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A well-written and thoughtful memoir about how McBee, a trans man, trains as an amateur boxer and observes how he and the cis men at his gym navigate masculinity. He doesn't tell any of the other men at his gym until after he fights the big match he's preparing for, a public match for charity, so he gets to see how they relate to him when they think he's a cis man and how they relate to him afterward.
McBee is a journalist and all else aside, this is a good piece of sports writing on boxing. He got interested in it as a quintessentially masculine sport, but in fact there's some women at his gym and his own sister is also an amateur boxer; one of the more honest and upsetting aspects of the book is his discovery that once other people perceive him as a (white) man, he's listened to more, he's not interrupted, no one takes credit for his ideas, he's deferred to, he's assumed to be competent and correct... and he not only sees all the women around him getting none of that, but he finds how easy it is to fall into doing what all the men around him do, and ignore women's input, talk over them, etc. He does try hard to stop that and also address other men doing it, but he only realizes in retrospect that he literally didn't even let his sister, a more successful boxer than him, finish her sentence about boxing in favor of listening to his brother who has never boxed.
That's just one small piece of the type of exploration of masculinity and social performance of gender that McBee explores in the book. Another aspect I found very interesting was how the male boxers were able to touch each other and express emotion within the context of boxing, as if the sport gave them such proof of masculinity that it became okay to do things that would otherwise be seen as dangerously feminine. (McBee mentions a survey which found that American men tended to definite "man" as "not a woman," while Danish men defined "man" as "not a boy." You can see how one of those tends to go in a much more toxic direction than the other.)
Along with the thoughts on gender and gender politics is a good and moving story of McBee's relationship with boxing, how he uses it to explore his self as a man, and his relationships with other men, his girlfriend, and his family. His family is fraught in ways and has some traumatic history but is overall very supportive, and there's a lot of sweet and positive relationships in the book.
Content notes: McBee was sexually abused as a child and his mother died of cancer, but there's no graphic details of either.
McBee is a journalist and all else aside, this is a good piece of sports writing on boxing. He got interested in it as a quintessentially masculine sport, but in fact there's some women at his gym and his own sister is also an amateur boxer; one of the more honest and upsetting aspects of the book is his discovery that once other people perceive him as a (white) man, he's listened to more, he's not interrupted, no one takes credit for his ideas, he's deferred to, he's assumed to be competent and correct... and he not only sees all the women around him getting none of that, but he finds how easy it is to fall into doing what all the men around him do, and ignore women's input, talk over them, etc. He does try hard to stop that and also address other men doing it, but he only realizes in retrospect that he literally didn't even let his sister, a more successful boxer than him, finish her sentence about boxing in favor of listening to his brother who has never boxed.
That's just one small piece of the type of exploration of masculinity and social performance of gender that McBee explores in the book. Another aspect I found very interesting was how the male boxers were able to touch each other and express emotion within the context of boxing, as if the sport gave them such proof of masculinity that it became okay to do things that would otherwise be seen as dangerously feminine. (McBee mentions a survey which found that American men tended to definite "man" as "not a woman," while Danish men defined "man" as "not a boy." You can see how one of those tends to go in a much more toxic direction than the other.)
Along with the thoughts on gender and gender politics is a good and moving story of McBee's relationship with boxing, how he uses it to explore his self as a man, and his relationships with other men, his girlfriend, and his family. His family is fraught in ways and has some traumatic history but is overall very supportive, and there's a lot of sweet and positive relationships in the book.
Content notes: McBee was sexually abused as a child and his mother died of cancer, but there's no graphic details of either.
