A couple of decades ago, Aidan Key went on a talk show with his identical twin sister, Brenda. The interview — which was about Aidan’s transition and Brenda’s parallel life as a woman — went fine, he tells me. “Then they opened it up to the audience for questions,” he remembers with a laugh, “and somebody raised their hand and said: ‘So, which is better?’”
The question didn’t faze him exactly, but did become aware of the atmosphere in the room shifting, almost like there were suddenly “two different cheering sections”. Suddenly, everyone was leaning forward, desperate for an answer to the question: girl or boy? Man or woman? When all is said and done, who has the easier ride? The answer to that question, he says, is actually pretty complicated.
There aren’t many people like Aidan Key: born in 1964 and raised as a girl alongside Brenda, he transitioned in his early 30s, after becoming a parent. He did so at a time when transgender narratives were rare and trans people were treated like curiosities; there was no mainstream language for what he was going through, and gender-affirming hormone therapy was only provided in very specialized medical settings.
For Aidan, going through that hormone therapy — where his levels of testosterone were gradually increased up to the level usually seen in a cisgender male — was eye-opening.
“I realized pretty right away that testosterone is pretty fantastic in giving you greater strength and energy,” he says, “We might understand that in general, because we do know that we can generalize that men are bigger and they grow taller, they have greater muscle mass, et cetera. But experiencing it was pretty shocking — and pretty great. And I remember one of my first thoughts was thinking: Oh my gosh, that is so unfair.” It wasn’t just that he was suddenly building muscle as soon as he hit the gym. It was the amount of energy he had, all the time, which was so much more than he’d had while living as a woman. “I just thought: OK, they have an advantage. And they don't even acknowledge that it has nothing to do with how brilliant they are. It's just the reality of a greater amount of testosterone in one system, rather than a smaller amount.”
With skyrocketing testosterone also comes increased libido. As Aidan points out, he was going through the hormonal equivalent of male adolescence — but with the advantage of a fully-formed, adult brain. For the first time, he says, he felt a huge amount of compassion for teenage boys, “because, you know, I found teenage boys quite ridiculously annoying my entire life. And I just felt so bad [about that] because I, as an adult — I was in my early thirties — I could have all of those feelings of physical overwhelm because of increased libido. But really, how does one contain it [when one still has the brain of a child]?”
Boys had never factored into Aidan’s thinking much. He was raised as a young woman, and unlike Brenda, he was romantically interested in girls. He remembers seeing Brenda blush and giggle around boys at school when they were teenagers and then going straight home to their mother and asking her what on earth was wrong with his sister. But now, all of a sudden, he was a man. And it was impossible to ignore the fact that most men come out of boyhood.
“If I was moving through life and estrogen was more the dominant influencer and I'd get mad about something, well, darn it, I'd start crying,” Aidan remembers, “because I'm frustrated, angry, whatever. And also, I’m quite upset that tears are the first thing that comes out, because if one is angry about something, you don't want tears sending a message of weakness or whatever that inspires in others.” After he started on testosterone, “all of a sudden I realized: I'm angry and I'm going to speak about that, and I'm gonna speak very clearly about that. And I found that the cognitive element of that was shifted in that way.” He no longer felt frustrated to tears; assertiveness came naturally.
But then there were the unexpected physiological changes to how he dealt with sadness. “I was having some deep challenges to situations or relationships in my life that caused me a lot of pain and grief and sadness, and I'm waiting for the tears, and they're not showing up in the same way,” Aidan recalls. “And because of that, there's a couple of things — one is that those around me don't know how much things are hurting, because they're not seeing it. And also I think: Oh, well, maybe I'm doing OK, when I'm not. So in some respects, I didn't pay attention and take care of the huge pain that was going on because I thought: I'm doing OK. I’m holding it together.”
It’s hard to explain exactly why that is, says Aidan. Although his emotions were present, they weren’t present in the same way as they had been before: “The emotions were all there. Like, grief feels like grief, anger feels like anger. But they just felt like there was a greater distance, like they were deeper inside rather than more on the surface of my body.” This realisation, too, gave him compassion for young boys. They are physiologically set up to be able to more easily ignore their emotions, he believes, which clearly can have catastrophic effects.
