None Of The Above - Travis Alabanza

I needed this book. Travis had become, it seemed to me, the circus pony of trans, trotting about in braids and tassels in the service of entertainment, and although I had seen some of their shows nothing apart from the occasional poem had quite won me round to their world-view. “None Of The Above” makes amends. It is, though, a perpetual risk in writing about trans from a personal perspective to come across as narcissistic, - as though it is all about you, - and Travis doesn’t quite avoid that danger, but the deeper you read into this book the more you can understand the importance of individual stories if we want to create a wider understanding of trans in society. It is a memoir because it focuses on particular memories, but it was written in lockdown so it is also a set of reflections on self in isolation, and a series of meditations or ruminations on the current state of trans. It's easy to start generalizing about our trans experiences – we are trying, aren’t we, to connect with others, who may well consider themselves non-trans? – but “None Of The Above” keeps faith with actuality by concentrating on a number of phrases spoken to Travis by a range of acquaintances, each of which opens up an area of trans experience to reflection. Narcissism is OK if there’s thought behind it, some logic, some attempt to connect with the experiences of others, and each chapter here works as a free fantasia on a trans theme. Each phrase recurs like a chorus in a song, and keeps restarting a train of thought which eventually returns to the central idea. It’s like a series of petals on a flower each opening up in a different direction – it’s poetic, it’s discursive, and occasionally it’s a bit much. I should talk – as someone who thinks aloud in typed words, working out what I think as I go along – but you very much need to lie down alongside Travis for the duration, to enjoy this as pillow-talk which adventures into new and often wonderful new insights. They are, in my experience, genuinely remarkable self-understandings – I loved being in their company. The background to them all is Travis’s constant wrestling with the idea of being non-binary and needing to avoid the non-category becoming a category of its own through too much self-definition. It’s as though this so much needs to be a turning-point in a life and a general weariness soaks the whole text so whatever your trans-orientation you feel for Travis. I was glad then to see them alive and well post-Covid/lockdown only last week in conversation as part of our local writing festival, to see them maybe some way towards merging the “man in a dress” persona with the “celebrity in stack-heels you’ve paid to see” personality to ground themselves in good old-fashioned telling, by using the insights derived from writing the book. The weariness had apparently gone. From that conversation came some useful thoughts - that everybody has problems with fitting into the gender-binary and it would help if we each admitted it. It was also nice to have it on record that Travis’s preferred definition of themself is “cross-dresser”, a wonderful liberation of an apparently old-fashioned term. The book’s insights are scattered amongst the reflections. These seem to me to be often new and unique to Travis – I list just a few,- “History and its knowledge can be such a balm for ignorance; it helps ground our current questions in something that survived before us.” in the face of condemnation – “This feels too real to disappear. If I am in connection with another one of us, how can they say we were not here?” “If you spend all your time trying to prove to them that what is happening is real, what you are left with is no reality of how you feel.” “…..it is clear that what is really sacrificed in the ‘culture war’ against us. Where trans people must sacrifice our possibility, in exchange for safety.” And the chapter about trans sex and love was for me full of revelations. It’s not something many trans-writers have tried to explore and so much of the writing opens up new ideas – the way sex can end up seeming to be about mathematics not poetry, the need to feel in the heart not the head, the sheer liberating complexity of sex with another trans based on two unique configurations of self and body and identity. The danger is of over-thinking, of course. A devout friend once said to me of the spiritual life that “Trying is Lying,” and there’s a lot of trying (and lying) in our lives currently. “None Of The Above” sees Travis trying and trying and trying, spending a lot of time considering self-amending, giving up, engaging with surgery, correcting bodily and social aspects, and it all did exhaust me at times, but there they were the other day on-stage dispensing wisdoms. The book ends with a dream of ultimate personal fluidity. If we need to connect with each other let it all start in our shared dreams, and Travis’s dream is as good a place to congregate as any.