This is the third in my series of conversations with artist friends where we get to dig a little bit deeper into our own work, reflect on our journeys, and hopefully share something useful. Find the first two here and here.

Official Bio: Shannon TL Kearns is a transgender man who believes in the transformative power of story. As an ordained priest, a playwright, a theologian, and a writer all of his work revolves around making meaning through story.

I recently got to join Shannon for the release of his new book, “No One Taught Me How to Be a Man: What a Trans Man’s Experience Reveals about Masculinity,” and it was such a fantastic and fascinating read that I thought it might be interesting to have this conversation.

KYLE: A line from your book that really stuck with me: “As I started my medical transition, I began to think deeply about what being a man meant to me. What kind of man was I going to be? What did being a man even mean?”

I feel like your book is such a gift because it makes explicit a question that, for a lot of cis guys, is either implicit, or just kind of never asked in the first place. In my work, so many young men are really smart and have a lot of empathy, but are not directly confronted with that kind of question—they are not given space to really grapple with it, and maybe don’t know how to make space. I feel like this gets to the central “project” of your book, but I’d love to get your take on it – could you share the basic elevator pitch of who you are and why you wrote this book?

SHANNON: I love this question and reflection on the thrust of the book because you’re exactly right: being a transgender man forced me to be intentional about growing into my masculinity in a way I think was very helpful. It’s also a unique experience because I had to ask the questions. I wanted to reflect on the intentionality of my own journey and invite other men to ask these questions of themselves. So the book is about the things I learned, sometimes accidentally, while transitioning that, to me, opened up larger questions about how we’re defining masculinity, how each of us are relating to our embodiment of masculinity, and what might happen if we were all more intentional about asking and answering those questions for ourselves. 

I’d love to hear how the young men you’re working with are asking/answering these questions? Do you find more intentionality in how they’re constructing their genders? Or are we still not there yet?

KYLE: It might sound like a cop-out answer, but I think it’s accurate: it’s both. “Young men” is an enormous identity category, and I am personally seeing a ton of variance in how young men are making sense of masculinity and gender more broadly. And I think a lot of it has to do with social media, and how exposure to good and bad ideas has been supercharged. On one hand, a ton of young men are light-years ahead of where I was at 16 or 18 or whatever in their understanding of multiple, valid ways of being, of consent and healthy sexuality, and of a range of other issues relevant to this conversation. On the other hand, the “manosphere” and misogynist influencers (not to mention misogynist politicians holding the actual reins of power) are a real issue with real-world impacts. 

My take, for a while now, is that things get better and they get worse at the same time. It’s not a neat-and-tidy narrative, and that can be disorienting, but it can also be an opportunity: a particular school, or social circle, or other space can be “nudged” one way or the other, and it often just takes a bit of leadership: the classic example of the teen boy calling out the sexist joke, or the football coach taking the initiative to go to a training, and then bringing in a guest speaker to talk about healthy masculinity, etc. These “small” moments can have big ripple effects in this information environment.

And that connects to another question I wanted to ask you: “Masculinity discourse” (online especially, but also offline) seems to come in waves—every few years, there’s a big series of articles, essays, and points-and-counterpoints about the problems with men and young men. I’m curious about how you feel about this cycle: What’s good about this constant questioning, what is weird or potentially harmful about it, what is missing from the conversation, etc.

SHANNON: Oh man. Yeah. I think one of the reasons it’s happening is because it’s a reaction to other groups who are making progress (however small) which then throws the question of those at the “top” of the heap into crisis about their own place in that pile. So in that way I think these waves are troublesome but only because they’re not actually getting to the heart of things. It often feels like we’re naming a problem but never actually diagnosing the disease or willing to deal with it. So it keeps coming back. It also seems a bit like a smoke screen. “Let’s get back to focusing on men! Men are suffering!” without being willing to say “because they refuse to divest from the systems that are hurting all of us.”

So I wish these conversations pointed toward a cure, you know? Let’s name the problem, but also face what’s behind the problem. It’s not just a “loneliness epidemic” (to use a current issue); it’s that men cannot be vulnerable with one another, or men aren’t willing to have equitable relationships. It’s not that women are being “mean” or “too picky” or whatever, if that makes sense?

