Most of us experience gender conditioning so young—research shows it begins in infancy—that we misunderstand the relationship between nature and nurture, culture and biology, fitting in and being oneself.

I thought about the advantages thrown at me for an aesthetic that looked like a birthright. I thought about passing, and how it erased a part of me, and how hormones responded to context, and how race and masculinity were inventions that benefited me, and what I could do to challenge that.

It seemed possible to me, in the dry heat of that courtroom, that heaven was a metaphor for the grace of perspective you get when you die

Boxing breaks many of the binaries that men are conditioned to believe about our bodies, our genders, ourselves. With its cover of 'realness' and violence, it provides room for what so many men lack: tenderness, and touch, and vulnerability.