Oases of safe & nurturing masculinity

I keep finding, making my way into, spaces of non-toxic, safe, and nurturing masculinity. 

I’ve been doing this my entire life but now I’m doing it in a more conscious way or, rather, with a different awareness because of the more explicit and liberated way I can express & present my gender identity. 

This weekend I did my first Ragnar in Zion, a relay race on trail where the eight team members run three loops (an easy one, a medium one, and a hard one) each non-stop for about 24 hours, including during the night. I was invited to join a team that was being organized by a couple of old high school friends of my (cis-male) running buddy who supported me as an ally in my half-marathon activism race four weeks ago. The situation felt similar to the ice-climbing trip I did joining another one of my (cis-male) buddies in February: I’m full of enthusiasm when the event is proposed to me because I love adventure; I trust my buddies, I know we like similar things, and I instinctively believe that since my buddies are nice guys, their other friends will be nice people as well, so I don’t worry about the group dynamics or social aspects with strangers; right before and at the beginning of the trip/event, though, I get anxious and ever scared about the possibility of being misgendered and/or of possibly finding myself in upsetting group/social dynamics that could make me feel uncomfortable and/or misgendered. Fortunately, though, just like with the ice-climbing trip, things didn’t just go well: it was a wonderfully affirming (& fun) experience! 

The whole team, regardless of gender, was a group of lovely, really nice people. I was the only queer person in the group, everyone except for me was cis, monogamous & heteronormative, but once I got over the initial fear or unknown of how I would be seen — whether I could even be really seen as myself — I felt totally comfortable. Everyone used my chosen pronouns (“he” in this context), I never got misgendered once, and as the hours went by I was more and more openly my queer and yet masculine self, naturally, spontaneously, feeling accepted and liked just as myself, just as I am. We were a group of nine people, eight runners and the Ragnar team captain’s wife: three cis-women, five cis-guys, and myself. And once again, I was “one of the guys”. And not only one of the guys, but one of the three fast guys on our team. The three of us were the serious athletes, the competitive ones, the ones doing push-ups to not get bored while we were waiting for our turn to run. But this competitiveness, this “doing push-ups to kill time” wasn’t done in a spirit of toxic masculinity or bravado: it was a form of male bonding — admittedly, socially induced, but done in a fun, almost childish way. Overall, there was a lot of bonding. The event itself, the way it is designed, calls for team bonding among the runners, regardless of gender. And this was also nice for me: that it didn’t even matter so much that I was the only queer person in our group because we ALL shared the passion for running and/or the outdoors and adventure, regardless of gender or queerness or normativities. There was so much openness, all of us just sharing stories about ourselves and getting to know each other in groups of different sizes while we waited for our turn to run. All of this openness and vulnerability even from the cis-guys, talking about their own struggles, mental health, doubts and fears. The cis-guys in this group, like so many of the cis-men I keep in my life, are the type of person who uses their power or privilege to empower, support and lift up others. This type of person exists, this type of cis-man exists, and they can be boyishly doing push-ups to kill time between runs as a way to bond with one another, but they’re really good guys, they’re the type of man we need society to see, the type of man we need to show as a role model to boys to end toxic masculinity. These are the guys who use “he” pronouns for me without thinking twice about it, who troop into the men’s rooms all together, me included, chatting while we’re all peeing — they at the urinals, I in the stall.

These are the guys with whom I want to continue going on road trips and adventures and runs and climbs. These are the type of guy with whom I want to fill my life, building oases of safe & nurturing masculinity around myself — maybe as one of the ways in which I father the little boy in me and then hopefully helping these oases spread further and further to eventually engulf the aridity of toxic “binary genderism”.