None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

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For Alabanza, this sense of disembodiment is everyone else’s fault, for inflicting the arbitrary “gender binary” upon the world. Horn’s account of growing up offers richer and stranger possibilities, recounting childhood with a heavy-drinking, indebted mother, a fine artist who called Horn’s school projects ‘bits of twonky shite’ and used her child, from an early age, as the model for her work:

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. I guess my way of avoiding the trap – although can you really? Who knows – is that i n this book I am interrogating myself, and I would be doing that anyway, whether or not there was a culture war happening . I still would be asking these questions even if no one else was around. Everything has to revolve around them, their likes and their dislikes, which is sad, although it does mean we always have something to talk about … them. 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’Arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes coupled with rage when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted Unfortunately, though, None of the Above doesn’t stop there, but attempts to theorise each personal anecdote to make wider points about “life beyond the binary”: for example, whether or not there’s such a thing as “proper” trans, or how such identities interact with race and class. And once away from personal stories, the prose is relentlessly awkward. Modern political thought has disappeared down the postmodernism rabbit hole but has forgotten that postmodern white rabbit, does not believe in identity itself. Travis Alabanza is one of the most talented storytellers of a generation. None of the Above is potent, engaging, hilarious, and beautiful, just like Travis.” —Jonathan Van Ness, Emmy-nominated host of Queer Eye and New York Times best-selling author

Our German lodger, Hangwolf, primarily there to pay our food bills, developed into a brief but important and loving figure in the house: a tall, statuesque man who fitted into the structure of our unit, almost as if there was a gap left by a father, still warm for Hangwolf to walk into. The writing in this memoir is truly remarkable and life-changing. Travis gives us room to question the society we live in where gender has been so structured up to the point that it is difficult to navigate a safe and comfortable world if you don't identify as 'male' or 'female'. Hangwolf, you have to introduce me with the name of the song I’m singing; you can’t just say my name!” I said offstage (which at this point in my life meant the living room). 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.Unsurprisingly, then, both authors are ambivalent about boundaries and solidity: in other words, about their physical selves. Alabanza self-describes as feeling “like an imposter [sic] in my body”, elsewhere referring to “my body and its desires” as though these are wholly independent entities. And Voice of the Fish thrums with the tension between Horn’s sensual descriptions of the world, and dissociated, disembodied account of selfhood. All upcoming public events are going ahead as planned and you can find more information on our events blog I needed to write this book because I want to tell my own narrative rather than let everyone fill in the blanks,” Alabanza said. “And I think when an award like this happens for trans people, it just continues to show that there are more people wanting to celebrate us than not.” Listen to it. Read it. Learn from it. Share it with your friends, your family, your teachers, your community. Or if it is a phase someone will eventually move on from, then we can sometimes afford it grace, too. Yet if there is a permanence to it – a declaration that the gender nonconformity is intentional and refuses to go away – then there is a problem. If it is not used as the gag, punchline or reveal, but is in fact here to stay, then the facade of acceptability ruptures. The younger me playing the witch in the school panto was applauded while on stage, yet I know that if I had worn that outfit on the streets I would have been punished.