Amateur

Amateur begins with the outline of a familiar masculine quest: Thomas Page McBee trains for a charity bout and, in 2015, becomes the first trans man to box at Madison Square Garden. Yet winning is not his real question. He wants to know why men fight and whether someone can enter the social position of “man” without accepting its promises of dominance, silence, and violence. Boxing becomes both the memoir’s narrative engine and a laboratory for observing how masculinity is practiced through the body.

McBee calls himself an amateur at masculinity. Being read as a man only in adulthood lets him compare how the same person is treated from different gendered positions: his speech carries more authority, public space feels safer, and professional recognition arrives more easily, while toughness, competition, and emotional restraint are newly expected of him. Privilege therefore appears not as an abstract checklist but as permission distributed across meetings, streets, locker rooms, and intimate relationships. He acknowledges what he gains and asks how whiteness and class shape his ability to choose boxing, report on it, and narrate the experiment publicly.

The book is strongest when it refuses to make testosterone or the male body a natural explanation for violence. McBee consults researchers in neuroscience, sociology, and critical race theory, then watches coaches and fighters learn control rather than simply release aggression. A gym may reward pain tolerance, discipline, and confrontation, but sparring also depends on trust: partners must know when to pull a punch, coaches must recognize fear, and fighters must admit dependence on others. Violence and tenderness are not properties of two separate kinds of men; they are embodied capacities that a culture can organize into very different relations.

This is what makes Amateur a feminist text rather than merely a sports memoir. Patriarchy harms those subordinated by men, but it also produces “proper men” by shaming vulnerability, narrowing emotional language, and treating intimacy as failure. McBee does not use that observation to place men’s pain above the structural violence experienced by women and trans people. Instead, he asks men to become accountable for power: to listen to those affected, notice ordinary gender advantages, and understand being a “good man” as a continuing ethical practice rather than innocence conferred by identity.

As trans memoir, the book also resists the linear story of finally arriving at an authentic self. Transition does not hand McBee a ready-made masculinity; it obliges him to decide which inheritances to accept and which to refuse. Trans experience here neither proves that binary gender is natural nor offers a pure position outside gender. It reveals that everyone’s gender is rehearsed, corrected, and negotiated. “Amateur” is therefore not a confession of insufficient qualification but a disciplined refusal to claim mastery.

The book’s limits follow from its form. Personal choices, caring coaches, and humane male communities cannot replace analysis of domestic violence, poverty, racialized policing, or institutional trans exclusion. The injuries, commercial culture, and gender boundaries of competitive boxing also remain only partly examined. Reduced to the message that men can be gentle, the memoir’s structural questions could easily become another exercise in individual character.

It is better read as an embodied notebook on responsibility: when someone receives greater gendered authority, how do they notice it, use it, and remain open to correction? Pair it with bell hooks on patriarchal masculinity, trans men’s writing on medicine and labor, and feminist anti-violence work. McBee never settles the definition of a man. He changes the question into a more actionable one: in a world whose relationships are already unequal, how might we become safer people for one another?