Performance
A trans man trains for a bout while examining masculinity, fear, violence, and the ethics of learning to fight.
After transitioning, the author found that the same insistence on being taken seriously that had drawn pushback before now passed without challenge. On a male body it simply read as ordinary male confidence. His ideas were acted on readily, his expertise was assumed before he had proven it, and people listened with serious faces.
An adult entering manhood could feel himself being shaped in real time by small daily interactions. He compares himself to a plant bending toward the sun, growing toward whatever traits got rewarded: aggression, ambition, fearlessness. Because most people receive this conditioning from infancy, they mistake its results for nature.
The same body that is expected to feel no fear is one that makes a woman alone on a dark street afraid. His voice now silences a room, and his competence is presumed before anyone has seen it. In his account, male privilege and the harm men can cause are one condition seen from two sides.
In a moment of danger, a sentence he had never chosen surfaced in the author's mind: men don't run. He turned toward the threat because that is what men do. Learned codes of manhood can make a person's decisions for them under pressure, even when they reject those codes.
For someone abused by men and raised hearing men blamed for the world's harms, becoming a man meant joining the group responsible for that hurt. He writes that he too comes from a long line of poisonous men. His response was to watch and shape his own becoming deliberately, as a kind of insurance against turning into them.
Manhood and womanhood may be constructs rather than fixed facts. That does not make them harmless, any more than a hallucination is harmless when it drives someone into traffic. Seeing these beliefs as false is what allows a person to stop obeying them.
As the training went on, the author came to see the fighting arts as being less about beating the person across the ring than about winning the struggle inside oneself. That struggle includes mastering fear and choosing what kind of man to be.
Part of the author still wanted to act out the old masculine story of risking his body to prove he belonged in it. He also felt the pull of primal aggression in a fight as both terrible and good. The ethics of violence begin with admitting that the pull is real and attractive, not with pretending it is absent.
Men may be drawn to brutal sports partly out of needs that have nothing to do with violence: belonging, a way to express themselves, physical contact. A tap of the glove or a pat on the back after a bout can be the only touch the code allows. In this reading, combat sports serve as a workaround for men who have long been unable to open up.