Review: Non-Binary Lives
There are some books you read quickly, chaotically dog-earing pages with intention and urgency. And then there are books you read slowly, not because the language is dense, but because your own life keeps interrupting you.
Non-Binary Lives: An Anthology of Intersecting Identities, edited by Jos Twist, Ben Vincent, Meg-John Barker, and Kat Gupta, was very much, somehow both of these for me. I couldn’t put it down (nor my orange highlighter which did make a sacrifice for this book). It certainly wasn’t a book I wanted to “finish,” but one I wanted to sit beside. One that kept pulling memories out of me mid-paragraph, asking me to pause, stare into space, and quietly renegotiate how I understand myself.
Published in 2020, the anthology sets out with an ambitious but deeply necessary aim: to push the narrative around non-binary identities further than it has previously gone. Not by narrowing definitions or offering tidy explanations, but by doing something far more radical (in my opinion): showing breadth. Mess. Contradiction. Context. Humanity.
As the editors state clearly on, “Non-binary is varied unexpected unique non-binary is beautiful” (pg. 13). And the book lives up to that declaration, refusing to present non-binary identity as a single story, a checklist, or a performance that can be done “correctly.” Instead, it offers what feels like a room full of voices. Some loud, some tentative, some joyful, some grieving… but all equally real.
This essay is not a chapter-by-chapter review, nor a neat summary tied up with a clever bow. And that’s intentional.
This book deserves to be engaged with in pieces.
Non-Binary Lives is structured as a collection of essays, each rooted in deeply personal experience, shaped by culture, geography, community, bodies, health, language, and time. Trying to respond to it as a single, unified object felt (for me, anyway) like doing a disservice to its very premise. So instead, this piece serves as an overview: a grounding, a framing, a promise.
In the coming essays, I’ll be responding to individual sections, chapters, and ideas as standalone reflections. Not because my thoughts are neat or easily segmented (quite the opposite) but because this feels like the most honest way to hold complexity without flattening it.
One of the strongest through-lines of the book is its attention to storytelling. Not just the stories we tell others, but the ones we tell ourselves. Stories are how humans survive. How we understand who we are, where we belong, and where the edges of us begin and end. But they’re also how boundaries are built. Sometimes protective, sometimes painfully restrictive.
The editors write:
“There is no right or wrong way to be non-binary; that no one person or way of being is more legitimate than another; that we are all valid and real; and that our communities are more vibrant and nourished when they embrace the diversities within them.” (pg. 15)
That sentiment landed with weight for me. Not as a comforting affirmation (though it is that), but as a provocation. It made me ask questions I didn’t realise I’d been quietly carrying for years.
Is the way I speak to myself shaped my the discrimination I’ve faced?
By the trauma I’ve survived?
By the need to constantly justify my existence, even internally?
As someone who lives at the intersection of multiple identities (disabled, neurodivergent, bisexual, non-binary), this book didn’t just reflect me back to myself. It also made visible the gaps in my own reflection. I am not, though, a person of colour. I benefit from whiteness. I am also not culturally or linguistically diverse. While I exist within marginalised communities, I also move through the world with privileges that others in this anthology do not.
The book doesn’t let you ignore that. Nor should it.
One of the things I appreciated most about Non-Binary Lives is that it didn’t rush to answer everything. Instead, it left space for uncertainty and trusted the reader to sit with it. I found myself asking:
How do I refer to myself as a child?
If I’ve always been non-binary, something I believe to be tru, what does it mean that I was socialised as a girl until I was 24?
Am I “doing” my transgenderness correctly?
Is there enough room for me to exist, as I am, without explanation?
These are not questions I expect a book to solve. But they are questions I value being invited to ask. Reading the lived experiences of others, people navigating similar tensions, doubts, and negotiations, was unexpectedly liberating. Not because it erased my uncertainty, but rather it affirmed that uncertainty itself is not a failure of identity. It’s part of it.
This book is divided into four sections, each of which I’ll be engaging with more deeply in future essays:
Cultural Context: exploring how place, language, religion, spirituality, skin colour, and geography shape non-binary experience
Communities: focusing on belonging, visibility, safety, and exclusion
The Life Course: addressing age, time, parenting, and coming into non-binary identity later in life
Bodies, Health and Wellbeing: examining disability, mental health, neurodiversity, body size, and care
While I resonated most strongly with the final section (particularly where disability and mental health intersect with gender), I still found something to hold onto in every story. Even those far removed from my own lived experience offered recognition at a human level. And perhaps that’s the quiet triumph of this book. Not sameness, but connection.