During the time when he was doing media interviews and touring universities and schools during the early days of his transition, Aidan was invited by a middle school teacher to come into her classroom and talk to the children about his experiences. The class sent him letters afterwards, and he says he’ll never forget one that came from a 13-year-old boy addressing a part of Aidan’s talk where he detailed how he often made sure to set aside time for a good cry during difficult times. The boy wrote that “it was really interesting to hear you talk about expressing sadness and being able to do that, because I've already learned to turn that off,” Aidan remembers. He sighs. “And it just completely broke my heart.”
Toxic masculinity
Who would choose to raise a boy? They place greater demands on the mother’s body during pregnancy and breastfeeding, ultimately leading to mothers of multiple sons dying earlier. They are harder to potty train, more likely to have behavioral and mental health problems as children, less likely to do well in school, and more likely to engage in substance abuse as teens. And that’s without even delving into the dubious cultures surrounding boy-raising: #BoyMoms, toxic masculinity, incels and efilists and “Your Body, My Choice”. In the US today, where sex selection is common during IVF, prospective parents overwhelmingly choose girls.
That may be because of western perceptions about girls staying closer to their families as they age. It may be because boys are perceived as harder work, with less emotional payoff at the end. Whichever way you slice it, raising a boy — or multiple boys — is a huge responsibility, not least because boys become men, and men still rule the world. And the evidence increasingly suggests that to address that responsibility, we need a new playbook.
How do we engage boys in school again, tempt them away from porn and AI girlfriends and misogynistic YouTubers, navigate questions about feminism and the anti-woke backlash, protect them from seeing content pushed by firearms manufacturers on social media, and give them the space to actually enjoy their lives, all while nurturing the masculinity they’ve been told is toxic? Over the past few years, a number of people have put forward ideas. One is “red-shirting” boys in schools from kindergarten onwards, i.e. holding them behind a year so they’re a year older than the girls they learn alongside. This idea is based on the theory that boys are emotionally less mature than girls because their brains mature slower, before catching up around puberty. But there’s actually scant evidence to suggest that the “slower-maturing brain” theory is true. A 2019 neurological study found that both that theory, as well as the theory that boys use their brain differently to girls, was nothing more than a myth. Why, then, should they be held back? Perhaps it’s the schools themselves that should change.
This is a subject of special interest to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and author of the 2022 bestseller Of Boys and Men, as well as the somewhat controversial 2024 follow-up Yes, Boys Can! Inspiring Stories of Men Who Changed the World. One might say that we already have an abundance of examples of men who changed the world for little boys to look up to: museums, galleries, TV shows and news media are replete with politicians, historians, scientists, actors, artists and entrepreneurs who have made it to the top and are very obviously male. But in a world where the manosphere beckons, it is important to spotlight the men in Reeves’ book: inspiring nurses, teachers, dancers, poets, orchestral musicians and visual artists, who are heard about much less than footballers, engineers, soldiers, mathematicians and firefighters.
Reeves, who is 55 years old and has three adult sons, does work that a lot of people might find confronting. In a world where boys are falling increasingly behind in education and men die by suicide at four times the rate of women, he advocates for a culture that is more positive about masculinity. Over the past eight or nine years, Reeves says, it’s become increasingly common among liberals “to see men not as having problems as being a problem”. From 2016 onwards, terms like “toxic masculinity” and “manspreading” became mainstream — and young men are “over it,” he adds. “They’re just over it. They’re not against gender equality… They’re just kind of over the censoriousness and the lecturing.”
For women who have experienced decades of discrimination, this might be a hard pill to swallow. Even as reproductive rights are being rolled back and the gender pay gap persists, we are being asked to make more space for men’s feelings. But Reeves isn’t a misogynist, nor is he a Republican — “I was one of those parents that went on the Women’s March and then went home to make sure my son had done his homework” — and that is central to why he believes his work is so important. He’s seen how easily boys are being led astray by online misogynists peddling regressive, sexist theories; he’s watched the videos and studied them in order to learn about how young men are radicalized. He recognizes that young men’s interest in the far right is a huge cultural problem. And he thinks we have to be honest about how to solve that.
