Non-Binary Life

Non-Binary Life is a call for thinking about the possibilities of life outside of, and irrespective of, gender. While it concerns a nonbinary person—the author— it is also much more than merely a plea for the broader social world to “accept” non-binariness as “valid.”

Instead, Marquis Bey offers the opportunity to refuse to have gender be something we carry for ourselves and others. What if, this book asks, we no longer let gender be a way of organizing ourselves? To write, to think, to imagine, to agitate, to tremor through relationality and spatiality without regard for gender is what might be called a nonbinary way of life.

In chapters that span the topics of pronouns, strategically enacting gender out of necessity, masculinity, love, family, language, and even the Redwood National Forest, Non-Binary Life provides a more robust and personal treatment of what it means to live with and as nonbinary. A foundational text for those interested in gender and trans studies, as well as memoir and autobiography, for it does not simply recount already-believed truths about nonbinary gender. Instead, Bey provides the first sustained treatment of nonbinary theory, of questioning gender and the gender binary from the perspective of nonbinariness.