None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary

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When Our Worlds Collided follows what happens to three teenagers from different walks of life after a 14-year-old called Shaq is stabbed outside a busy shopping centre in Manchester.

Alternately wry, witty and wounded . . . Alabanza has a crisp, contemporary writing style . . . Alabanza lifts the lid on our potential for empathy, alliance and complicity * * Irish Times * * So Travis, when did you know?” I think of other people I have heard speak about their moment of knowing, how they say their parents recall them crying whenever they were in the wrong clothing. I think of an article I read by another trans person speaking of the indescribable pain of knowing innately they were not in the body they were supposed to be, how their childhood was plagued with the consistent reminder of being told they were a gender they were not. And I draw a blank. I cannot pin this reality on to mine. Educational, illuminating and hilarious. Not only an empowering and enriching read for those that are treated like outsiders on this confusing and cluttered planet but a book that leaves readers with a far better understanding of issues that are faced’As well as a writer, Alabanza is also a performance artist, and in 2017 they became the youngest recipient of an artist residency at the Tate. Their debut show, Burgerz, won the Edinburgh fringe total theatre award in 2019. Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that,wishes to be feared and to be notorious (narcissistic supply) Truth is that rather than identify as she/her, he/she or they/them, most trans people identify as nothing but me/I.

Perhaps the kindest thing that can be said about None of the Above is that, despite attaining neither argumentative rigour nor enjoyably arty meandering, it occasionally hits on something that rings true. “I am trans because of you,” Alabanza declares, “not because of me.” That is, outliers such as Alabanza and Horn have been shoved to the margins by social categories that refuse to make room for them. Some are deceptively innocuous, some deliberately loaded or offensive, some celebratory; sentences that have impacted them for better and for worse; sentences that speak to the broader issues raised by a world that insists that gender must be a binary. One may sympathise with this dilemma while wondering whether a measure of pragmatism might not be in everyone’s interests. After all, it’s hard to see how we can accommodate those who experience every form of social meaning as violent impingement, short of abolishing all social meaning. And a culture stripped of both social meanings and the ability to think is no culture at all. Voice of the Fish enacts the least worst version of this perspective: radical subjectivism as an art form. By contrast, None of the Above is probably a more accurate reflection of what a politics of radical ambiguity means in practice, among those less literate than Horn: woolly thinking and self-absorption. Alabanza's memoir is separated into seven chapters, each with a phrase that has been directed at them throughout their life. As a gender-nonconforming, mixed-race person, Travis talks about their life and struggles from living in an estate town to being who they truly are in a binary-focused world. 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 authorTravis Alabanza: It feels like a trap that you can’t avoid. I actually started writing a completely different book which was information-heavy, instructive and modelled off Reni Eddo-Lodge [the author of Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race ] and Shon Faye [the author of The Transgender Issue ]. But then, after reading Shon’s book, which is so great, I thought, ‘oh it’s already been done, I don’t need to do this,’ and deleted the whole thing. Travis' book will challenge the reader to reflect on the ways we treat each other, pushing for a brighter future where gender structures aren't being weaponised in the ways they currently are’ 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.