia, the way that the sexism underpinning hypermasculinity is a vice grip on even the most rebellious among us. To be your own man is to acknowledge that you’re not “real” unless everyone’s “real,” that all the power located in a monolithic masculinity is a house of cards built on your back and you, pulling yourself out of the stack, are helping to upend the whole foundation.

What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay.

We eat peanuts, drink beer in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston. A guy tells me, upon his marriage, that his mother reminded him to be good to his wife. A real man respects women, says the ad campaign, which only exists to tell us exactly what real men have failed to do, a reminder of what isn’t expected.

***

A memory: in Napa for his birthday a few years ago, before I was on testosterone, I looked up my brother’s astrological chart. This is a thing I do, inevitably, at parties and birthdays and long car rides. Anyway, I told him he was a Cancer rising, started to read the description off my phone as we drank coffee near the French Laundry, surrounded by tourists despite the drizzle.

“What does that mean?” he asked, his aviators mirroring myself back to me.

“It says you’re imaginative,” I told him, “and sensitive, and nurturing.” He looked chiseled and young, a little out of place still, living in a city after so many years in wintery, industrial towns. I could see, in the months since he’d arrived, that he was becoming himself.

“I’m nurturing!” he echoed, his thick arms crossed across his chest. He turned to his girlfriend. “I’m nurturing,” he told her.

Since I’ve transitioned, I’ve revisited that moment: my surprise at his enthusiasm, the emphatic way he announced it, the pride in his voice. What a reward it must have seemed to him to be seen as the man he was, not the father he was afraid of becoming, but the person he’d grown out of thousands of reps and all those cracked-shell moments when the vice squeezed too hard. Here he was, the person he’d been all along.

“I’m nurturing,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you know that about me?” We were leaning against a car, the two realest men you know, and of course I said yes.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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Trans, but not like you think

Originally published on Salon.com, August 6, 2012

Photo by Kareem Worrell

Just last week I got a birth certificate from North Carolina Vital Records that put a state seal on a tale that began before I could talk. “Thomas Page McBee,” it says, under “Certificate of Live Birth,” and then, there’s the word I spent thousands of dollars, a major surgery, two trips to probate court, two physicals, a doctor’s letter, plus the 80 oily milligrams of testosterone self-shot into my thigh every week to achieve: male.

When I tore open the envelope it took my breath away, much like seeing my reflection every morning — the growing pronouncement of my jaw, the square sideburns, the scruff on my cheek, the pecs and biceps ballooning steadily with each workout — I tear up sometimes, I’m so floored by the rightness of it all. I held my birth certificate, my heart galloping, and I felt born again at the age of 31.

Maybe you think you’ve heard my story before: I knew I wasn’t a girl before I knew much of anything. There were the years of private, simmering mirror-hate; the jealous glances at men, the coveting of facial hair and biceps. As trans people become more visible, our stories have narrowed into a neat narrative arc: born in the wrong body, pushed to the brink of suicide/sanity/society, the agonized decision to begin hormone treatment/surgeries for the reward of ending up ourselves and looking “normal,” which ends in a lesson about the tenacity of the human spirit, the gorgeous triumph of believing in yourself.

This is all true. But for me, and many others, it’s also more complicated than that.

I don’t think I was born in the wrong body. I am not “finally myself.” I’ve never spent a day being anyone else. Mine is another story, a real and complex story, and one, by definition, that’s not as easy to tell.

- – - – - – - – - -

I’ve been thinking about Lana Wachowski since she released a video clip promoting her new film, “Cloud Atlas,” last week. In an age when Chaz Bono yuks it up with David Letterman and the frontman for rock band Against Me! created a frenzy when she came out earlier this year as Laura Jane Grace Gabel, Wachowski surely knew that the video clip would garner attention, requests to be interviewed, before-and-after photos, fans’ gushes of loyalty or turncoat transphobia. Even for those lucky trans folks not facing a daily threat of violence, this is a strange time: one where we find our portrayals hovering between soft-focus empathy and tawdry headlines.

Despite reportedly being several years into her transition, which has been discussed in print and gossiped about openly since the early-2000s, the famously tight-lipped Wachowski has never addressed her gender identity publicly, even when “raising eyebrows” at red-carpet events in pearl earrings and dresses.

So here she is, in this promotional behind-the-scenes video, meant to address the making of her new film. “Hi, I’m Lana,” she says simply, seated beside her directing partner and brother. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, a wide smile and that’s it. No baby picture montage, no recounting suicide attempts, no bloody footage of surgery.

Hers is not that kind of story.  She goes on to get down to the business at hand. When she describes the new film, her pink dreads shake like flags in the wind.

“I’m Lana,” she says.

I hope that’s the sound of a tide turning.

- – - – - – - – - -

Don’t get me wrong. Some trans people feel that they’ve suffered a birth defect, tantamount to a missing limb. For some folks, “trapped in the wrong body” is a precise description. I don’t fault anyone their language or their vision of themselves. I don’t tell anyone else’s story.

But I do think that the typical trans narrative — the one you see on talk shows or in long human-interest stories in popular magazines — is dumbed down for your consumption because it’s presumed that people who aren’t trans don’t think about their gender identity. Even more darkly, there’s an unspoken assumption: that trans people are strange, untranslatable. There’s something so fundamentally confusing about the trans experience, the logic goes, that we need to make our stories really, really palatable for you to understand us.

