Amateur review: Thomas Page McBee on what it means to be a man

Amateur

Thomas Page McBee

Canongate, $32.99

It is no coincidence that the terms "masculinity crisis" and "toxic masculinity" have become current at a time when leaders such as presidents Putin and Trump strut the world stage like parodies of the archetypal alpha male. Who better to explore this crisis than someone who has had to interrogate, with every cell of their body, what it means to become a man? As a new man – a trans man – Thomas Page McBee learned to box in order to confront the theatre and the reality of male aggression, gender conditioning and traditional masculinity. Even as the experience brought to the surface all his anxieties about "passing" as a man, it prompted him to reflect on inherited prejudices about masculinity and the advantages that being a man automatically endows. With exhilarating clarity and tenderness, Amateur, which has just been shortlisted for $55,000 Baillie Gifford non-fiction prize in Britain, exposes patriarchy for the construct that it is.