Non-Binary Lives, An Anthology of Intersecting Identities by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Barker, Kat Gupta

5 our of 5 🌟Confronting my cis-gender privilege

First things first: I don't feel I could ever rate someone's life story, hence I won't that. My review is based on the book's structure and how it made me feel while reading. All the testimonies in the book are real people's accounts and they are equally valid.

The book editing is excellent. The introduction includes an abundant explanation of terms used in the book and cultural context to all of them. The testimonies itself are divided into sections by themes like 'The Life Course' or 'Communities' to better grab the context. The editors have done an awesome job in explaining what being non-binary really means with all its various shades. Each of the narrations is different, some of them are more lyric and some more down-to-earth or including two or more people. The title consists of thirty distinct narrations overall and, like many short stories, I liked to read them separately with some time to reflect on each.

Non-binary is somehow new to me, I was raised in a country that doesn't even have its own word for being non-cis-gender (or cis-gender for that matter). As a consequence, my gender privilege was unbeknown to me for a long time. Many of the testimonies contained in 'Non-Binary Lives' described similar uprising but without that gender privilege. They are histories of solitude, fear, confusion, and struggle to belong somewhere. These are not feel-good stories by any means, even if they ended happy-ish. But these are stories that should be read to learn about life in all its forms as the narration often went way beyond gender and sexuality because being non-binary means different things to different people.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Jessica Kingsley Publishers for this digital copy.