When Jacob Tobia and I sit down for our interview, it’s in two dingy plastic chairs next to a gray concrete wall. It’s not the setting I’d imagined, but in many ways, it’s appropriate. The downtown parking lot, behind Cup A Joe on Hillsborough Street, is where Jacob made their second book deal. And inside, fueled by iced mochas, is where they wrote Before They Were Men, a 300-page philosophical challenge to both misogynists and some strains of feminism.
Tobia, a Cary native, always returns home to write. And there are a few things that haven’t changed since we were at Raleigh Charter High School together. While Jacob has come out as genderqueer and started wearing bright pink lipstick in the intervening years—a story charted in their 2019 memoir Sissy—they’re still a leader in the LGBTQ+ community, charging ahead with revolutionary new ideas that are sure to set the agenda.
In 2013, they were introducing me to the idea of gender and sexuality as a spectrum. In 2025, they’re asking readers to do something more uncomfortable: consider how the gender binary has created suffering, “emotionally and spiritually,” among those seen as most benefitting from it—men and boys. They’re asking us to show compassion towards incels, right-wing podcasters, and anti-trans crusaders. To investigate the gender trauma these men might have suffered, what pain lies behind their anger and hatred. To realize that men, like us, are survivors of the patriarchy.
Before I can ask my first question, Tobia launches into the story.
Jacob Tobia: Two years ago, I was with my best friend from high school in Cup A Joe, waiting for the call to hear how the sales day for the book went. I was sitting out here, probably in that exact chair, just sobbing. Because we barely sold it. And the advance, not adjusting for inflation, was 60 percent lower than my first book. So two years ago, today, I found out that my financial future as an author and as an artist was radically different than what I was expecting.
It actually speaks to the profound uphill battle that this book is. In some ways, I’ve written the book that everybody needs that nobody wants. Everyone’s exhausted by the idea of it.
How did you come to write this book? Was there a point at which you had an epiphany about the ways men and boys suffer from the gender binary?
JT: There were a few moments that were really important to me in deciding this is the cliff I’m going to Thelma and Louise off of, which is certainly what it feels like it’s done for my career.
I talk about this a little bit in the book, but my dad died in 2021, after a protracted battle with a neurological pain disorder. It was miserable. After his death, I joined a grief support group. So I show up for the first time, and I just was like, “Oh my God, there’s not a single man in this room.”
I had to sit with that for months and be like, “Where are men grieving?” The answer is they’re just not. Or they don’t have spaces for it. It was difficult to think about, “What do I need to revisit about how I’ve been taught to think about men and boys? If they can’t grieve, how privileged are they?”
I don’t see suffering as a zero-sum game. I want to think about what it means for us to elevate and care about the suffering and pain of men and boys without the inference that that means that women and girls aren’t suffering, too.
One of the ideas in your book is that we don’t need to have a winner and a loser—the patriarchy and gender binary are hurting everybody.
I look at the gender debate that we’re having in society right now. It just feels like us sitting around being like, “Who really won in the Iraq war? The Americans or the Iraqis?” The answer is: nobody. The only people who won were the profiteers who were evil enough to trick us into doing the whole thing.
That is the reality of gender in America right now. There is a very small group of profiteers who are working with all their might to pit us against one another and convince us that this is a war worth fighting, when in fact, we should realize that we’re all being manipulated and need to band together to stop the violence.
The ideas in this book have obviously been percolating for a while. Tell me about the process of writing it.
The first half of writing this book was avoiding it. I kept hoping to live in a world where I wouldn’t need to write this book. And honestly, I kept waiting for someone else to step up and do it. It’s profoundly embarrassing for the feminist movement that no one beat me to the punch.
This is truly uncharted territory in a way that is not a compliment to me, that is not a compliment to the feminist movement. It is actually just an indictment of everybody. It is pathetic that we have not taken our feminist tools and the profound gender analysis skills that we have, and tried more vehemently, and with much more intention, to encourage men and boys to use those same skills of analysis on themselves and their own experiences.
What reactions do you get when you tell people that men and boys are profoundly suffering from the gender binary? Are you expecting backlash to this book?
I don’t expect backlash so much as I expect a lot of people to be confronting really serious trauma from their lives. When you’re in that headspace, because I’ve been there, you often direct your anger at the person who made you think about it.
It’s why this is a book, because the way you relate to a book physically, you don’t scroll through it first thing in the morning. You are offline while you are reading it, hypothetically and hopefully. So it gives you a little bit more of a creche in which to really cradle your broken heart. That is what I hope the book feels like to people. And it’s why I began it by writing, “Whoa, hold up, pause. Take your time with this. Don’t go too fast.”
How do you think we can bring this conversation into the spotlight?
The people who curate our media environment have to choose to lionize and valorize individuals like myself who are working to solve this. I wish there was a feeling of urgency deep in the bowels of The New Yorker of, “Oh, we’re fucking up this whole conversation, guys.” I wish that there was a sense within the New York Times editorial board of, “Oh, this conversation is going off the rails, and we’re ending up with two really disparate wild polarities that are driving men and boys further into the dirt.” The former being a nostalgic, sexist return to manhood, the latter being the abolition of manhood.
