 He is the author of Man Alive, A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness, and Becoming a Man. Please welcome Thomas. It's so great to be here and to be in such esteemed company. It's very exciting. So in deference to Anne and my girlfriend and other people who've heard me read from this in the last week, maybe many times, I'm going to try to read something a little bit different. So this is my book, Man Alive. I'll read just a few sections and then I'm going to read something from a column I write for the Pacific Standard. And I guess all you need to know about the book itself is there's two big events that happen. One is a mugging that I experienced here in Oakland, where I almost died. And the other is abuse I endured growing up. And it all takes place prior to my hormonal transition. Prologue, South Carolina, August 2010, 29 years old. What makes a man? It's not that I hadn't studied them. They're sinew. They're slang. They're beautiful bristle. But before I was held at gunpoint on a cold April day, I couldn't have told you. A real man. A family man. The Marlboro man. Man up. The man in the mirror. I loved that Michael Jackson song growing up. Used to forget my girl hips. Used to sing it to my best imagination of myself. What makes a man? The need to know led me to my father's hometown in hot damp South Carolina. The story starts there because that's where I went when I could no longer afford to leave the question alone. To let it rear up every few years when I had too much to drink and it was just me and my reflection and my hungry ghosts. And so I steered my rental through the swampy South with my cap pulled low. I had that teen boy swagger. Scars like smiles across my chest and a body I was just beginning to love. But the story also begins the night I almost died back in April of 2010. And in 1985 when my father became a monster and in 1990 when my mom found out he was one. Men she'd said then. And I learned to say it the same way. A lemon in my mouth. In South Carolina I could smell it through my open window. Alligators and secrets. The embers of Sherman's March. The Ku Klux Klan. My father's farm burning. It smelled like my animal fear and the spicy deodorant I used to cover it. Men I thought with that old bitterness. But I already knew my body was shifting. In fact that's why I was there. A good man is hard to find. The windshield blurred. The road was inky. The rain biblical. The cheap motel off the highway seemed like not such a hot idea after I passed my fifth gun rack to pick up. But there wasn't any turning back. Once a body's in motion it stays in motion. My mom's a physicist. She told me that. The truth is this is a ghost story. No this is an adventure story. This is an adventure story about how I quit being a ghost. Oakland. January twenty nine twenty eleven twenty nine years old. I learned to lift properly under the guidance of a white bearded trainer named Mike. He owned a pickup and a shotgun and I'm relatively certain he didn't think of my gender much at all. He didn't call me brother but he didn't man me either. He was gruff though philosophical. When I told him about the mugging he said he'd pulled a gun on someone once. Some dude who tried to carjack him. His knees had gone to jelly facing the other guy's shotgun despite the 12 gauge in his hand. It made me feel small he said and I wasn't sure if he meant his own gun or the other guys. Maybe both. You feel strong now he grinned watching me deadlift twice my weight. You're a big shot. Mike was like a really wild uncle. Part survivalist. Part muscle head. Eat protein he hollered at me as I left each workout. An egg a day and you'll be all muscle. Doubted. I told him I wanted a broader chest more bicep but he focused on my core instead. Your arm muscles are too long he said regretfully and pecs are really hard to develop when you're not male. He looked away at that respectfully but your core that's your power anyway. He showed me how to throw a punch a jab from the shoulder. Feel that he asked poking my torso in his sweaty gym. We stood in front of a mirror the light from Rockridge Avenue blaring into subterranean moldy space. I pulled my punch but the jab to Mike's outstretched hand must have stung because he winced. See all core. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise he said before sending me back to sit-ups next to the punching bag. I watched my face appear in the mirror rising over the mountain of my legs alien as moon rock. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the ropey pull of my abs tightening into a fortress around me. First you have to tear the muscle Mike said then it rebuilds itself even stronger. I couldn't quit seeing him pulling that shotgun out from behind the headrest of the pickup. He thought he might shit himself he said but he held the gun level at the man reaching into his open window then he peeled out of that parking lot before the other guy could react. I probably shouldn't have pulled the gun he said reflectively. It was an ongoing conversation now weeks after he first told me the story. He stood above me spotting while I bench pressed a meager 40 pounds. I don't know what got him on the topic maybe just a sensitivity to our size difference. He had six inches and 150 pounds on me but I lived no shame in that. I thought of how it felt to freeze under the mug under my father's hand under Huggins gun. I thought of what I knew I needed deep in the growing core of me. It's not fear that kills you in that type of situation. He said it's what you do with it. Where I grew up in Western Pennsylvania dear wanted to keep the population down. Still we put out salt licks and watch whole families wander by. I found I could open the door and approach them as long as I moved slowly. They'd lock eyes with me ears pricked stuck as if stopped by time. I'd get closer and closer five yards for three. I reach a handout greedily and like magic their eyes would pop open little their bodies hunching into themselves. Then always they'd spring awake and bound away big and graceful alive. There was an invisible line a wire I trip and it was different each time four yards to everybody has a different threshold. We all know how to run eventually most people don't realize that we never forget how to escape. And then so I write this column for the Pacific Standard it's called the American man. I don't think you need to know anything else. So this is called fighting solves everything. I have a pretty pair of black Everlast but I take the loners whenever I go to a new gym. I want the other guys damp history to imprint the DNA of the place onto my skin. It's one of my superstitions like tapping twice and hard on any handmade motivational sign as long as there's nobody around to catch me. Casting my little spells like please let me pass through this place. Unknownist but from the man I am. I bang banged you have to want it in the stairwell of this sweaty basement spot downtown which looks like every other authentic boxing gym I've been in. Prize fight posters papered in the walls. Speed bags lined the brings perimeter along with the uneasy mix of pasty well coiffed brokers and grizzled broken teeth X pros and hungry ripped amateurs. They all jockeyed for space careful not to touch every shoulder bump a possible brush fire. An older guy with a den in his forehead pushed past me and called sorry behind him not once but three times hands up and I felt his fear of me how it ran between us electric. I love boxing gyms like I love barber shops and vaguely antiquated highly illuminating conversations with friends dads about dating etiquette. You're having a romance with masculinity my friend a boxing fan told me and the thing is love is dark too. When I started taking testosterone I was 120 pounds in all angles. 20 pounds in three years later I know when to stop step toward a threat and when to walk away. I know that I think about violence that I hate it but move now in a world defined by power in ways I didn't choose and don't want. All the meditation and good intentions in my heart cannot cut down the alpha in the office meeting or the guy following me down the street looking for a fight. I never stopped trying to be the kind of man who uses privilege and power for good but then again here I am left jab left jab right cross right cross right cross left jab. Here I am pretending that this punching bag is the head of this truly terrible dude I know an abusive sociopath who goes my life daily. I want to say that I don't love this part of me this edge I want to find my hot desire to give this guy stitches disturbing but I can't I don't. I want to say I wouldn't fight dirty if I found myself alone with him in some midtown alley but I know myself and I would he's a menace to a woman I love so of course I'd get him in a choke hold if I could. I know myself I'd whisper vigilante horrible little horrors in his ear and I wouldn't regret a second of it. Most violence happens at the end of met at the hands of men. Men beat women men rape men torture men use power to keep women and children silent men kidnap men kill men walk into movie theaters and schools and shoot people for no reason. Men blow up buildings men murder trans women and leave them by the side of the road in San Francisco. Men betray our partners over a third of women globally experience physical or sexual violence at the hands of a boyfriend or a husband. Nearly 40% of women killed worldwide are murdered by an intimate partner. Men like my father molest children men like the man who almost killed me on an Oakland sidewalk in 2010 shoot other men over nothing. When I injected my first shot when I walked into a truck stop bathroom with ease I realized that my body allowed for a dark trade. I could stroll dark streets late at night and each man I encountered was the worst kind of threat but more likely an animal giving me wide swath. But I in turn had become potential danger women cross the street regularly to avoid me and my beard. It was nearly instant the way I became part of a lineage that is in some ways a cancer on half the world. Of course the other truth is that I fought hard to be who I am one man a good man a beating heart in the skin. If I'm honest it's too easy to leave it