Both and Neither

Both and Neither is a work of memoir and haunted nonfiction about life beyond the binary. Genre and gender come from the same root, meaning of a type or a kind; the book therefore adopts a trans-genre approach to telling a transgender story. Memoir sections move through Marzano-Lesnevich’s own life, questioning how to construct a coming-of-age trans narrative that resists the simplicity of crossing a binary. As part of understanding the cultural aspect of their identity, Marzano-Lesnevich looks for their historical antecedents, re-investigating the stories of four people to derive a transmasculine lineage from those who transed gender in their own ways—stories that unfolded in the same geographic places Marzano-Lesnevich went on to inhabit, but that were once invisible to them. In the order the figures appear in the book, they are: Joseph Lobdell, Gerd Katter, Pauli Murray, and Claude Cahun. Each of them left behind writing about their gender, insisting that though they were deemed female by their societies, their own experiences of gender were more complex. In their lifetimes and beyond, this complexity was erased, denied, criminalized, or subsumed. The book argues that those erasures and others have resulted in a cultural haunting, in the form of anti-trans legislation and violence, the transgender figure having been made into a kind of modern-day bogeyman of society’s ills. As the book progresses, both threads eventually interweave around a present-day through-line of archival visits and t4t relationships, unfolding in the context of escalating attacks on trans rights, in which Marzano-Lesnevich asks how to make a life in a culture that would deny, suppress, and harm transgender people. To ask to be seen is to ask how to be loved is to ask how to live—answers to which can only be found in community, across time. Both and Neither originally took a more straightforwardly nonfictional approach, hewing closely to the records. This risked inadvertently re-enacting the historical violence of those records, however, and pretending that official documentation truly documented trans life. As such, what has emerged is a book that uses speculative techniques and hauntings to instantiate critical work that interrogates historical silencing and erasure, influenced most strongly by Saidiya Hartman, Eve Sedgwick, and Avery Gordon. The title Both and Neither refers to the both and neither of time (the past always anticipating the future, the present always imbued with the past) and of documentation and affect. While the historical sections are deeply and meticulously researched, Marzano-Lesnevich imagines into the research, as the past, like the present, is made up of more than could ever be officially documented. This trans-genre approach honors what was left out.