“What they'll say, these misogynist influencers, they will say something like this: ‘Look, here are some true facts about what's happening to boys and men, and here's some stuff that you're probably feeling right now, and I guarantee you that if you say that to your mom or you say that to your teacher, you will be shut down.’ So these guys will say: ‘Go try it. Go see what your mom and your teacher says. If you question whether the gender pay gap is a result of discrimination, or you say that there are actually some actual differences between men and women — go try that. And I guarantee you that they'll freak out and shut you down because you know what? They don't want to hear the truth. I'm telling you the truth. They don't want to hear the truth, so go try it.’ So guess what? They go try it. And guess what? Half the time, the teachers and the moms or whatever shut them down and say: ‘I can't believe you're saying that. I can't believe I'm raising misogynists.’ And so they go: Huh, interesting. That's exactly what that guy online said would happen.”
One of Reeves’ own sons once sent him a YouTube video about how the gender pay gap is a “myth”. Reeves watched it, and discussed it with him later. As he explained to his son, “it’s not a myth, it’s math” — in other words, the gender pay gap is more structural than direct these days, now that it’s illegal in most places to pay a woman a different salary for doing the exact same job as a man. It was an in-depth conversation. It involved pulling statistics and talking about history. “But I could have said: Oh, how dare you. Do you not know that your mom gets paid less? And did you not see that lawsuit? And like, what kind of monster am I raising here?” he says.
The way that Reeves and his wife navigated parenthood while building their careers is instructive on how he sees the world. “I was a stay-at-home dad for a while,” he says. “My wife and I took the view that we would basically take it in turns to have a ‘big job’.” They defined “big” in terms of how demanding it was, rather than how much money it brought in — so when Reeves was working at a think tank, that counted even though it wasn’t especially well paid; it also counted when his wife worked for a few years at PriceWaterhouseCooper. Through each making sacrifices for the family and for their own jobs, they noticed something. Reeves’ wife always felt the most guilt about missing play dates and bedtimes, whereas Reeves felt a deep sense of guilt about not making money while he was staying at home with the kids. Despite all their efforts to make things fair, and the fact that they were both passionate about their careers and about parenting, they were still products of socialization. It hurt Reeves not to be “the provider” in the most traditional sense, while his wife felt within herself that she should be the default parent, even as neither of them believed that in their rational minds.
‘Boys penetrate’
In the early days after Aidan Key’s transition, he realized that he’d become invisible. One day, not long after he’d joined a new workplace, “a coworker of mine, he and I are standing out on a sidewalk in front of our workplace, and he's talking, and it took me a while to realize he's talking to me,” he says. “Because if I'm talking to somebody, we're looking at each other, we're conversing, we're doing that. But he's completely like, at least a 45-degree turn away from me and talking to something—” he gestures into the distance, “—over there. And I'm looking like: What's going on? Like, who is talking? And I realized that him and many other people had stopped seeing me.”
When society saw him as a young woman, he had gotten used to eyes following him all the time. People spoke to him directly; when he walked in a room, people noticed. Now, he moved through the world without anyone noticing. Women avoided his gaze for fear of inviting something; men avoided his gaze for fear of seeming aggressive. There were advantages to not being looked at all the time, but it also felt increasingly lonely. “I was just ‘extraneous human’,” he says. If, among all this invisibility, a woman made proper eye contact and held his gaze or said something, the attention felt so much more meaningful. “So, you know, I'm seeing the flip side of something that I inherently knew [when I was living as a woman],” he says, “because heaven forbid you actually say something nice or give a dude a smile because boom, they're right there going way over the top in terms of what the interaction might typically, or what I think it ought to, warrant.”
Aidan’s twin sister Brenda told him she experienced this invisibility setting in as she got into her late forties. For Brenda, too, it was complicated: she realized that even though that attention had been problematic and often irritating, it was also disorienting to have it withdrawn.
After he came out as a trans man, Aidan was surprised to find the lesbian community who had previously embraced him began to push him away. But he is, as he puts it, a people person. Instead of shrinking back into isolation, he began holding sessions where people could ask questions about gender. He put together support groups, coordinated media appearances, set up training programs for businesses, and launched the first Gender Odyssey Conference in Seattle in 2001. He founded a nonprofit called TransFamilies that supports the families of transgender children, did a TED talk and wrote a book (Trans Children in Today’s Schools, published by Oxford University Press in 2023.) He wishes the oxygen on trans rights issues wasn’t taken up with debates like which bathroom a person can use — “the nearest and cleanest” is surely the best, he adds — and instead thinks we should come to a place where we accept we won’t “break society” by allowing people to explore gender.
