Both and Neither

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.

In Both and Neither: A Memoir and History of Gender (Or, A Haunting), Alex Marzano-Lesnevich weaves memoir and history to explore how we bear witness to trans lives, past and present, following four lives that have made—and unmade—gender in the public imagination.

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.