None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

Product Information

One may sympathise with this dilemma while wondering whether a measure of pragmatism might not be in everyone’s interests. After all, it’s hard to see how we can accommodate those who experience every form of social meaning as violent impingement, short of abolishing all social meaning. And a culture stripped of both social meanings and the ability to think is no culture at all. Voice of the Fish enacts the least worst version of this perspective: radical subjectivism as an art form. By contrast, None of the Above is probably a more accurate reflection of what a politics of radical ambiguity means in practice, among those less literate than Horn: woolly thinking and self-absorption.

I opened my mouth, aged three, and said: ‘Doctor, I am actually a cross-dressing, gender-nonconforming deviant.’ And that is how we all knew something was different about me.” Travis Alabanza is] a big voice in multiple intersecting communities . . . This is a book that is supposed to make other people feel seen, heard and help them understand themselves. It's brilliant’ This is a deeply personal memoir that truly connected with me and makes me want to do whatever I can to make the world we live in more acceptable and kind to everyone no matter their gender, race, identity...etc. I have struggled with my identity all of my life and there was one particular quote that hit so close to home that I had to consider who I was trying to satisfy with my answer, myself or the people around me who won't stray from the binary. Six years on, I still do understand what my friend meant. Her “traditional” means a gender recognisable by the state (ie male or female), and the untraditional are those of us who are non-binary. Her word “proper” is actually doing some heavy lifting, where “proper” means going from one distinguishable gender to the other (or at least looking like you are trying to do that in their eyes). A part of me wonders if here, for my friend, the “proper” also meant commitment.I think of some of the people I have met who say 'My pronouns are she/they,' and when you ask which they prefer, they say, 'Always they, I actually only want they, I just want to be less difficult.'" TA: You could gather ten non-binary people walking down a street and they would all experience gendered violence differently depending on how they are presenting . So it’s not an effective way to talk about violence and support. I’ve also been getting frustrated with the way ‘non-binary’ is being turned into a third gender, and its cooption by the state and the media. Even fighting for a non-binary marker on a passport feels like another way to contain what was, for me, something that couldn’t be contained . None of the Above is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a prison break, a revolt, a wild thumb in the eye of a carceral gender system that tries to bind our flesh into rigid and ranked categories.” —Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution

That’s why the last chapter is titled This Is For Us Baby, Not For Them . I’m trying to ask, ‘What would transness feel like if we just stopped reacting? Is it possible? Can we do it for a brief moment?’ My gender looks and feels so different when I’m not trying to persuade anyone else when I’m not trying to make myself legible to others or worried about being misgendered, and instead asking what I’m actually feeling on the inside . That feels much more reminiscent of when I was younger: I’ve been out as [trans] for almost ten years, and I was way freer about it at the beginning, which is not the trajectory you might expect. But during the time I was writing the book, my relationship with my gender was stifled. And I think that can only be the result of this climate.When I was 16 and met the first person who said ‘I’m not male or female’, that was mind-blowing. It felt so punk” – Travis Alabanza Feels entitled. Expects unreasonable or special and favorable priority treatment. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her expectations In my friend’s directness, I gain a clarity about experiences that were dealt me with greater sleight of hand. My friend’s “But I mean proper trans” in the middle of a south London pub becomes the moment a hairstylist on a job told me, unprompted, that my wig “would suit my face more if I shaved”. Now when I hear “But I mean proper trans”, I think of the countless men who have told me, unprompted, that if I “made more effort to be convincing” then they would sleep with me. I decide instead that today I will try to say what I think, even if I have not fully figured it out But as I write this, nothing about the memory feels like a knowing. “Knowing” should feel like the remaining jigsaw piece, found after months and months of searching for it, slotting into place. No moment I can pinpoint reveals an innate knowing of my transness; rather, each is just another example of how I am responded to by the outside world. Still, I guess some women long to be men, and men who long to be woman, and others who just despair and want their despair known.