None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

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Despite how many times I have had to withstand questioning about when exactly I knew, I still wish I could pinpoint an answer that felt honest, even if just for the rare time it is asked from a place of safety and comfort; even if it is just so I know myself. Sometimes I wish for the more out and out, retro bigotry – at least then I know where I stand 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 . Yes, and the relevance of which we have yet to come to grips with. I daresay this is a long-term trend. Victorian children were put to work in all sorts of iniquitous circumstances. My own mother started work in a cotton mill at the age of 14. Teenagers weren’t ‘invented’ till after WW2.

I am grateful for my body, for how it moves me through the world, but I do experience it as distance, as transient shell that I will walk out of in the same way I walked in. I identify with the gazes put upon it. Their exteriority. To look at myself more than as myself. To experience oneself from within, but, also, crucially, from without.” The book is also very funny. There’s a humorous account of them winding up a wealthy donor at a charity function – who demanded ‘so, when did you first know?’ – by spinning an elaborate and at first plausible yarn, which ends with a three-year-old Alabanza visiting a doctor and saying their first words: “Doctor, I am actually a cross-dressing, gender non-conforming deviant.” Their interlocutor didn’t find this quite so amusing. is reviewed between 08.30 to 16.30 Monday to Friday. We're experiencing a high volume of enquiries so it may take us

None of the Above] is timely and timeless, courageous as well as meticulously crafted.” —Sunny Singh, director of the Jhalak Prize verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ TA: The thing is, I got made into a talking head – that was never my career goal. Realising that I don’t need to be sanitised or respectable was so liberating. I can reject this imaginary voice that says, ‘I shouldn’t say this in public because I need to be representing this, this and this.’ No, I don’t. When I started to gain a small public platform, my friends didn’t recognise me as that person: they were like, ‘bitch, you’re so rude and jokey in real life, and this feels like a CBBC version of yourself.’ The pandemic made me stop and realise that I didn’t want to do that anymore. [And in terms of how transphobes might react], it doesn’t make a difference. I had this realisation, ‘bitch, they think you’re a freak either way.’ I want to go to work and have fun.

Praise for Travis Alabanza: Humane and heart-rending . . . Alabanza is sassy and witty * * Guardian * * A breath of fresh air . . . Anyone expecting a hand-holding guidebook will be disappointed by the candour, complexity and subjectivity of None of the Above. There's no memoir like it published in the UK . . . Alabanza's memoir offers welcome nuance to those willing to listen’

Advance Praise

When someone refers to me as a “he” in passing I have to remind myself they could possibly be talking about me’ Modern political thought has disappeared down the postmodernism rabbit hole but has forgotten that postmodern white rabbit, does not believe in identity itself. I once replied to a casting director: “When I played a witch in a school play; I was 13.” He nodded, as if that was an answer that made sense to him, so he could move on. He looked at the figure in front of him, saw the shadow poking through my jaw, and could draw the lines of where a witch once was, or could be. No one has to conform to socially constructed stereotypes, but every mammal is either male or female and cannot change from one to the other. Mammals are sexually dimorphic because that is how they reproduce. Sex-defined behaviours are all around mating, reproduction and the protection of young, and are apparent in all species. Behaviours that only humans have invented – wearing clothes, doing specific jobs, adopting or giving names, playing with toys or at sports – are all artificial social constructs and have no relation to sex. Anyone can do any of them but it doesn’t make them the other sex or ‘non-binary’.

Absolutely stunning . . . Travis is one of the sharpest writers out there and everyone should read this book’ IONE GAMBLEI also think it’s too early to pass any kind of lucid judgment on this process, including whether it’s a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing. At this moment in history, when we’re starting to gain a foothold on some kind of perspective, all we can do is pass our own individual judgments in comparison with our own experiences. But to add, that those experiences didn’t lead to a particularly coherent society, or a peaceful one either! There are the plastic, trout-pout, highly-styled bio females out there who live for selfie posing, but not a large percentage. Yet those who feel a need to become a new woman-identified gender aspire to this sort of femininity, exclusively. I suppose it is the need to feel this Uber-feminine femininity makes the difference to go under the knife. And women who want to take off their shirts in public and have male privilege, or other delights.