If we don’t find a middle path here, we’re going to do what happens in history when societies find themselves at this point, which is, spiral so fast into fascism it will make your head spin. There are so many comparisons between where we are now and the Weimar Republic. And one of them is that disenfranchised, angry young men—given nowhere to go and nowhere to locate their pain and no real explanation for their suffering—turn to demagogues. It’s a really bad episode of Watch What Happens Live.
You’ve mentioned seeing men relate to each other in a different way at a Buddhist monastery. What about that space struck you as being necessary in society more broadly?
Part of what worked about that space is that everyone there had a bigger goal that was far beyond gender. And in Buddhist practice, part of the goal is to relinquish identity, to realize that a lot of your identities don’t serve you. There is something powerful in this moment in being a little anti-identitarian.
I am done with identity politics. The irony is that identity politics is hurting everybody, but it is hurting white men the most. Because they’re not getting empowerment out of it. They are being asked to re-identify with a structure that is abusing them.
It doesn’t mean saying you can’t identify as a man. It’s about what happens if the idea of being a man is just less important to you. Manhood should be something that’s back-burner in your brain, in an ideal world. Being a man is so expansive and boundless that you pick other things to be more specific about who you are.
Sometimes [with gender], it feels like we’re telling people to say, “Are you into music or not into music?” I don’t want that. I want subgenres. And has [your taste] changed? And is it changing? What are you exploring right now versus what have you been into since you were a kid? What are you nostalgic for versus what’s that new weird thing that you heard and said, “Oh?” There’s a softer way to hold gender for all of us. I’m desperate for men to participate in creating that identitarian softness.
I’m fascinated by the way you talk about language in this book, as a tool to change how people think about gender.
Well, we pretend that our language isn’t incredibly powerful, but the reality is that identity does not exist without language. If we are trying to get people to consider their identities differently, we need a scholar’s, a poet’s, and a PR goblin’s perspective combined on how to craft that.
There’s this feeling from the right and the center right of not letting feminist language win, because we’re trying to control them or whatever their narrative is. It’s like, “You all are really missing the forest for the trees.” Gender freedom is something everybody needs. All of the things trans people say about what we want for our gender is exactly what you alpha motherfuckers want, too.
You want the ability to express yourself without shame. You want to be who you are and feel loved and supported in the world. You want a place in society.
You want the ability to express yourself without shame. You want to be who you are and feel loved and supported in the world. You want a place in society. You want a feeling that it’s okay to be who you are, and you want your gut instincts around your gender expression to be celebrated.
What makes you hopeful for the future of how we talk about gender and gender trauma?
I know this probably sounds counterintuitive, but I am really heartened by the clear desperation in the world right now. I think everyone on all sides is starting to feel really desperate because things are getting scary faster than we can fathom.
I don’t want a world where that’s true, but in a world where our discourse is failing us, where what we’ve done hasn’t worked, where the way we approach our work compounded problems that we didn’t mean to compound—in a moment when identity politics has failed us and where the Democratic party is in shambles, that desperation is warranted and necessary in order for us to seek something new.
I think we are all going to get to a point pretty soon where everyone looks around and says, “We are desperate for something new. Does anybody have something?” And I will be like, “Hi. I have it all. I don’t have it all perfectly, but I fucking have it all.” You know? And I’ve done the work ahead of everybody else. I’m living a decade in the future, like always.
What should people who want to support men today do? How can we close the gender and ideological divide?
It’s twofold. One, talk to the feminists and queers in your life about this. And say, “Are we capable, at our LGBT organization or at our feminist group or whatever, of thinking about how our work could and does apply to the gender challenges of boys and men? Can we begin to think about that?”
That local work matters and is what builds into a movement. We don’t have a national infrastructure right now for this work. We should, but we don’t. It’s something to bring to your intimate community first. Because it is really intimate work. We have to create more of an idea of what it means to be a lovable, pro-social, helpful, kind, community-oriented, sweet man. If we don’t acknowledge that that’s possible, we’re screwed.
The second part is that your intimate community includes the men in your life whom you love. Have you ever talked to them about what their gender felt like? Have you ever asked them, “Hey, what was being a boy like for you? Was your boyhood good? What parts of it were hard? Is being a man challenging for you right now?” These are questions you can just ask people. Their heads might blow up, but it’ll be a good explosion. Fireworks.
What’s next for you?
Well, you caught me on a very ceremonious day. Today was the day I was supposed to be starting orientation for my Master’s in public health at Yale. I deferred, I’m on the road for a year. And instead, today is the day that I signed a lease for a place in Durham.
I’m going to see how it goes over the next few months. I’ll be splitting my time between furnishing my place and making it really cute and homey, and hustling the living shit out of this book. I’m also thinking specifically about what it means to actually try to become part of this movement. I want to be at tables with the men leading this conversation and be like, “Let’s figure it out, dude.” I want to help you, and I want to figure out how we do this right. And asking to be at those tables and being permitted at those tables is—it’s a fight.
The other part is, I’m really concerned with the state of the trans movement right now. Just in terms of our ability to organize, our control of our messaging, our understanding of what messaging is working and not.
A world in which we don’t fix the animus against us, and a world in which we don’t find a way to win again, is not one I want to live in. So I’m working on that too. And that’s just a lot of behind-the-scenes scheming and a lot of writing really boring policy-type stuff, trying to be like, “Guys, can we all come together?” Sorry, gender neutral. “Y’all, can we all come together at a table here?”
To comment on this story, email [email protected].