Amateur by Thomas Page McBee review – a trans boxer’s life lessons theguardian.com

In the 1979 country song “Coward of the County”, Kenny Rogers’ reluctant hero concludes that sometimes you have to fight to be a man. As Amateur recounts with excoriating honesty, fighting is integral to Thomas Page McBee’s understanding of his own masculinity, and the book is his attempt to use the “brutal intimacies” of boxing to “help me address the question of male violence with some ritual and containment”.