Can you really be non-binary?
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Everyone, it seems, has had enough of the boring old binary; non-binary people are having a moment. Celebrities are embracing “they/them” pronouns in droves; non-binary fashion lines are springing up like mushrooms; authors are riding the wave.
Two new books aim to give a flavour of what it’s like to be non-binary. None of the Above, by performer Travis Alabanza, offers “Reflections from Life Beyond the Binary”. And Voice of the Fish is a “lyrical essay” that combines scrapbook-like quotes with autobiographical fragments and free-associative prose, to convey something of author Lars Horn’s self-experience.
In one sense, the books are starkly different: Horn is a skilled writer, while Alabanza is mediocre at best. But they share a number of common features — most strikingly, a distinctive blurriness. It’s an intentional feature of Horn’s writing, and in Alabanza’s case probably more a function of bad style. But these differing types of incoherence — intentional and unintentional — reflect the wider political implications of “non-binary”, inviting questions about just how far this idea can really be carried.
Both are, crucially, books about being misfits. Alabanza describes (with characteristic clunkiness) a “lack of ability to fit into the boxes they are trying to place you in”. Mercifully more succinct, Horn echoes this: “I did not fit.” For the latter, who self-describes as “Nonbinary, transmasculine”, gender isn’t easily categorised but “unseen, unintelligible”: “I sense myself as movement. As lake or late-night radio. As a thing that feels weighted, finds it hard to rise, break surface.”
Both writers express the same longing to inhabit the world in a more fluid, protean and self-created way. Water, swimming, tides, sea-life and blurring physically at the edges are recurring themes in Voice of the Fish, and Alabanza employs a similar aquatic metaphor: “A body of water, potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.”
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