like a boy but not a boy, Navigating Life, Mental Health, and Parenthood outside the Gender Binary by andrea bennett

File Under: First Person Plus

This is my first attempt at shopping books by publisher. The responses I’ve received to my own submissions have changed the way I read. In preparation to send my own work to Arsenal Pulp Press, I’m currently working my way through their queer catalog from last year. Like a Boy… is from that stack. 

I know from pitching my own work that mainstream publishing is not particularly welcoming to alternative structures. But I beg of everyone: how else can a queer story be told? Arsenal, an independent publisher in Canada, gives me hope: bennett’s book embodies what I’m going to clumsily call an alternative structure: disguised as a book of essays, their personal narrative is interspersed with the shorter narratives of sixteen other queer millenials; everyone’s origins are in rural Canada.

I had a yoga teacher back in the 90’s tell me “there are as many ways of doing Trikonasana as there are people on the planet.” The same is true for transness. There is no one way, no singular expression, certainly, no empirically correct posture. 

All the while, running through the chaos of our nuanced individual experiences are these golden threads of universal experience. In an oppressed world where white binary cisgender hetero expression is the norm, I crave hearing the beautiful notes of a trans song and I find that melody in books like andrea bennett’s. 

I particularly appreciate bennet’s portrayal of parenting outside the binary. Even with technology’s contribution to wildly expanding the shapes of families for some time now, the implicit role definitions of “mother” and “father” remain for the most part, beyond criticism or interrogation, lest we piss off too many people heavily invested in and identified with them. bennet’s expression of being a milk parent proved a refreshing drink. 

I’m not sure if the author meant to, but the conveyance style of the sixteen additional chorus of voices reads a little like sixteen condensed interviews, perhaps in translation. The distance this sensitivity infuses is clever indeed, since the telling of anyone else’s story is, at its base, a translation. I love how joining bennet’s own story with the experiences of other rural Canadian queers ties them all together into a beautiful unity of queer experience.

Like that yoga class back in the 90’s and so many other group activities, it is lovely to have the freedom of individuality within the community of a shared practice.