The New Self-Help

What Becoming a Man Showed Me About a World Designed for Men

Every day, I was rewarded for behavior that I was previously punished for

This story is part of The New Self-Help: 21 Books for a Better You in the 21st Century.

When I first began injecting testosterone, I clocked the changes primarily in aesthetic terms: the T-shirt that now fit me, the graceful curl of biceps, the glorious sprinkle of a beard. I loved being a man; I loved having a body.

Those first few years of testosterone injections coincided with a period of anxious headlines about men in economic turmoil. Post-recession, surges in suicides, drug addiction, and even beards were all blamed on a broader insecurity about the massive loss of jobs and the shake-up of male-led households after the crash. It was dubbed a global “masculinity crisis,” its hallmark behaviors deemed “toxic.” It was, according to a 2010 cover story in The Atlantic, “the end of men.”

But I was only beginning: A man born at 30, with a body that reveals a truth about being human that is rarely examined. The more I felt at home in my body, the more uncomfortable I became with what was expected of it. I couldn’t shake the idea that this “masculinity crisis” reflected something important and…