NONE OF THE ABOVE

An exploration of the potential of transcendent identities.

Alabanza, a well-known trans author and performer based in the U.K., structures this memoir around seven impactful phrases spoken to them over the course of their life. The author then unpacks the phrases to show profound personal and social implications. In the chapter titled “This ain’t a thing we do round here, son,” Alabanza examines their experiences of society’s typically aggressive (and sometimes violent) policing of gender as well as how gendered and racialized discrimination can intersect. The author frankly and wittily charts their struggles to conceptualize and find acceptance for a sense of self that does not conform to social expectations about gender binaries. They argue that fixed notions of gender may be fiercely defended, but loosening that fixity promises liberation for all of us. Throughout the book, Alabanza skillfully handles the mix of personal anecdote and philosophical reflection. Their frank confessions of anxiety and lingering uncertainty about the shifting coordinates of their gendered identity are especially refreshing and appropriate given the underlying argument about the fluidity of all notions of selfhood. “To be gender nonconforming and feminine,” they write, “or to be trans—or, to put it plainly, to look like someone the world calls a man in a dress—is to know intimately that the world is chaotic, unsettling, and does not make sense….It does not make sense for people to be afraid of others who have never hurt them, yet they continue to be.” Among the most insightful passages are those in which the author points out how commitments to rigid categorization and hierarchical thinking inform both race and gender prejudices: “Whiteness and the gender binary feel like the same virus.” Alabanza presents a promising alternative to such pathologies in their celebration of more flexible modes of being in our private and public worlds.

A bold, astute consideration of the challenges—and vital potential—of living outside normative categories.