Into The Heart of Masculinity

In exploring the topic of masculinity, I spoke with Sam, a 35-year-old trans man living in the Pacific Northwest.

Sam’s perspective is one that has shifted from outsider to insider over the course of a lifetime. As he’s progressed along this path, his appearance, and his gender performance, his masculinity has evolved… as has his understanding of what it means to truly be a man.

In first becoming a boy, Sam was committed to playing by the rules. As a kid, he would never allow a single soul to see him playing with dolls (which he loved). He always dressed in baggy boy’s clothing. Even then, he knew that any nuance in his gender performance threatened to undermine his mission to be seen as a boy.

As he’s become and adult and grown into a stronger sense of masculinity, though, Sam has enjoyed playing with these scripts, rules and roles. His masculinity has largely been a DIY project. Without the traditional markers of passage into manhood, Sam has taken advantage of this blank canvas to create rites and rituals for himself.

When he was first embarking on his years-long phalloplasty journey, he created an event that would act as his initiation into this new phase of his manhood.

“I hosted this event, which I called the Knights of the Man Table, y’know, like the Knight of the Round Table. All my friends came and they dressed up as knights and we did this fake jousting competition where we were standing on one foot on a book (which was your horse) and poking each other with the soft side of a broom to see who would fall off first. It was bracketed and there was a prize. I wrote songs on the guitar and I made my friends sing along to them. I printed them lyrics about my new penis, and how excited I was and all the things I was going to do with it. I just tried to make it a really celebratory thing, to make it a rite of passage.”

At the same time, however, he understands that his version of masculinity involves elements outside the traditional masculine space.

“After the festivities, I sat my friends down and gave them this Google Slides presentation of all the stages of my phalloplasty, and what I needed from them for support. And I think that’s when I learned I need to be able to ask people for exactly what I need. I know my different friends can show up in different ways, but it’s also really vulnerable ’cause you don’t know who’s going to show up for you and who’s not.”

For Sam, vulnerability and community have represented a throughline in his blossoming as both an individual and a man. In his struggles to navigate these waters, he learned that to be a man means to see struggle not as a weakness, but as a ladder.

“Asking for help was a big one; being able to find friends I could cry or struggle around. I do think I got a gift from the butch women in the queer community who showed me you can be strong on the outside and it’s still okay to need to be seen, to be soft with people close to you.”

As he’s gotten invited into more cis gender spaces, he’s identified this very sense of vulnerability as something other men struggle to access. Without the structure and emotional support of a romantic relationship, many men find it difficult to connect with others, let alone drop their guard. Coming from a non-cis space, however, community is a non-negotiable for Sam.

“I have built a huge community. I nurtured it and I give to it and I make sure I get back from it. As a trans person, I understand that community is a means of survival. But I know a lot of men my age who if they’re not with a woman in a relationship, they’re completely isolated. They can’t do those softer things for themselves. They can’t meet their own needs in that way.”

And as he continues on his journey, Sam finds he’s being invited into intimate male spaces, into friendships and brotherhoods that are nurturing and tender – that represent something very different to popular conceptions of American masculinity.

“It’s been one of the most nurturing, caring forms of intimacy I’ve encountered. I think most people would dismiss them as just bros. They joke around or whatever. But there’s so much more that goes on that people don’t know or hear. I love that side of it. I think there’s a real male intimacy that happens in sharing emotions when you feel like the rest of the world won’t care or in how you support each other and show up for each other.”

And in his work and life, he’s is doing everything he can to nurture this sense of intimacy.

“That’s why I’ve been trying to talk to guys more about this male intimacy thing. I just think it’s so missed. I think when guys can access these emotional, intimate spaces, they can support each other, they’re able to be more whole. The sad fact is, though, that many men aren’t taught give to their community and give back unless they’re from a marginalized community. And then they’ve learned to survive and learned to rely on community. And they do have ways of surviving.”

For Sam, this mission is especially important for the younger generations. In his work as a counselor and mentor, he’s found that more and more boys and young men are expressing a desire to learn ways of being men that are different to what they grew up with.

 

“I feel a lot more responsibility for how to be a man than most guys do, in what I show the world. Because I work with youth, young men look to me for cues of how to be a man. That’s something I love, like I love talking with boys about masculinity, about consent, about how we treat each other, about all of that. It’s a lot of the guys who have shaken off their own shackles of masculinity who I find are trying to mentor young men, because they realize that young men need an outlet that’s going to expand what acceptable and honorable masculinity is.”

-Eve Ejsmont