Learning Boyhood From a Dead Man

Content Warning: Death of Sibling

Pluto Rennie

I learned what boyhood looked like from my brother. Not as a set of direct rules, but by paying attention to how he moved through the world—how he stood, how he treated people, how he existed in his body. He was older than me, not in an authoritative way, but it was obvious early on that he moved through things with a casualness I didn’t yet have. 

My brother died in 2020. He was 23. When people say that, they usually mean to emphasise how young he was, which of course is true.  But I also hear something else: how complete he already felt. He had already lived through his really cool teenager era—leaning over the kitchen counter like the house belonged to him, smelling faintly of cigarettes 24/7, the Pixies bleeding tinny and insistent from his bedroom—and that mattered. 

I’m a trans masc lesbian, which means my relationship to boyhood has never been straightforward. It wasn’t something handed to me cleanly, or claimed without friction. Boyhood came to me sideways—filtered through observation and imitation, through watching someone I love move through masculinity without performing it too hard. My brother never seemed like he was trying to be a boy. He just was one (and man, was I jealous). 

As a teenager, he was effortlessly cool in a way that can’t be replicated. He wasn’t polished or ironic, and he didn’t seem like he was trying to prove anything. He wore clothes into the ground. Sagged his jeans to my mother’s horror. He had bad haircuts and bad facial hair that somehow worked. He moved like his body belonged to him—like it wasn’t something to apologise for. He would roll his eyes at my mum in exaggerated teenage annoyance, then smile at her the second he thought she wasn’t looking. Watching him, I learned that boyhood could be soft and harsh and stupid and sincere all at once. That it didn’t require dominance. That it didn’t require cruelty. 

He wasn’t macho. He wasn’t especially sentimental either. But he was loyal, he was curious, and he took up space without asking permission. That last part mattered to me more than I realised at the time. As a kid, I was already learning how to fold myself smaller. He was learning how to stretch out—on couches, in conversations, on his bedroom floor when he miraculously found his way home after drinking too much. He showed me that taking up space didn’t have to be violent. It could be casual. It could be natural. 

When I think about boyhood now, I don’t think about rules or aesthetics or even gender. I think about how my brother laughed with his whole body. How he trusted the world enough to be a bit reckless,—possibly too reckless, according to his car—the biggest casualty in his experiments in freedom. How he let himself be known. Boyhood, as he lived it, was a practice in ease. 

After he died, people talked to me about grief as if it were singular. As if I had lost one person, one relationship. But what I lost was also a future reference point. I lost the chance to keep learning from him. I lost the adult version of the boy who taught me how to be one. The one who would have shaved his beard, grown into his laugh, maybe learned how to cook something properly.

Coming into my own masculinity without him has felt like learning a language from a speaker who is no longer alive. I have the accent. I have the rhythms. But sometimes I’m missing the words. I find myself wondering what he would have thought of the person I am now. I suspect he would have understood more easily than most.

Being a trans masc lesbian means I carry boyhood differently. I don’t want it to erase my softness, my queerness, my attachment to womanhood. I want it to sit alongside them. That’s another thing my brother taught me, without meaning to: masculinity doesn’t have to cancel anything out. It can coexist. It can be generous. 

He grew up with me and our three other sisters. His boyhood was shaped in a house full of girls, which meant it was never entirely sealed off from softness, intimacy, or femininity. Being the only boy in the house didn’t make him distant or hardened. If anything, it made him attentive. At Christmas he bought my twin sister lip glosses, and me nail polishes—neon green and electric blue, the kind that stained the skin around your fingers. When the younger ones wanted to watch Paw Patrol, he sat down and watched it with them—the television too loud, the theme song repeating, no commentary, no complaints. He didn’t treat those things as beneath him. They were just part of growing up together. 

He never knew he was teaching me these things. He never knew that I was watching him as closely as I was, collecting gestures and attitudes like survival tools. But that’s how it works sometimes. We learn who we are by loving people who are already living pieces of us out loud. 

My brother was a really cool teenager. He grew into a young man who still carried that ease with him. And even now, even after his death, he remains one of my clearest guides. Not because he had answers, but because he showed me a way of being that felt possible. 

Boyhood, for me, is not something I mourn as lost or inaccessible. It’s something I inherited. It lives in the way I move through the world, a little less afraid of myself. It lives in the space I let myself take up. It lives in memory, yes—but also in practice. 

I am still learning. But I learned the most important part early, from my brother: that being a boy can mean being kind, empathetic, and free. That it can feel like home.