Finding Nevo

 

I read most of Finding Nevo in a school library last week between sessions, then polished it off in another sitting after borrowing it from my local library. Nevo Zisin's memoir makes an interesting companion piece to Yves Rees' All About Yves, both for the similarities and the differences between their experiences. Both live in Melbourne, both struggled with gender identity and ended up seeing themselves as 'transmasc,' but emphatically not as 'men trapped in a woman's body,' though both recognised they might have to say that was the case in order to get the gender-affirming treatment they needed.

However, Rees is an academic, and able to articulate with precision their own confusion. Zisin is less intellectual in approach (and significantly younger), which lends their account a raw immediacy. There are a couple of sections near the end which are particularly moving, where Nevo imagines attending a party with all the versions of their younger self and is able to reassure and comfort them all. Zisin also differs from Rees in holding a strong and confident Jewish identity and community.

I'm learning more and more about the trans experience, principally that it's much more complex than I'd assumed. At one point Zisin says, after beginning to pass as male, 'I went from one gender box into another, but this one had more space.' It's distressing that both male and female gender boxes are experienced as being so rigid, neither can comfortably accommodate someone feeling uncomfortable or alien in their own body. Who made these bloody rules anyway?