Both and Neither

A transgender and trans-genre exploration of life beyond the binary

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'This is a book about struggling to live as you are when there is no narrative for that person, no role to suit, no story for your story - and discovering that all along there was such a narrative, just never one you knew'

Far from being a recent phenomenon, there have been countless brilliant lives and diverse cultures who have 'transed' gender all along, from the Wild West to Vichy France, to myriad non-Western cultures. In BOTH AND NEITHER Alex Marzano-Lesnevich rewrites into history those who've transed gender in a series of indelible portraits, that run alongside their own personal journey of identity, from living as a woman to eschewing the binary entirely. By bringing to life characters from the past and creating, on the page, an eclectic cross-historical community of gender defiance, Alex writes into existence the very community - the very history - that they themselves need.

As they discover, the way we are seen is as crucial to identity as our own expression of it. In a contemporary expansion of gender, in a relentlessly binary culture like ours, how do you truly see and live beyond the binary? In BOTH AND NEITHER Alex proves the gender binary, which appears so concrete to us, to actually be a relatively recent construction. Alex's own testosterone-aided transition brings them to a place between - a new space of possibility - in a brilliantly interwoven text that, in interrogating the past, illuminates the future.