At an Uzbek restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, we ate plov, manti, and shashlik, and talked for a couple of hours. It was summer. The chicken wings he’d insisted on ordering grew cold; I leaned back in my chair, my belly distended from the food and several bottles of pear soda. My eyes landed on the TV screen playing Russian new-wave music videos behind him.

I handed him the letter that was folded up in my pocket– which I had translated into Russian. It began, “I don’t know if you know this, but I am transgender.” I included an anecdote about my mother’s pregnancy with my twin and I, during which she was convinced I was a boy. At the delivery, she said, “Here he comes!” I apologized to him for withholding, explained the history behind my anxiety, and included some more recent experiences I’d had.

He looked at me, confused. He squinted, trying to read the small Cyrillic text, and my heart pounded in my chest so loudly I could hear it from within my body. He puts it down quickly and hands it back to me, and says that he’s always known I was trans.

“This no bother me. You person. You my friend, bro.” 

I met Talap Mamyrkanov when he started working at Gleason’s Gym, where I have been a coach since 2021. The gym, founded in 1937 by Bobby Gagliardi (who changed his name to Bobby Gleason to appeal to the Irish fight crowd), is the oldest consistently running boxing gym in the country. More than 136 world champions have trained there, including Jake LaMotta, Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, and Mike Tyson.

When Bruce Silverglade came on as a co-owner of the gym in 1982, he brought with him a commitment to furthering the gym’s efforts towards social inclusion and accessibility. While the gym had long been a multiethnic space, with trainers and fighters of all different nationalities, it lacked diversity along the lines of gender, class, and ability. It was a fighter’s gym, and had little room for those who didn’t fit neatly into the conventional model of amateur or professional boxing.

In 1983– a decade before USA Boxing (the amateur governing body) sanctioned women’s boxing– Bruce Silverglade started a women’s program at Gleason’s. Because there was only one locker room, Bruce convinced his business partner to close the gym early two nights a week to allow women to train. In 1987, when the gym moved to Brooklyn, there were enough women members to designate a separate locker room exclusively for them, and they integrated into the existing community. Under Bruce’s leadership, Gleason’s Gym pioneered a number of additional programs in support of even greater diversity at the gym, including a charity for under-resourced youth, free membership for veterans, and adaptive boxing classes for people with disabilities.

All of these initiatives aligned with my own interests in integration and accessibility. In 2017, I started a project called Trans Boxing, which initially consisted of a weekly group boxing class for trans and gender variant people. As the participation became more regular, a small community developed, and as it evolved, participants and supporters of the work contributed through collaborations, including a publication, various art exhibitions, a podcast, and workshops. Rather than a narrow reactionary focus on gender policing in sport, the project sought to find ways to explore the history, culture, and practice of boxing through a trans perspective.

When I approached Bruce about bringing the project into the gym, he was immediately enthusiastic. Feeling, as I did, that it was a natural extension of the kinds of programs Gleason’s had been supporting for over 50 years. Up until this point, Trans Boxing had – like the women’s program at Gleason’s–  held classes in gyms after-hours, as well as in parks, and community centers. Participation was casual, and people trained primarily for the sense of community and self-confidence it gave them.

This iteration of Trans Boxing at Gleason’s Gym demanded a greater commitment to integration within a much larger and more diverse context than the project had ever taken on before. It was also a huge step for me both personally and professionally. I was anxious, uncertain how I’d be received, asserting myself as a coach in such an impressive and historically significant gym.

As a fighter, I had little official experience, having only competed twice. My first fight was a “smoker”– which is an unsanctioned boxing match– on Coney Island hosted by the NYPD boxing team, where I faced a woman and NYPD officer who had formerly been a Puerto Rican national judo champion. My second fight was in the Daily News Golden Gloves tournament, where I fought an experienced fighter from the legendary Starrett City Boxing Club in the 112-pound female division. After that fight, an existing injury (a torn ligament in my wrist) worsened, requiring surgery and ending my competitive career in 2017. With competition off the table for the foreseeable future, I immediately began my medical transition, which included hormone replacement therapy followed by top surgery in 2018.

I continued to train at my home gym– the New Bed Stuy Boxing Center, and in 2020 when the gym closed as a result of the pandemic, a group of us trained with a coach from the gym at different parks in Brooklyn. The gifts of my transition revealed themselves to me most starkly through how I boxed. Aspirations I’d had for years as a fighter in terms of both ability and style, but also emotional maturity and mental attitude, started to fall into place on their own. I had more fun fighting, I felt loose and playful, and open to experimentation. The lack of emphasis on gender segregation also helped me to lean into boxing’s expressive potential, rather than its competitive aspects.

In those first couple of years, I often felt like an outsider: awkward, hyper-aware of myself and my fighters; our disruption of the status quo. There was a certain sense of fragility that, after a while, started to shift into a more solid recognition as the gym’s culture adapted to our presence, and me as a coach. I changed, too. I began to develop my own style and sensibility, and my enthusiasm and passion for coaching grew as I was able to invest more time and energy into building fighters.

Despite being ineligible to compete myself because of the restrictive policies for transgender athletes in both amateur and professional governing bodies, I had continued training and sparring. But in 2022, I discontinued a relationship with a longtime coach, due to numerous factors, but most notably his difficulty with my transition. It broke my heart to realize that what had once been a clumsy but loving awkwardness calcified into bitterness and anger.