But I’ve found the opposite to be true. I write a column for the Rumpus exploring themes related to my transition, and the people who email me or the friends who start conversation over drinks about their own genders are almost always not trans. We talk about the ways expectations of masculinity and femininity inform and stifle us, or how we’ve all grown from teenage bravado informed by those concepts into unique adults, unafraid to be who we are.

Because of that sense of dialogue (inevitable Internet trolls and ignorant menace aside), I’ve come to believe that non-trans folks are not only capable of metabolizing more than the schlocky softball celebrity interviews and stark mirror-in-a-mirror documentary shots, but are hungry for real conversation. Gender is part of everyone’s life, we’re all negotiating the line between what we’re expected to be and who we are.

In that spirit, then, I’ll tell you the whole story.

- – - – - – - – - -

I believe I was born in the right body; transgender, yes, but there’s nothing “wrong” with me.

For 10 years I was a boyish, short-haired kid, as equally interested in skateboards as poetry. As a teenager, I cultivated a guy-but-better gallantry that won me girlfriends and a few manageable bullies. There were signs that the center wouldn’t hold: the way I felt caught off-guard if my reflection materialized in a window, my insistence on getting a hot shave at the barber, the ace bandage flattening my chest.

Like a lot of people, I understood even at a young age that gender was a spectrum, with “hyper-masculine” and “hyper-feminine” on the extreme poles, and a million shades of potential expression between them. I knew I was masculine, but saw myself as artistic, rebellious, indifferent to alpha posturing. I loved the ruggedness of James Dean and the romanticism of the Beats. For the most part, I felt OK about myself. Anyway, in my baseball hat and jeans, I looked like all the skinny boys I was friends with.

I knew I wasn’t a woman, not like my girlfriends or sister or mother. Not like my friends, even the tomboy punk-rock straight girls or the swaggering butch lesbians. But I looked at most of the men in my midst and didn’t see myself in their jockeying power dynamics or aversion to hugs. Even later, as I befriended guys just as baffled by masculinity as I was, I didn’t connect my growing discomfort in my body to the reality of their physical differences. I didn’t feel like a man exactly, and I figured, once I knew trans men in college, that hormones weren’t for me. It was easier to imagine dressing like the fantasy guy I saw in countless mirrors than it was to imagine an actual life of men’s rooms and shoulder claps.

It was my breasts that troubled me the most: they were lost pilgrims, afloat on my frustrated body. My attempts to hide them grew more elaborate by the day, and my frustration with their shape made getting dressed an angry hurricane of discarded, too-tight T-shirts.

By the time I’d moved to Oakland in my early 20s, I’d decided I would have chest-reconstruction surgery as soon as I could save up enough money to do so. Maybe, I figured, that would fix the growing reality that I no longer “passed” as a teenage boy, that every “ma’am” thrown my way tarnished my sparkle. So, one foggy June morning in 2008, a surgeon sculpted pecs where there once were breasts. I lost, in the process, five pounds of flesh; I awoke feeling a much heavier burden lifted.

But something was wrong. I thought maybe I could find peace by lifting weights, jumping rope to keep trim and hide my hips, wearing V-necks that showed off my flat chest. I went swimming shirtless in the Caribbean, trying to occupy some unicorn space. I tried, with growing desperation, to both love my body and be myself. I even wrote about it for Salon: I’m not a man or a woman, I said.

But pronouns made me bristle, and I didn’t understand yet that I could look like a man and be whomever I wanted on that grand spectrum. I didn’t think that, just like you, I have a gender identity that’s growing and evolving, that I’m tasked with finding my authentic place in a jumble of stereotypes and expectations. What makes a man? I thought, looking at myself.

It was my body that showed me. They call it dysphoria, but it feels to me like watching yourself become a stranger. Maybe you’ve known you’re making a mistake: a bad marriage, the wrong career path, something that becomes clearer and more potent daily. My reflection seemed to be going in the wrong direction: rounding where it shouldn’t have been, thinning where it should have thickened.

Every trans person has a breaking point, and mine came two years after top surgery, when I expected to see myself and found a woman standing before me, instead. As much as I didn’t connect with the cultural expectations of Being a Man, I knew that I’d grown up and become one. I was going to have to figure out how to bridge the gap.

I’d done so many sit-ups and spent so much time in quiet reflection, tailoring shirts to fit my bird chest that I knew, in that last-puzzle-piece way of an epiphany, that loving myself meant allowing my body to change. I had a primal sense of home, and I knew exactly what it looked like. My body needed me.

A few months later, I began injecting testosterone.

- – - – - – - – - -

Here we are, over a year later. I love the way my face has blended into something familiar, how I’ve met the guy I saw every time I squinted at the mirror. I am indeed the male-bodied version of myself, the same romantic, tattooed guy.  I wish I could explain to the 23-year-old looking in the mirror that I needn’t have worried: my body knew. My gender hasn’t changed since I was a teenager.

I’m very much my own man.

I don’t know how Lana Wachowski feels, but I hope that the relative quiet of both her “introduction” and the reaction to it signal a growing awareness that we’re entitled to our stories, however we want to tell them. Maybe we don’t need to hand out sugar pills anymore.

“I’m Lana,” she said, and smiled. It was an act of faith to leave it there, in two words and a shake of that hair. Consider the story told.

Self-Made Man Series on the Rumpus

I am really excited about a series I've written for the Rumpus, Self-Made Man, that's all about my adventures in masculinity, rest stops, trauma, and compassion. Please check it out.



Rumpus original artwork by Jason Novak