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. Alabanza’s book has a reflective quality that touches the heart and engages the mind,” said judge Anthony Vahni Capildeo. “It feels like being invited into someone’s interiority.”

I needed to write this book because I want to tell my own narrative rather than let everyone fill in the blanks,” Alabanza said. “And I think when an award like this happens for trans people, it just continues to show that there are more people wanting to celebrate us than not.”Unsurprisingly, then, both authors are ambivalent about boundaries and solidity: in other words, about their physical selves. Alabanza self-describes as feeling “like an imposter [sic] in my body”, elsewhere referring to “my body and its desires” as though these are wholly independent entities. And Voice of the Fish thrums with the tension between Horn’s sensual descriptions of the world, and dissociated, disembodied account of selfhood. In the 70s and 8s you could be a man and wear your hair long, and wear make up and no one wondered if they had changed gender. Hair bands, Goths… Yes, and the relevance of which we have yet to come to grips with. I daresay this is a long-term trend. Victorian children were put to work in all sorts of iniquitous circumstances. My own mother started work in a cotton mill at the age of 14. Teenagers weren’t ‘invented’ till after WW2.

My gender looks and feels so different when I’m not trying to persuade anyone else, when I’m not trying to make myself legible for others or worried about being misgendered” – Travis Alabanza Pursuing the endless goal of perfect equality, left wing liberalism has become its own carcinogen. By providing preferential treatment to those with recognised protected characteristics, it incentivises an endless multiplication of identities, each demanding the power of the state is used to rescue it from its oppression. If the political left has come to believe that future of the modern state is as a kind of identerian Leviathan, then non-binary identities actually threaten to become a kind of Russell’s Paradox at its heart, an identity, which is not an identity, and so collapses identities into a subjective, ungovernable morass, as hard categories are replaced with spectra of subjective feelings, which are impossible to ground political power in.

Speakers

Praise for Travis Alabanza: Humane and heart-rending . . . Alabanza is sassy and witty * * Guardian * * Or if it is a phase someone will eventually move on from, then we can sometimes afford it grace, too. Yet if there is a permanence to it – a declaration that the gender nonconformity is intentional and refuses to go away – then there is a problem. If it is not used as the gag, punchline or reveal, but is in fact here to stay, then the facade of acceptability ruptures. The younger me playing the witch in the school panto was applauded while on stage, yet I know that if I had worn that outfit on the streets I would have been punished. Brilliant . . . This is a book which everyone can learn from, whether you’re a cis person who hasn’t yet interrogated how your options are shut down or any flavour of trans person pushed towards trying to be less visible but maybe less of yourself for having the options stolen away’ 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 author

Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that,wishes to be feared and to be notorious (narcissistic supply) Travis will talk to Reni Eddo-Lodge, the award-winning author of Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. Live from the British Library. You can enjoy this event with others gathered in local libraries in Rugby and Norwich. 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.Still, I guess some women long to be men, and men who long to be woman, and others who just despair and want their despair known.

Absolutely stunning . . . Travis is one of the sharpest writers out there and everyone should read this book’ IONE GAMBLE That’s why the last chapter is titled This Is For Us Baby, Not For Them . I’m trying to ask, ‘What would transness feel like if we just stopped reacting? Is it possible? Can we do it for a brief moment?’ My gender looks and feels so different when I’m not trying to persuade anyone else when I’m not trying to make myself legible to others or worried about being misgendered, and instead asking what I’m actually feeling on the inside . That feels much more reminiscent of when I was younger: I’ve been out as [trans] for almost ten years, and I was way freer about it at the beginning, which is not the trajectory you might expect. But during the time I was writing the book, my relationship with my gender was stifled. And I think that can only be the result of this climate. The rich, white donor lady leans in. She nods, as if to say, go on, don’t stop, tell me, how exactly you know.

None of the Above is more than a breath of fresh air. It’s a prison break, a revolt, a wild thumb in the eye of a carceral gender system that tries to bind our flesh into rigid and ranked categories.” —Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution JG: The book contains some harrowing descriptions of the violence and harassment which you experience regularly. What is it about gender non-conformity which makes people so angry? None of the Above is a well-crafted and considered work of literature . . . [Alabanza's] analysis of how gender is experienced in the world is nuanced, ambiguous and often unexpected in its conclusions. The book is also very funny’ Surely this was how I knew? If I were telling this story at a dinner party, in response to another person asking me the question yet again, I would receive full marks for this one. There are the clear signifiers that link this story to the mainstream perception of trans identity, particularly those of us assigned male at birth: the high-heeled shoe and the performative nature of the song effortlessly blends with the public imagination of how all transfeminine people discover our gender. Blended with the quirkiness of a hunky German lodger, this story, when told right, often results in a sea of smiles, unthreatened nods and a calmness washing over the room. A calmness that is specific to liberal cisgender people feeling comfortable again because they have you all figured out. Travis Alabanza writes about gender and its possibilities with such generosity and ease even the most provocative suggestions start to seem obvious, despite their challenges to society at large. This anti-memoir, which is at times both profound and funny, will make anyone question the stories we tell about ourselves, how we tell them and even who the telling is for’