As a transgender man and as a parent — his daughter is now 35 — Aidan knows how important it is to simply give people space. And sometimes making that space involves challenging long-held assumptions by people in a position of power over children.
At one session he was giving to schoolteachers a few years ago, he remembers opening the floor to questions and “this person raises his hand and he starts talking about the fact that he's a shop class teacher. And he said: ‘Boys come in and they grab a hammer and they're pounding nails into the desk and grabbing the screw gun and doing all that, and they're just making themselves at home, and inherently they're just going for it. And girls come in and they just sit there and they look scared and they don't know what to do.’” Aidan remembers sitting patiently as the man went “on and on and on about this,” wondering, “what’s he getting at here? What can I address?” Eventually, the man finished off his monologue with “a statement, not a question. He said: ‘Let’s face it — boys penetrate.’”
Aidan widens his eyes in amusement. He took a second, he says, to let that statement settle into the air. The room went silent. Then, he says, he turned to the shop teacher and said: “First of all, I'm not going to deny that there are physiological differences between men and women, because I'm busy experiencing those with the variation of hormone levels, and the effects they have on my emotional expression and my physical body.” But, he continued, let’s think about the journey a little boy takes to that shop class — the parent who shows him a hammer, or gets him a set of play tools — versus the journey a girl takes, where she probably had tools taken out of her hands and was ushered away from situations involving drills and nails because they’re dangerous. In the end, Aidan adds, “it was an opportunity to take a wildly interesting and outrageous comment — ‘Boys penetrate’ — and give it validity, without disrespecting him for saying it. And it's very possible I'm addressing some things that would be very beneficial for the rest of the room to hear.”
Thick-skinned, naturally upbeat and extroverted, Aidan realized he would have to invite invasive and potentially offensive questions to achieve what he wanted to achieve: a more equal and tolerant society. He shouldn’t have to do it — that much is obvious. But if no one extends an olive branch, then how can we ever hope to understand each other?
The sins of the fathers
When it comes to schoolteachers, Richard Reeves also has some thoughts. Boys are probably falling behind at least partly because there aren’t enough male teachers, he says. In the U.S., around 77% of schoolteachers are women, and in elementary schools — where almost 90% of teachers are women — that number is even more unbalanced. The reason why that lack of male teachers might negatively affect boys is unclear. It may be because we learn better when presented with role models who look like us. It may be because women teachers better connect with little girls, or because they tend to set up lesson plans that are more conducive to female learning, with fewer breaks for physical activity, for instance.
As ever, the reason we got into this situation is complicated. As women moved into the workplace, some of the first jobs they were allowed into were teaching children. Over time, that job became more and more female-oriented — and, as with other jobs like nursing where women dominate, salaries went down because “women’s work” was socially devalued. Now, salaries aren’t high enough to tempt men into the profession. Teaching is “dangerously close” to becoming a “second earner profession,” says Reeves. And when men do apply for roles that they’re now not usually seen in — such as elementary school teaching — there’s some evidence that they may be discriminated against at the application stage, simply because the hiring managers are more used to seeing women.
One of Reeves’ sons is a fifth-grade schoolteacher in Baltimore, he says, “so I’ve done my thing. That’s one!” He believes that his son has experienced sexist discrimination. But it’s hard to have those conversations with mixed-gender audiences, he adds, because women will often respond to the idea of inviting more men into their industries by saying: “Oh, sure, yeah. Bring some men in so they can all get promoted past us.” He laughs. “And I’m like: OK, can we agree that those are both problems?”
Getting people to agree that sometimes, the patriarchy can hurt men as well as women is always an uphill battle. But it’s an important one to have. Research shows that boys receive less physical affection from their parents and caregivers than girls, even though they might actually need it more. Men are also less likely to win custody cases in family court — and while it’s still unclear about why that might be, it’s likely that sexist assumptions about mothers being the “natural” primary caregivers could underpin some of that decision-making.
So what practical advice can a parent of sons put into action? Most recently, a longitudinal study found that just one hour a day of physical activity from elementary school onwards might give huge mental health benefits to all children, especially boys. If you’re raising a boy today, the available scientific evidence suggests you should probably concentrate on providing access to four main things: hugs, sports, books, and a strong male role model in their life who can provide an example of positive masculinity.
