Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender – Nick Krieger

I introduce a lot of books on this blog about lesbians. As a lesbian, I guess it’s pretty predictable that I would do that. I occasionally find a book about or for gay males that piques my interest and I review that. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I have little experience with those who are transgender and that I’ve been making an effort to learn more and to introduce books that have been either helpful to my learning curve or that I felt might be helpful to a reader who is considering transitioning or who is in the process of doing so.

A couple of books I previously reviewed, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us and Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by Kate Bornstein (with S. Bear Bergman on the 2nd book), focused on voices of the “gender queer” in the broadest sense; what my mother’s generation would have called “gender benders”. Those books focused primarily on people who had transitioned but also shone a light on some who had not transitioned and who were not planning to do so but who were living lives that did not necessarily reflect their birth gender.

Now, if you read my post this past Tuesday, Masculinity Without Men, about the Judith Halberstam book, Female Masculinity or my Butch is a Noun post on October 4th about the book, ahem, Butch is a Noun, you know that my wife can best be classified – if we have to label things – as gender queer. She was, of course, born as a woman but her gender identity leans more male than female.

Now that I have your head swirling with book titles and previous posts, I’d like to introduce the book that is my topic for today so you can see what I’ve been driving at for a few paragraphs. It’s a Beacon Press publication from May of this year by author Nick Krieger titled, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender.

Nick Krieger is a native of New York who, as he puts it, “transitioned to San Francisco” when he was 21. I have no idea how old he is now but, it really doesn’t matter. Nick’s a well traveled man who is a major travel guide contributor. His stated goal in life is to “queer up” everything that he can. He’s doing a fine job!

The thing to know about Nick going into this book is that he started life as, Nina not Nick. He was female and he has transitioned/is transitioning into male, or, at least, into a more male form in appearance. Nick, unlike with some of the other transgender bios/memoirs I’ve reviewed, it seems to me isn’t completely comfortable being labeled one or the other, at least not yet.

His book begins with several chapters that flow quite well but that all revolve, for the most part, around the same subject, his dissatisfaction with his female chest before he had his surgery and the ways that he went about binding it, learning about options for surgery and so forth. It’s not tedious at all even though this discussion of breasts/no breasts is lengthy. It’s actually pretty enlightening. He tells it from an angle that makes the reader feel as though they’re in his head, hearing what he’s thinking about his female body, his appearance, his dating preference (straight girls)  and feeling what he’s feeling. Some of what I’ve read about him in relation to his body mirrors conversations I’ve had with my wife about herself and the way that she often feels.

From what I’ve read, I get the gut feeling Nick will eventually feel completely male. He’s always had a preference for straight girls, he was intensely relieved to be rid of his breasts…it’s just in the cards for him. This is a great read from a female to male perspective where most of the focus of the other books I’ve read on transitioning have been male to female.