Both and Neither (A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, A Haunting))

Author of The Fact of a Body, and winner of this year’s Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich weaves memoir and history to explore how we bear witness to trans lives, past and present.

Built on deep research and delivered with striking clarity, Marzano-Lesnevich brings into focus a fascinating cast: Joseph Lobdell, a nineteenth-century trans man confined to an asylum for loving a woman; Gerd Katter, a carpenter and early patient at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science; Pauli Murray, the visionary whose ideas helped ignite civil rights and feminist movements; and Claude Cahun, the artist who defied gender through radical self-invention.

And, as the archive opens, the story turns inward. Marzano-Lesnevich reckons with their own desires, relationships, and becoming, where intimacy’s ecstasy and ache collide with history’s long shadow. Both and Neither fuses daring scholarship with emotional precision to reclaim a past too often erased, reimagining what it means to be seen.

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