Later that year was when I first saw Talap at the gym. It was a winter night; cold and already dark outside. Inside, it was fluorescently lit, humid, and loud, buzzing with the usual crowd. He was wearing an Adidas tracksuit and a fitted Yankees hat. He shadowed another coach, Leon, for the first couple of hours, and he didn’t smile or speak to anyone else. At first, I thought he might have been the father of one of Leon’s students, but he had a quiet professionalism and quality of attention that prompted me to introduce myself to him, extending my hand and asking, “Are you a coach?” He looked at me almost like he was surprised that someone saw him, and said, “I coach!” as he smiled and shook my hand.

We quickly became friendly with one another, greeting each other at the start and end of our shifts, and complementing one another’s training techniques and fighters. I found his personality to be incredibly earnest and kind, and started to really look forward to seeing him in the gym. As our friendship grew, we would take coffee breaks together, chat throughout the day, and walk together to the subway at night.

When he began to work with his own students, it was his intensity and passion that drew me to him further, as well as his training methods, which were in stark contrast to the other coaches. I started to train with him and his fighters a few days a week. Talap’s background is in soviet style boxing, which has dominated amateur boxing in the Olympics for decades. The highly technical and evasive style is more suited to tall, lanky boxers than to stocky pressure fighters, like me. But I was deeply curious about Talap’s approach and wanted to learn the principles myself so that I could properly teach components of the style to my students.

During sparring, he’d encourage me,

“Bro, your egg iron!” (By egg, he meant testicles.) “You really man!” “He scare-ed you!” He was confused, though, as to why I wasn’t competing in tournaments. “You crazy. You need fight, really fight. You need test your knowledge, your power.” 

I evaded his questions by telling him I had to take a medication that is prohibited. In the ring one day, he looked at me with a straight face and pointed to the two long faded scars on my chest, quietly asking, “What happen?” In our shared vernacular, I said, “I later explain.”

By this point, we had gotten to know one another more deeply and shared more about our personal lives and our respective histories. Talap told me stories of growing up in Kyrgyzstan, his amateur boxing career, studying Physical Culture at a university in St. Petersburg, and his family. He trained all five of his sons and would show me videos of their boxing and MMA competitions.

I was uncertain if Talap knew I was trans– and based on experiences I’d had with coaches in the past, I was anxious that when he found out, I’d lose the ease with which we related, or lose him completely. Talap’s influence had a profoundly positive impact on my abilities as a boxer and a coach, and his guidance and support gave me a new sense of self-confidence. Beyond that, though, he was one of the most vibrant people I’d ever met. In the weeks it took for me to work up the courage to tell him, I started crafting the letter carefully. I relished my time with him; bracing for it to end.

Instead, after I came out to him, our relationship deepened, and he embraced a partnership with me. We became a team in the gym, training our students alongside one another, taking them for runs on Brighton Beach, and working their corners together during competitions. I helped Talap register for his coaching certification. He was so happy, he grabbed my face and kissed me on the forehead.

Talap’s support has had a tremendous impact on the training of each one of my trans and non-binary fighters, and their sense of belonging in the gym. He trains my students with the same intensity he trains his own students. This past year, I prepared a transmasculine fighter of mine who competes in the women’s division for his first fight. Talap provided steady guidance, never once misgendered them, or interrogated us about their gender presentation, or eligibility.

I used to wonder why he chose to align himself with me and my students; to become a pillar of support for us, when he could have seemingly just as easily distanced himself. Later on, as we grew closer, my thinking shifted, as I thought about the connection between our perspectives. I think we saw ourselves in one another. Despite our differences in identity and background– me being trans and white, him being Asian and Muslim– we were both migrants.

Like “boxer” and “coach” the identity categories he and I occupy — immigrant and transgender — represent crossing boundaries, rejecting the limits of one’s original circumstances, and reaching towards a state unknown. These identities demand that an individual believe there is another possible reality, one categorically different from what the person knows, which is available, should the person have the audacity to claim it.

March 19th was a Wednesday. I remember watching the clock at the gym, calling him repeatedly, the horrible sound of his automated voicemail, checking his social media, praying for some activity. Every one of his fighters that arrived at the gym that day confirmed that no, they hadn’t heard from him. The next day, I found him through the online detainee locator system. He had been detained during a check-in with his immigration officer, something that had been a part of his regular routine for over two years.

He was initially detained at the Nassau County Jail. When I called, the officer barked at me, “No, you can’t talk to him. He’s being deported.” I asked him when, and he responded callously, “He might be getting loaded onto a plane right now.” A few hours later, he was transferred to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to the federal facility in Batavia. I took off time from work, and spent the next two weeks on the phone with lawyers and assistance groups. Finally, I found the lawyer who would eventually take his case.

I became Talap’s advocate on the outside, and I learned that he entered the US in 2019 after fleeing Russia, where he had faced decades of persecution and discrimination, and potential retribution and harm to his family. He was detained in Southern California for over a year before moving to Brooklyn in 2021. His lawyer worked to reopen his case, which the judge granted this past May, and his new hearing was scheduled for August 19th.

Shortly after he was detained, I visited Talap in Batavia. Through the thick glass, I looked at him as he sat slumped, the handset pressed against his cheek. I read him another letter, this time from one of his young boxers, a 15-year-old boy named Oscar. I noticed his body straighten and looked up from the paper to see him smiling, his big cheeks pushing up on his lower eyelids. He blinked and tears quickly fell as he said,

“This guy good. He smart. He strong. He grow up.” 

Later, another friend of his told me that when he called her that night, he said hearing Oscar’s letter made him feel like he had grown wings, and could fly over the fence that surrounds the jail.

Talap asked me to train his fighters while he’s away. “No shy. Call them. Tell them they need come training. If they no come this not correct.” Of his 20+ students, just a handful of dedicated fighters have remained at the gym in his absence.

The rest, I know, are waiting for him to return.

Support Talap Mamyrkanov.

Learn more about his case.

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