Ben Greene — who transitioned at 15 years old while living with his parents and two younger sisters, then aged 13 and 10, in a small town in Connecticut — knows what it’s like to study maleness. He always knew he was a boy, but he’d been brought up as a girl. So he came up with what he believed was a foolproof plan to channel masculinity.
“When I first came about, I was like: OK, if I'm going to be a boy, I have to do it right,” he says. “I have to prove that I deserve to be called a boy, and I'm going to be the perfect man. And I was obsessed with that. And so I would go — I had another friend who was also transitioning to male — and we would go to the food court of the mall and we would sit for hours with notebooks and take notes on men.” Those notes got increasingly granular as time went on. They included things like “How does a man walk? How does a man hold a bag? How does a man interact with a chair?” The two friends practised holding their hands up with partially bent fingers, convinced that men never fully extend their whole hand. They quizzed each other at the end of the day to make sure they weren’t slipping up on how to present themselves to the world. Greene laughs. “It was exhausting,” he says. “Ridiculous.”
Despite studying male behavior with that level of precision, Greene initially insisted that he wouldn’t take testosterone. That’s because of “the way we talk about testosterone as a society,” he says. “‘A testosterone-fueled rage’, ‘wars are started by testosterone’, and we talk about it as this great creator of evil.” When he really examined why he didn’t want to take hormones, he realized it was “because my favorite thing about myself is that I’m nice, I think I’m a good person, I’m patient… To be really blunt, my feeling at that young age was: I can’t start testosterone because I don’t want to become a bad person.”
Ultimately, Greene did start taking testosterone a few years later. And while he found that it did make him feel more assertive and protective over his loved ones, it was more of a “turning up the volume on what was already there.” He now spends a lot of time counseling young trans boys and men about how testosterone can’t change your personality. What’s been lost in the conversation, he believes, is that “the patriarchy might make you make evil choices” but there isn’t anything inherent in men that pushes them towards being bad.
Clearly, there are some advantages to being a trans man, Greene adds — he’s never going to dismiss a woman with: “Oh, it’s just your time of the month,” for instance. But he’s also had to deal with people taking his emotions less seriously. He misses the easy camaraderie and the closeness of female friendships, and it took him a while to realize that he can’t sit next to women on trains at night anymore, in the way he was taught by his parents when they were raising him as a girl, because he’s seen as a potential threat rather than an ally.
Greene says he’s also been shocked by the social media output that targets young men. Like Richard Reeves, he’s noticed that the most insidious accounts will challenge boys to open “edgy” conversations with their parents or peers, or to approach women in public with declarations about being a “high-value man”. When those efforts inevitably lead to rejection or conflict, such influencers will tell boys that they’ve now proven how society is weighted against them, “so they very sneakily and intentionally draw them toward the far-right”.
Greene (who is the author of My Child is Trans, Now What?) cites the actor Pedro Pascal and former basketball player and co-owner of the NBA’s Utah Jazz, Dwyane Wade, as two examples of positive role models for young boys. Both are successful and charismatic high achievers who also take pains to be emotionally open in public. They also both have transgender relatives — Pascal’s sister, Lux, is a trans woman, while Wade has a trans daughter, Zaya — who they vocally support.
Both Richard Reeves and Aidan Key believe that a lot of raising successful young men involves being open to having the difficult conversations. It also involves approaching parenting boys as a positive, enriching experience, rather than an experience in avoiding worst-case scenarios. And it means not visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons who are new to these topics.
Aidan knows that “a poorly worded, invasive, even crass question is touching on something that others surely could be thinking, but are polite enough to know better. And so I feel like it's my job — I've made it my job — to embrace that, to really listen to what is being said here, and what can I wrap my arms around and acknowledge and honor and answer?”
If it was all just inappropriate questions about genitalia and angry diatribes, then he might’ve stopped his work a long time ago. But, he says, it’s important to remember that “I get to see more than just that part. I get to watch them move. I get to witness in real time the shift that happens, and that is pretty amazing.” He’s not going to see it in everyone, of course. But every time he meets a group, he does see it happen in some people. And one by one, those people will go out and, slowly yet perceptibly, help to make the world a better place.
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