At 16, I realised that my gender was more complex than the one I’d been assigned at birth. As an avid reader and writer, I turned to books for answers, but found them wanting.

In the 2010s, mainstream publishing houses weren’t prioritising or platforming the nuanced and realistic stories of gender and self-discovery I craved.

There were some novels I enjoyed, but they weren’t aligned with my exact fears or joys about gender non-conformity. And, as is my experience working as a children’s bookseller, this is often what teens crave in books: a mirror, something that tells them they aren’t alone.

Although there are still barriers to diverse voices and representations in literature – we are often spoken about, spoken for, or spoken over – there is now a growing wealth of non-binary literature by and for non-binary people. There are stories for those of all ages, particularly autobiographical forms such as memoir, essay, poetry and graphic works.

Through metaphor and object writing, authors align their bodies with the world, and provide a tender, rigorous and compelling landscape of queer identity.

As I read their works, I see the bodies of my queer loved ones, my body, my teenage body which I tried so hard to understand, represented within the pages. These stories sit within a budding literary archive, a cacophony of selfhood.

The non-binary body as an (art)efact: Rae White

Poet Rae White considers the non-binary body as an object, and does so beautifully, with an interrogative eye turned towards a society hellbent on categorisation. In their collection, Exactly as I Am, White explores the non-binary body as an object situated within everyday places that are rendered complex (by others) such as bathrooms, changerooms, transport and airports.

They write of popping pimples, colliding with lovers, sailing in fleshy waters. There is a sense that the poet is behind museum glass, observed, preserved, sometimes in admiration, but also never out of the watchful eye of others. This objectification runs the risk of stunting growth or the fluidity of movement – key tenets of my own queer identity.

In a poem on felling trees, White writes:

if eviction’s in moratorium, then does private

equal public? And what might it mean to grow

autonomy?

Private and public discourse on the growth and autonomy of the non-binary body is part of what shapes self-expression and self-understanding, as well as confining or reducing it.

White’s words both illustrate these constraints and exemplify the capacity for writing to help us move beyond them. Like me, White states that they searched books for answers as a baby queer: “Back in my day I was still searching the mobile library shelves for books and words that described who I was”.

In this work, they create those words and meanings themselves, and offer them to readers like me as potential building blocks or tools for our own self-understanding.

In their final poem of the collection, ‘I am myself’, White writes that they are “not just the in between / but the fluidity / the change / and the motion / of motion”. The non-binary body is not just an object or piece of art, it is the museum itself, collecting and changing exhibits and meaning, ever moving.

I am reminded that although I am marked by my past in scars, freckles, and lines on my skin, my identity is also beautifully fragmented, and there is always space for something new.

The non-binary body as a stray cat: Erin Riley

Erin Riley’s deeply moving memoir-in-essays A Real Piece of Work spans everything from social work to professional wrestling, to family conflict, to community care.

In an essay titled ‘Cat Man’, Riley writes of a wandering cat who roams their neighbourhood, enters their periphery frequently, but keeps a distance. The cat becomes known to the apartment block, particularly one man who goes the extra mile for the cat, setting up a tent and leaving food out. Riley calls it a “beautiful act of love”. It is an uneasy alliance on the cat’s part, but a vital one.

Although Riley perhaps didn’t intend this essay to be read with such literal anthropomorphism, as a die-hard cat person I couldn’t help but identify with the stray.

We are freaks, feral, thrown into circumstances not of our own making, at the mercy of a world not built for us. To be different from the norm, to be queer, is to be at the mercy of systems and cultures which are not always welcoming and can even be violent.

We rely on community, connection and the kindness of others, while also living in the fallout of kindness lost. I have lost friendships and strained family relationships due to my identity, as Riley has too. This kind of ostracism is sometimes lonely and sometimes builds resilience.

Perhaps Riley did intend the literal reading, as the stray cat and its loving human counterpart encapsulate this paradox perfectly.

I personally form close bonds with those who understand my raggedness, who understand that I am at once fiercely independent and in need of communal care. Throughout this work, Riley deftly threads the plight of all people, all beings, to our capacity to care for one another, and it feels especially true for non-binary people.

