In Thomas Page McBee’s “Amateur,” a memoir about being the first trans man to box in Madison Square Garden, and an exploration on masculinity itself, the memoirist writes that his then-girlfriend told him,
“Maybe, instead of looking for the men you want to be, you need to face your worst fears about who you are.”
She is referring to the dangerousness of the patriarchy and possibly being a part of it.
In Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris” a 1960s science fiction novel about an alien ocean that creates apparitions of your greatest regrets, Lem writes the following dialogue:
"A normal man," he said. "What is a normal man? A man who has never committed a disgraceful act? Maybe, but has he never had uncontrollable thoughts? Perhaps he hasn't. But perhaps something, a phantasm, rose up from somewhere within him, ten or thirty years ago, something which he suppressed and then forgot about, which he doesn't fear since he knows he will never allow it to develop and so lead to any action on his part. And now, suddenly, in broad daylight, he comes across this thing ... this thought, embodied, riveted to him, indestructible.
He wonders where he is ... Do you know where he is?"
"Here," whispered Snow, "on Solaris."
Then, roughly 60 years later, Thomas Page McBee writes about his run in with a would-be mugger. He says:
“I tried to avoid thinking about it, until my run-in with the man on Orchard Street clarified her wisdom. There he was, finally, my awful mirror: when he balled his fists, I balled mine.
If you happened upon the scene and didn't know me, you'd be hard-pressed to identify what made us so different, and you'd be right.”
“We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact.
This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”
Maybe you are a trans man afraid of what it means to be a man, maybe you’re a cis man feeling unsure of how to be a good guy. Lem and McBee have very little in common; Lem was Polish and barely escaped the Nazis, McBee lives in New York and writes for television. But they both understood something about loneliness and the terrifying reality of what it means to look inward.
But as the scientists are in Solaris, we have to be curious, we have to keep looking, and we have to believe that a better self is possible.
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