Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity

I received an ARC through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The good:

This is a collection of personal life stories by people who identify as nonbinary in some way. These people are a variety of identities, races, ages and assigned genders, with different opinions on transition and identity. What I really liked was that many, if not most of them are over 30 (with several over 50) which really goes against the idea that being nonbinary is just something young people made up. Also, while it is addressed that female-assigned nonbinary people seem to dominate in discourses, this book itself has many male-assigned people telling their own stories.

All in all, I loved the diversity in both writing styles and in experiences. From a show more Chinese mother getting English gendered pronouns wrong to pole dancing and Buddhist retreats, this collection had a lot to think about, and many parts that resonated with me.

The bad:

The lives of marginalised people are rarely easy. The stories here discuss (other than the expected transphobia and cissexism) suicide attempts, self-harm, miscarriage, drugs, graphic death threats, and more. In the entire anthology, there are only two stories that have any kind of content warnings, both for sexual assault. While I am really glad that these warnings were there, I was annoyed by them because they showed that the editors know warnings are necessary - they just... apparently didn't think anything other than sexual assault qualifies as triggering enough? I really wish content warnings were normalised.

There was one story that was by the parent of a nonbinary teen. This was already a little strange (the perspectives of parents can be important, but having only one in a collection otherwise full of nonbinary voices made it same out of place), but what really bothered me was that there's a part where the parent describes in detail private conversations by the teen, and... there is really no indication of how they read those conversations? Did their child show them willingly, or did the parent go through their messages? I couldn't really get over that question, and the chapter in general left me feeling uncomfortable. I think the collection really could have stood without that one. show less

i think this was a decent enough read, but not especially moving or thought-provoking. some of the essays were really good and powerful and i will definitely be supporting the work of those authors in the future, but others were really, really bad. also, as a collection of memoir essays, it didn't feel very cohesive? which maybe makes sense because there seems to be a conscious effort to include as many diverse voices as possible, but that also means that the editors compromise its quality a bit. honestly, even with the essays in this collection as they were, i think they could've done a better job of putting it together.