You could republish this book as “Chicken Soup for the Non-binary Soul” and it would fit in just fine. I mean this in the sense that it’s a collection of many very short memoir-essays arranged by theme and primarily (it seems) with the intended audience of people in the same group as the authors (in this case, nonbinary people). Just like all of the Chicken Soup books are.
Some of the stories are sad. Some are about different experiences of nonbinary pain. Some are about pain not directly related to gender (one takes place during an actual coup). But some are not sad. Many of them are full of joy and peace (one is about someone who literally studies the path of Zen). One— and only one— is by someone who is not non-binary— a mother of an agender teenager, speaking from her perspective about her child’s gender journey and the choices she made as a parent along the way. I enjoyed reading that one, but I’m not really sure why it was in this book. It seemed to have a totally different audience than the rest of the pieces/didn’t seem to belong. I hope the mom wrote it with her child’s permission. There’s also a lot of loneliness in the pages— I think specifically of one person in their 50s who said they’ve never met another nonbinary person older than 25, and don’t know any other amab nonbinary people at all.
Several of the writers say they didn’t discover the term genderqueer until the 1990s on online message boards, and one of the editors of the book (who is one of many people who independently invented the term around the same time) said that while they first used it about themselves around that time, they didn’t see the word catch on until much later. So, it makes sense that most genderqueer people are young— the term was just beginning to be used when we were born.
Another word I think of in relation to this book is “gender diversity.” I think it’s easy for this word to feel empty for cis people, for us to take it as really just meaning “men and women and binary trans people and nonbinary people” — 4 categories. But this collection really illustrates just how much diversity there can be within “non-binary.” Particularly, as several of the writers note, the word “non-binary” says nothing about what people are, only what they are not.
Some people use he/him or she/her. Some people use they/them or ze/hir. Some people use gender neutral pronouns but still like terms like Mommy and Daddy and being “one of the girls” or “one of the boys.” Some people do not. One person, whose story is unlike any other that I’ve heard before, says he still feels male internally even though he has been happily living as a woman for several years. He says this is because he transitioned later in life, after decades of being a father and husband. He also says that unlike the trans women he knows, he’s never felt like he IS a woman on the inside, only that he WISHES he could be a woman. So he describes himself as a male who lives as a woman, even though such a description would be incredibly offensive to other people.
I also learned about the many different ways that nonbinary people may and do choose to transition. I knew already that some nonbinary people take low doses of HRT to achieve some changes but not others. But there’s so many (basically infinite) combinations of things people may want to do. Some people change their names, some don’t. Some people use new pronouns, some don’t. Some people get top surgery or bottom surgery (and this is already misleading, because there are lots of DIFFERENT top surgeries and bottom surgeries people can get!). Some people use hormones, or low doses, or only sometimes, or they do for awhile and then don’t, or not at all. One author has a friend who they say describes herself as “female to male to female” transgender, not because she regretted transitioning, but because her gender identity changed over time. Like, I knew that there can be as many genders as there are people in the world. But this collection really helped me understand exactly what that means, or can mean.
Separately, all of the mentions of discovering terms (like genderqueer) and learning about gender diversity online through forums and YouTube videos made me think about the importance of Tumblr to the LGBTQ+ community during the first part of the 2010s. This was the place to go to learn about identity and history. And there was a lot of misinformation too. Now, millennials on Twitter often bemoan the Gen Zers on the platform who are rehashing the same fights and “discourse” (I put this in quotes because in this context it means something slightly different than in the academic sense) on Twitter as we did on Tumblr 10 years ago. Now, people don’t need to go to the library to get information about their identities, but getting information is a lot messier, even if the information is more plentiful.
Tumblr is also, maybe not the origin but certainly the place of proliferation, of “microlabels” that people make fun of a lot. Like “poly pangender biromantic demiheterosexual” (I’m only kind of exaggerating). When I was younger, I was dismissive of people who identified themselves like this. Now, I think it’s a bit more complicated. First, people can identify however they want. Second, just like Sedgwick says in Epistemology of the Closet, defining sexuality primarily around hetero/homo doesn’t have to be the way to do it. She lists many other dimensions of sexuality that we could use for our social categorizing. So, words like these are attempts at describing/categorizing those other things, and they seem silly because as a society we aren’t used to that. On the other hand, LGBT and queer identities are sociopolitical categories that have been in part imposed upon us (by the medical establishment, for example) but are also embraced for political and community purposes. One of the reasons “queer” caught on was because it’s one umbrella term (and anti-normative)— the more people you organize under one banner, the more power you have. So, microlabels diffuse political power instead of collect it. And laws/prejudices/discrimination don’t happen along those hyperspecific lines. They happen along the lines of “this category, that category, or can’t categorize.” But then again, it also seems good for young people to have such a specific awareness of their desires and feelings, even if those feelings change over time. This doesn’t really have anything to do with the book.
But it does remind me of one author who said they don’t consider themselves binary but also don’t consider themselves non-binary, and they reject the term non-binary because to them it connotes upper middle class, white, urban, afab people who present masculine. And that is not them, and they don’t want to be lumped in with them. So, even while “non-binary” is meant to have lots of space as a term, there’s certainly very specific images that come to mind for it, and non-binary folks who don’t match those expectations are unseen/more frequently misgendered (although all nonbinary folks get misgendered a lot).