Thomas Page McBee

Round One

In his training for the fight in a charity match at Madison Square Garden, McBee joined the Church Boxing Gym. It is in downtown Manhattan and in underground down several flights of stairs. There are several rings in the room and it is covered with posters of fighters long forgotten. It is a place that oozes testosterone, echoes to the sound of people working out and sparring and the aroma of stale sweat permeates the place.

Round Two

Mangual and the other guys training him admired his energy and enthusiasm and were fully behind him for this match. Thomas Page McBee was learning how to punch, how to get hit, when to defend and when to strike. Every time he entered the ring he learnt a little more about what makes a man, what makes them resort to a physical way of dealing with issues and why some sorts of masculinity were toxic. But McBee had not been completely open with those training him; when they said he had balls facing the other guys in the ring, it turns out that he didn’t.

Round Three

Because McBee was trans. After a lifetime of being, but not feeling female and having had surgery and testosterone and hormones that he started at the age of 30, he finally got a new birth certificate at the age of 31 declaring the sex he always knew he was. But there is more depth to this book than just his personal journey across the gender divide. He uses it to ask wider questions as to why men are as they are, how women’s perception of him changed and how culture and stereotypes should not always define who we are or who we aim to be.… (plus d'informations)

Thomas Page McBee’s account of his decision to move from passing to full female-to-male transition is testament to how a personal story can be told simply but with huge power and heart. It isn’t an easy story to read, I can’t imagine how it was to live, as McBee explains his childhood abuse at the hands of his father and his struggle to come to terms with the potential relationship between this abuse and the development of his gender identity. Because at the heart of this story is the question, who and what makes a man? This man, who was born female. This part of the story, though difficult, is not graphic. It is told with delicacy and remarkable restraint, McBee trusting to the reader’s empathy rather than supplying them with intense details. Alongside the chapters that deal with the events surrounding this abuse McBee tells of a mugging he later describes as “the best thing that ever happened to [him ]”. A dangerous and dramatic moment that provided a burst of clarity and perspective about his future and his identity.

Not only is his story one that needs telling he can also really and truly write. The interweaving of the threads of his narrative cleverly expresses how these events in his life created, and allowed him to create and discover, the man he is. His intimate, honest style has a clarity of voice and vision that packs an enormous amount of power into a few pages. There’s real poetry in his his ability to capture moments of transcendence and insight in a few powerfully and perfectly chosen words (“the warble between the shape in my mind and the one in the mirror,”) and this is only highlighted by the complete absence of sentimentality or sensationalism. It’s a tender, poignant and powerful story about being the best you and defining yourself in the face of all the people and events that might attempt to do it for you.

Some have suggested that the lack of a wider transgender context, the struggle for transgender rights, the place and theory of masculinity is a failing of Man Alive but I’m not convinced that this criticism is entirely fair. While the context is always valuable and they’re is a significant need for complex theoretical and political works on gender it is also vital just to recognise transgender life and experience. McBee has dealt with these wider issues elsewhere in his columns and perhaps will tackle them further in the future but this is not what Man Alive is about. It seems to me that he has achieved precisely what he meant to do, which was to tell his own story of self-discovery and finding his place within his own skin. It is valuable enough on its own without demanding more.It was a privilege to read about his discovery of a truer self.

I received a free advance copy of this book in return for an honest, unbiased review.… (plus d'informations)