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Thomas Page McBee

Thomas Page McBee’s Lambda award-winning memoir, Man Alive, was named a best book of 2014 by NPR Books, BuzzFeed, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly. His new book, Amateur, a reported memoir about learning how to box in order to understand masculinity’s tie to violence, was published in August to wide acclaim. Thomas was the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden, a “masculinity expert” for VICE, and the author of the columns “Self-Made Man” for The Rumpus and “The American Man” for Pacific Standard. His current column, “Amateur,” is for Condé Nast’s Them. A former senior editor at Quartz, his essays and reportage have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, and Glamour.
  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #11: Blood and Ceremony

    I’m trying to tell you that there’s something steady inside each of us, something unconcerned with expectation or gender or fear. There’s a center, and it’s like a friendly ghost of every person we’ve ever been.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #10: Pride

    Last June, after he showed me how to pull back on the syringe and shoot the air bubbles skyward, my nurse injected an oily universe of possibility into me.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #9: Passing

    I don’t know if this is the biology of it, but on the day of my testosterone shot sometimes I think I can feel my vocal chords widening, a throaty expansion.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #8: What Makes a Man

    I cock my arm and send another heavy stone into the Atlantic.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #7: Translator

    Em and I were both poets in high school, though she is the last one standing, her body of work forming into something beautiful as the son in her belly. Back then I liked her because she never fell for…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #6: Observer Bias

    I am in a good mood when I meet a woman with a severe, sophisticated haircut for a business lunch on a sunny patio in Back Bay. She asks about this column, about my manuscript. It seems that some people…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #5: Flipbook

    It’s magic hour on a Thursday. In my living room I do side planks on a mat for 90 seconds, and then 10 hard chin-ups in three sets.  I put weights in my backpack and feel like Superman, crushing 25…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #4: On Violence

    I’m on the phone with my brother for the first time in months and my voice is deeper than he expected.

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #3: Stitches

    I walked in on Rob (not his real name), an ex-jock and Affleck-like Bostonian during a covert, one-man photo shoot in the men’s room at my new job this summer, and now—due to some untold mathematics of manliness—he’s my first…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #2: Old Stories

    Look, it’s an old story, masculinity; usually discussed in terms of brutality and honor, power and powerlessness, and occasionally a highlighting of the tender underbelly that rises up no matter how much you try to push it down, like a…

  • Thomas Page McBee

    SELF-MADE MAN #1: The Truckstop

    I am in a public restroom off 95 in southern Maine, wondering what makes a man and also if I can muffle my piss stream with balled up toilet paper so as not to draw attention to myself. Will I…