A tender and eye-opening narrative of gender and masculinity. After suffering violence at the hands of men as a girl, then transitioning in his thirties, Thomas Page McBee explores the contradictions of living in his new body. Suddenly men want to fight him, he is not meant to talk about his feelings, he gets a pay rise & he can silence a room with his voice, these are the new realities of living as a man. But what if he doesn’t want to subscribe to them?

Through learning amateur boxing, McBee discovers that the rigid socialised experience of masculinity is not innate, it is learned. This is an important and necessary story about reckoning with toxic masculinity that needs to be told, and glimpses at the freedom of realising there is no such thing as a ‘real man’. A must-read.

Published by Canongate on 14th March 2019