there. The truth is I hit a punching bag and pretend it's the shithead. Why? I refuse to blame the hormones or the socialization or to ignore them. I won't have the romance run the game without questioning the game itself. Especially when the game holds the shadowy metaphor in its most naked sweaty form. Joyce Carol Oates boxing fan wrote in unboxing the best book on the subject that it is our most dramatically masculine sport. I get it and it breaks my heart. My romance with masculinity is beauty and terror. It's like watching a match where the guy rises zombie-like and hits his opponent again and again with autopilot eyes. I am transfixed. I am horrified. I am not him and I am. I watch a match where a guy won't get off the mat and I feel his humiliation, his wounding in that final count, his desire to live greater than his pride. And I feel my stomach turn in a world where his survival isn't a victory but a failure. My world now. Oates quotes her friend, a sports writer and boxing fan in her book. It's all a bit like bad love. Putting up with pain, waiting for the sequel to the last good moment. And like bad love, there comes the point of being worn out where the reward of the good moment doesn't seem worth all the trouble. I transition because for me there was no alternative. I was against the ropes. Maybe that's hard to understand but I suspect for most of us there's a blistering bitter reality best captured in the grace of a perfect uppercut. It is a truth about love, about masculinity, about moving through this violent, horrible, magical world that we might not want to see but at what cost. We don't give up on boxing. It isn't that easy, Oates writes. Perhaps it's like tasting blood or more discreetly put, love commingled with hate is more powerful than love or hate. It's ugly like how I gave myself a shot this week and nicked a blood vessel. The spray of blood on my harbored floors was not a metaphor but my body astonished, my body alive. I got on my knees and mopped it up with paper towels and felt afraid and proud and alone. No one but you knows this. Every day is a paradox. I pass and I remain a man apart. I appear to be what I reject. I am one of you. I am not. Fighting solves everything reads the back of my instructor's shirt. He keeps touching my gloves gently, pushing my hands up to my face. His body is a machine of muscles and tendons, wiry and insane looking, but his voice is soft, encouraging. Elbows in, chin up, he says, like a prayer. He points in the masking tape on my bag, right hook, full power now. He says, that X is a forehead. That X is your worst enemy. Hit that X. Hit that X. Hit that X. If I'm honest, I'll say that I feel that tingle in my teeth and my fingertips. When I think about breaking that abusive guy's jaw, I want him to come to a violent end. I want to see him on his knees and I want to be the one to put him there. Because I love someone, he is wounded. I am a lion. My tenderness is fierce. It balloons my shoulders and biceps, pushing my arms out like wings, my chest forward. I step in. It is a care like I've never felt before. It is knuckles and split lips and simple rules like, don't scream at this woman I love, not now, not ever. It is impossible to talk about boxing without talking about class. It is impossible to talk about passing without noticing that, despite the hand tattoos, I see myself shadow boxing in the mirror and I know who I appear to be. The white guy in his early 30s with the sharp haircut and the weak left jab. I know that the old guys brushed past me on purpose, that I don't belong here. But I don't belong anywhere else either. This is a safer version of a world I will never understand. I might be self-made, I might not have a trust fund or a safety net, but I've never put my body on the line for a $500 purse. We ended the night with hundreds of crunches, sadistic drills that went on for so long I left my body. I'm sure we all did. Us 20 headbanded professionals getting our cardio in. As my vision blurred, all I could hear was this guy behind me, a real boxer, with a fucked up nose going at a bag harder than I ever could. With each punch he made this strange sound, a cross between a cough and a laugh, dancing around my head expertly in his wrestling boots. It became a kind of trance. All of our bodies and the instructor yelling, don't stop, don't stop, don't stop and the dude looking really wild in his eyes, hitting that bag like it had done him wrong. It wasn't simple or moral, but it was transcendent. Later, the locker room was full, but dead silent as we hustled in tandem, unlacing boots and unwrapping hands and unbiting mouth guards. I pulled off my shorts and regretted the pink stripes on my boxer briefs, the fact of my difference, the fear that someone might notice that I'm not the man I seem to be, as I tried to casually throw on my jeans. But then I slowed up, eyeing the sign on the stall. If you punch this toilet, we will knock you out. I put on my pants one leg at a time, like a man who never be anything less than intentional, like a man without shame, like a man who knows he has nothing to hide. Thank you.