A review by camillatd
None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary by Travis Alabanza

emotional hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

NONE OF THE ABOVE is a book about the radical power of uncertainty and the disruption of binaries. It’s about transness as freedom and exploration. Alabanza doesn’t shy away from the thorny questions about gender: they embrace them, dance with them, untangle them with care and curiosity. I’ve been thinking about this book in conversation with The Transgender Issue (by Shon Faye) a lot. TGI does a great job explaining the politics of trans liberation in an accessible, persuasive, and compelling way. It executes what it sets out to do perfectly: laying out a clear case for trans liberation and its alignment with other struggles of oppressed peoples. 

But I want everyone who read TGI to read NOTA, and sit with the uncertainty. TGI is an urgent, well-argued case for trans liberation that stands on firm ground. NOTA is a boat out to sea, shifting with the tides of gender in all its unruly waves, destabilizing all of our conceptions about transness. We have to hold room for both. I want the certainty of fighting for liberation to not be contingent on the certainty of transness as legible to cishet audiences. I loved both of these books, and I’m still wrestling with all of their wisdoms.
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