The non-binary body as an ocean: Travis Alabanza

I had a natural affinity for the ocean as a child, just as I had a healthy fear of it. I felt that with a name like Marina I should – and could – speak to the ocean, it could understand me, and I it.

Home was salt on my skin, sand in my hair, ice cream dripping down my arms, seagulls overhead. As an adult, I often head to the ocean when I not only need to be alone but need to be with myself. In None of the Above: Reflections on Life Beyond the Binary, Travis Alabanza does the same:

I often get asked what my gender feels like,

and I want to say: it is more like, what do I wish it could feel like?

I wish it could feel like this moment.

Like it does not have a beginning or an end.

That you cannot see where it starts or stops. 

… 

That it is a vast space of nothingness in one wave, and holds so much in the next.

Sometimes I stand by the edge of where the ocean meets the beach, and look out into the sea, so I can feel like something that does not have an end.

The shore holds conformity, the ocean endlessness. Identity breaks in foamy waves that contain a “vast space of nothingness” and then hold “so much in the next”.  Fluidity, movement, and duality emerge once more as lenses for understanding queer identity and experience.

However, a non-binary self is, in Alabanza’s words, “a body of water, [with] potential to do so much, yet eventually bottled.” While other people can enable our self-exploration, they can also stunt or block growth and authenticity. Alabanza writes of a friend who let slip in a pub conversation one day that they didn’t see Travis as being “proper trans”.

This echoes my teenage experience where a (thankfully now former) friend told me that coming out – or even using they/them pronouns privately – would be “taking the spotlight from actual trans people”. I decided this response meant I should keep my gender identity to myself.

This is something I’m still unlearning. Alabanza’s work helps.

Alabanza unpacks the idea of being proper, and the converse of improper: the latter being “not a consistent measure – it is always a conditional acceptance, one that they can revoke at any time”. And while we can’t control the perspective and persecution applied by others, we can turn back to the oceanic metaphor to remind ourselves of our vastness, the way we contain multitudes.

Water is not good or bad, proper or improper; it is life, death, giving, taking. Water comes in waves, just like our identities.

The non-binary body as a seed: Maia Kobabe

“Was I a gay boy trapped in a girl’s body?” Maia Kobabe writes in their award-winning (and relentlessly banned) graphic memoir Gender Queer, “The knowledge of a third option slept like a seed under the soil.”

Seeds need to be nurtured, and watered, to undergo change. They are invisible perhaps to all else but the one who waters them, who knows that something will one day emerge.

Seeds are objects in transition – they will inevitably change and grow. This image is one I would’ve cherished as a young person who had been rejected by peers when attempting to express their identity. Instead, I filled pages and pages of my diary and wrote poetry, reaching for the words I knew must be out there, reaching for myself.

I wrote a poem where I tried to imagine myself beyond the word “girl”. I wrote my body as a floating thing, genderless. I wrote the colour of my eyes, the shape of my chest, the way I dipped the edges of books in the bath by accident. I wrote of wind-pink cheeks, a berry-red tongue, my soft chin. I didn’t show the poem to anyone.

My seed was buried deep, but it was slowly growing. Kobabe writes that, in their case, the seed “put out many leaves but [they] didn’t have the language to identify the plant”. They journalled their confusion and gender exploration during adolescence in order to find language and comprehension, just as I did.

The language of selfhood comes through literature, through writing and reading as an act of exploration, through tending to ourselves as if we were a sapling. Even and especially in the face of bigoted attempts at erasure, emerging into a non-binary self is like reaching for sunlight. It takes energy, requires care, and is beautiful. Its journey can be captured in words.

The non-binary body as anything and everything

In my own writings (from private journals to public-facing works), my non-binary body claims its own metaphors. It is a thunderstorm, a game of Scrabble. It is sunburned skin, rustling fabric, a cardboard box, a mosh pit.

My non-binary body is a part of the world and my only way of experiencing the world.

I am able to observe myself, write myself, create myself through and beyond gender because I am empowered and inspired by the writers who have come before me. I am proud to contribute to an archive where we explore our bodies and identities in safety, in joy, and in creativity.

Each voice – each written word – contributes to a chorus which cannot be ignored.