Thomas Page McBee Amateur

Canongate, 224pp, $32.99

If you told me at the beginning of 2018 that my book of the year would be the memoir of a transgender man who took up boxing, I would have offered you generous odds against it.

But here is Thomas Page McBee’s tough, tender, wise and moving Amateur,a book that will wholly rewire the way you think about men and masculinity.

McBee had an upbringing that would have destroyed most of us. A sense of being trapped in the wrong body from the get-go was one part of it. Being sexually abused by his stepfather for years was another. It is a tribute to the writer’s bravery and moral compass that even though he would be wholly justified in claiming victimhood, he doesn’t do so for a moment. Instead, he traces how the months-long preparation for a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden (McBee first pitched it as an article to his editors at Quartz), from being a rank amateur to a competent fighter, obliged him to think about what kind of man he wanted to be.

For most people, gender starts so early and remains so omnipresent that the question of what it is to be a woman or man is almost tautologous: my gender is what I am. But masculinity is not the water that McBee has swum in. He has undergone a profound translation in selfhood.

By notating the changes he feels in himself – along with shifting perceptions of the world towards him as his voice deepens, his chest muscles up, his beard darkens – McBee narrates a crisis.