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Reflection on Research and Composition for Change

You may be wondering what a trans man has to offer on the topic of masculinity. Should we not just be learning this topic? Are we not new to our gender? For many of us, we are unlearning the toxic masculinity with which we were raised or of the culture that surrounds us.

Myself- I never had any questions that I was a good choice for teaching this topic as I have followed several trans influencers for some time who are experts in it: half Korean 1st trans D1 NCAA men’s athlete and Harvard grad Schuyler Bailar @pinkmantaray, trans and nonbinary Asian-American artist Meg Emiko Lee @megemikoart, 1st trans person to complete the Triple Crown and run across the United States Cal Dobbs @calisrunning, and trans demiboy and nonbinary anti-bias educator Skye Tooley @growingwithmxt, for example. What makes them experts in it is their ability to discuss the nuances of masculinity, express the needs of our community, forward women, and champion women’s rights and that of other marginalized communities.

When deciding upon the materials for this course, I sought out the collaboration of Vice President of Equity & Inclusion and Associate Vice President of Equity & Inclusion Trumanue Lindsey, Jr. and Dr. Rassheedah Watts at Minneapolis College and North Hennepin Community College, respectively. My plan was to include either the Black feminist teachings of bell hooks or Angela Y. Davis. Lindsey suggested why not both and that Angela Y. Davis would offer more representation of the Black experience. I talked over my plans for my weekly schedule with Dr. Watts, and she approved of them and showed some interest in possibly getting me to teach a workshop for DEI.

For teaching these readings, I planned three core instructional lectures titled “Stopping Male Violence,” “Masculinity, Sex, Work, and Capitalism,” and “Reintegrating Self” linked to what I called Creative Expression assignments. The creation of these lectures was drawn from the bell hooks book A Will to Change and Angela Y. Davis book Freedom is a Constant Struggle as well as my poetry chapbook Tender One. They were sequenced in a way to help men/nonbinary people/masculine women/masculine-identified people/those who love masculine people identify a problem, some possible causes, and some solutions. One of the solutions offered in the course is “practicing integrity” through creative expressions.

Stopping Male Violence

Two of the issues I wanted to address in my course were patriarchal masculinity and white supremacy. For those raised to embrace patriarchal thinking, violence is seen as a way to power. This violence comes from anger, which is a hiding place for pain and fear, and those who exercise it do not see it as a barrier to love and connection. Much of this rage stems from an isolation from the demand to shut down emotions that starts in childhood. According to bell hooks, isolation is a weapon used by terrorist regimes all over the world to break people’s spirits. While most will not commit violent crimes, we are constantly inundated with messages that support male violence and male domination through unchecked violence.

Through this lens, I analyzed the white-supremacist capitalist targeting of individuals like Trayvon Martin in Florida and Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and turned a conceptual idea of terrorism on its head by looking at Angela Y. Davis herself and Assata Shakur as examples of targets of racist state violence. Both these examples received peculiar questions in the classroom as the students were unaware that Angela Y. Davis was once wanted by the FBI, prosecuted, and held in jail before finally being acquitted. Even today we are still seeing the effects of the white supremacist state terror’s broadening of the definition of “terror” in its war on terror as a justification of anti-Muslim racism used as a response against protestors, leading to white mobs, the militarization of local police, and the calling in of the National Guard, even on college and university campuses. It was one of my students who pointed out how easy it is for these white supremacist groups to target young men as recruits because they feel alienated and alone and like they have nowhere that they belong, and these places offer a sort of brotherhood.

To combat this, we must teach boys how to love themselves. For many, violent connection may be the only attainable closeness they experience. The violence done mirrors the violence enacted upon and done to the self. While dehumanized, it is easy to feel justified in dehumanizing others. Feminist transformation of masculinity focuses on a caring and nurturing self able to participate in the community. In bell hooks “Being a Boy,” she argues that “To love boys rightly we must value their inner lives enough to construct worlds, both public and private, where their whole selves can be consistently celebrated and affirmed, where their need to love and be loved can be fulfilled.” These are key components that bell hooks mentions are part of practicing integrity in “Reclaiming Male Integrity”:

·       being able to mourn,

·       to acknowledge one’s own ignorance,

·       speak of fears without shame,

·       knowing when to let go,

·       being flexible,

·       learning how to negotiate,

·       embracing change in thought and action,

·       to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others,

·       to assume responsibility,

·       affirm,

·       do little acts of mercy,

·       experience joy,

·       and to serve

Masculinity, Sex, Work, and Capitalism

One of the issues that men especially struggle with is contributing less emotional labor to relationships. Men and women alike often prioritize sex or romantic fantasies or work over making time for self-actualization. Self-actualization is where the process of healing takes place and where people learn good relationships with themselves and their bodies. Between societal pressures to be a provider and the demands of a capitalist society, men may not feel like they have the time for self-actualization. Bell hooks even claims that this fear of not being able to provide becomes even more desperate with a family. Oftentimes, it is not until men are forced to break that they get to choose to take time for self-actualization.