KYLE: For sure; and to bring it back to your book, I feel like you do such a good job cutting through the noise and getting to that bigger issue. As a poet, I love writing that uses down-to-earth, everyday language to explore big, complex ideas. I feel like there’s an elegance and approachability in your writing that makes your book easy to recommend to people, even people who are sick of that version of “masculinity discourse.” Of course, I’d also recommend it, more broadly, to men (but not just men) at different points in their own journeys: from guys who think about this stuff all the time, to young men just starting to move into it, and beyond. Your specific perspective/story, along with your approach to writing, just feels like something that is needed right now. In that spirit, another line from your book that jumped out at me: 

“This question- will I ever feel like I’m enough?- seems to be the one thing all men have in common. This deep-seated terror that they don’t fit anywhere, that they don’t live up to anything, that they are failing. Failing. But failing at what, exactly? Being the very thing that is supposed to come the easiest. Being yourself…”

Again, a powerful moment connecting cis and trans men’s experiences; I’m curious about how you thought about audience while writing this book: Who is your target audience? Your expected audience? Your dream/ideal audience? Or were you not thinking about it like that at all?

SHANNON: This is probably THE question I wrestled with the most. One of the interesting? Frustrating? I’m not even sure? Things about being trans is how often I run into people who think they have a pretty nuanced understanding of gender but then when you have a couple of conversations with them you realize how many assumptions they’re not even questioning. So I wrestled with: is this a book for people who have done a lot of work? Is this for people who have done no work? For straight men? Cis men? I think my ideal audience is cis men (gay and straight) who are really wanting to show up differently in their lives. They’re folks who are asking the questions, who are feeling the pangs of unease, who have this sense that something could/should be different.

I hope, then, that this book becomes not only a companion in their questions, but an impetus toward action. I’d love for groups of guys to get together and read the book, discuss it, make changes together, and process those changes in the group. That would be a win for me. 

KYLE: That’s the dream, definitely. On that note, I want to give you the last word here with a question that is less about the discourse around masculinity issues and more about the issues themselves. One of my favorite conversations (which can also be a more directed, facilitated activity but works great as something more informal too) is to ask a group of men to describe the future that they want to live in—specifically as it relates to gender, gender roles, masculinity, etc. And we could say 20 years, 50 years, 1000 years… but for now, let’s say 100 years. One century from now, if we keep fighting for the future we want, what might it actually look like?

Sometimes this conversation gets really big-picture right away, like everyone, holding any identity, will be free to be their whole selves. And that’s awesome. But I’m also thinking about really down-to-earth stuff: I imagine a world in which K-12 health class curriculum includes in-depth, culturally-relevant units (spread over multiple grade levels) on consent, healthy relationships, and counter-narrative masculinity stuff. I imagine a world in which trans people get 100% of the support and resources they deserve to be their full selves—and again, that’s not just a narrative thing; it’s a nuts-and-bolts policy thing. We need a world in which elected leaders and the movements they are accountable to are forceful, unapologetic, and bold in their demands for equity for trans people. Those are just a few examples. I know it’s a big question, but how would you describe the world we are fighting for? Please feel free to be as big-picture or down-to-earth as you want.

SHANNON: I love this question! Especially because I think we need to be able to dream the world in order to create it. I think other than the obvious things you mentioned; freedom to be who you are, support for trans people everywhere, etc. I think I want to see some really practical things: a change in how we instruct and raise young people so they all young people learn how to name and process emotions, all young people learn how to take care of themselves (cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.), all young people are encouraged to show up fully in their relationships. I think with where we are currently, more of that learning needs to happen in how we’re raising the kids we assume are boys.

I think, too, a world in which we understand that all people need different things and so we can create systems (education, work, health care) that are flexible and can meet people where they are. If we can start to divest ourselves of the idea that everything needs to be the same in order to be just, then I think we can actually face the problems of our culture and start to shift them. More than anything I want us to create a world in which we work together to create solutions, where we hold each other up, where we see each other as collaborators instead of competitors, where we live in abundance instead of scarcity. That’s my dream.

Two Final Notes:

• Get Shannon’s book here!
• Shannon guested on an episode of What’s Good, Man? where we talked about the pros and cons of thinking of masculinity as something to “fix” vs. something to “discard.” A really good conversation!
• Check out my counter-narrative masculinity resource hub for all kinds of readings, links, tools, poems, and more.