When Marquis Bey pronounces the word nonbinary, it rhymes simultaneously with abolition, utopia, nope, and why not? Rather than launching a counterpolemic to characterizations of the nonbinary as a positionality without a politics, Bey disengages from those agonistics to imagine a freedom beyond the carcerality of gender.

Professor Susan Stryker, author and co-editor of books including Transgender History (2008), The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), and When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (2024).

Marquis Bey's Non-Binary Life is a lovely and poetic personal meditation on living non-binary in a way-too-binary world-on race and class and burner genders, on the real cost of telling gender truths, and of sometimes just saying 'Sorry, but no' to gender.

Riki Wilchins, activist and author of books including Let's (Not) Talk About (Transgender) Sex, (Bloomsbury, 2026)