Like many men, in my own experience, I got to choose to focus on self-actualization during a period of underemployment. As a part-time community college faculty member, I am not usually assigned courses in the summer and so am left desperately scrambling for a summer job and short on cash. One summer I chose instead to go on a 1-month thru-hiking trip. I was fortunate in these circumstances to be between houses. I spent months preparing my body and slowly gathering my gear and calculating logistics for the trip before the time came to enter the wild with my friend.

Because my friend is mixed race, she asked me to research the area where we would be hiking to make sure it was a safe area for BIPOC to be in. This was not something that had occurred to me before, nor something she really was concerned about either, but her friends brought it up as a concern. Being aware of Duluth’s 1920s history, I took to researching the trail. I first scanned through the users of the SHT Facebook page for BIPOC hikers. It took me awhile to find a person to reach out to for questions; there were a lot of white people. After I asked for comfortability and explained my interest, they shared their experiences. There are a lot of Trump lovers surrounding the trail, and if you get picked up to go into town for a resupply trip or emergency, you might get a sermon. This proved to be true at our first fire on the trail.

A man happened upon us and our fire and got to talking with my friend. It almost immediately turned to the recent trial and conviction of the murderer of George Floyd. He asked her if he was going to come home to his house burned down and if they were going to riot. She told him it was unlikely there would be further protest since justice had been served, though the true justice would be George Floyd still being alive. I sort of just stood there stunned that he would approach a woman of color on the trail, clearly away for the same purpose as him, and address her with this racism – as if he did not know the body is a home and some are lucky enough to walk safely in it. It was a line I thought of later, for a poem.

My own ignorance prevented me from coming to her aid. There is something that has stuck with me that she told me before in a space that white people had clearly taken over where she was experiencing clear racism- that she did not expect a friend to stand up for her, but she did not think it marriage material in a partner. It stung, but I understood, and I think we all want to be marriage material.

Later, I would reflect on our reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha on the trail together and finding myself in his story in searching for his purpose in religious texts and spiritual devotion after I graduated to briefly joining the corporate and business world, only to find myself staring in the ageless face of a friend as she formed her truths about nature: that it gives, and it takes.

Reintegrating Self

In teaching Creative Expressions, I drew from my own experiences and hoped the students would learn valuable tools for writing for diverse audiences and adapting language and rhetoric in culturally and respectful ways. As part of the course, this section meant to build comfortability with language and concepts and confidence in writing. Since this course was focused on change, I intended to show them an alternative form of masculinity instead of just a critique of patriarchal masculinity, as bell hooks says we must do.

One of the challenges I found was in developing resources for possible research through the library, especially on trans men and transmasculine people. When searching in the library, I found my results yielding on these – my – demographic to have especially negative connotations or be criticisms of transgender men. One of my students brought up in his own expository essay on masculinity and maleness that he thought that men deal with mental health issues because of this constant criticism and that it was like society had made it like there was something wrong with being a man. Torn between Angela Y. Davis and knowing that it is white supremacy and the patriarchy that are the problem and the reason for men’s mental health issues and finding myself wondering if there was something inherently wrong with being the male identity or masculine or if what my search results were yielding was the result of cisgenderism, I returned to the discussion in “Being a Boy” that boys from a young age are taught that there is something wrong with their bodies, that the penis is only for pleasure or a weapon – that they are not educated, loved for their emotions, or taught how to love. Because as bell hooks says it is important to offer good role models, I ended up having to supply a couple of my own books for the library to put on hold for the semester: Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman’s Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and Mitch Kellaway and Zander Keig’s Manning Up: Transsexual Men on Finding Brotherhood, Family, and Themselves. These collections of personal essays have very diverse representations of genderqueer people and trans men in a variety of lifestyles. More Black men and women like George Floyd would be alive today if white men were educated on their bodies, on the frailty and divinity of humanity.