Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender
by Nick Krieger
Beacon Press. 202 pages, $15
THIS FASCINATING, deeply personal memoir recounts the author’s experience of transitioning from a female to a male identity, and learning through the process that gender is a much more fluid and varied idea than might appear at first glance.
Nick Krieger, originally known as Nina, discovers the transgender community while living in San Francisco. Reaching her thirties, she moves in with a group of younger queers who push the boundaries of gender by having “top” surgery, taking hormones, and changing their names. Some members undergo all of these processes, while others experiment with only one or a combination. In this way, Krieger explores the spectrum of possibilities available; one does not have to simply change from female to male or vice-versa. Through interviewing and speaking with these folks, she learns about her own feelings towards her body and gender.
Krieger’s story is somewhat unusual in that she does not report, as so many transgender people do, that she always felt, from earliest childhood, that she’d been born into the wrong body. Rather, through her conversations and interactions with her transgender friends, she came to understand that in certain circumstances she preferred the masculine part of her personality to her feminine part. Indeed, the name “Nick” comes about through sexual role-playing with her one-time girlfriend, a lesbian. She soon became comfortable navigating the spaces between male and female, incorporating aspects of both genders, and her friends, many of whom were in a similar situation, helped her to adapt. Most of her attention with respect to gender identity, however, focuses on her breasts. After discovering that she did not like her partners to touch her breasts during sex, she first tried various methods of binding to make them less noticeable. While these mechanisms are somewhat cumbersome to put on, she enjoyed the sensation of not seeing or even feeling her breasts; and before too long, she lost all awareness of them until removing the binders at the end of each day. She later took the step of having her breasts surgically removed. This choice caused great stress to her family, particularly her father, who could not understand her reasoning and refused to support it. In this respect, Krieger’s story resembles that of many transgender people: in a sense, they have to come out twice, first as gay or lesbian, and then as transgender, each time risking family rejection. Like Krieger’s relatives, some families have no problem accepting homosexuality but take much longer to become comfortable with gender re-orientation. Ultimately, her mother came to help her through the recovery period, while her father still grappled with his inability to accept the situation. Krieger argues convincingly that, despite the recent media attention and celebrity spotlight on the issue, many people still are not well-informed on gender issues and rely mostly on negative stereotypes and media caricatures. Both moving and witty, this memoir brings to light the many variations within the transgender experience. It should help those struggling with gender identity issues to know that there are many ways of being transgendered, as well as multiple paths to becoming comfortable with one’s own body. It should also prove useful for friends and family of transgender people, as a guide to supporting them through their often painful struggles.
