A review by brnineworms
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

reflective medium-paced

2.5

Unfocused. I admire the ambition and the insistence on including a wide variety of voices and angles, but the scope is just too broad for the anthology to truly come together. I wish there had been more emphasis on the idea of passing. I don’t know whether the issue stems from most of the writers not understanding the assignment, or whether the brief they were given was too vague to begin with. In any case, a lot of these essays had little to do with passing and instead discussed tangentially-related topics like presenting yourself as one of the good ones, or reclaiming a previously suppressed identity, or generally experiencing discrimination (societal and intra-community). It’s not that these topics aren’t worth talking about, they’re just not what the title and synopsis of this book promised, and the anthology format means no one subject gets the thorough examination it deserves. Even the essays that do engage with passing are rather rudimentary. Dean Spade’s essay, for example, identifies passing as a prerequisite to accessing privileges (and rights) which would otherwise be denied, such as healthcare. But surely this is common knowledge to anyone even vaguely familiar with the concept of passing? It offers no new insights if you are, yet it also isn’t quite basic enough to serve as a primer for people who aren’t.

I don’t mean to single Spade out – I do appreciate his work and this essay is hardly the worst in the collection (that would be The End of Genderqueer by Rocko Bulldagger). There were a couple of essays I did like, namely Persephone by Helen Boyd and Hat by Tucker Lieberman.

Nobody Passes doesn’t quite work as an anthology and it doesn’t deliver on its promise to explore what it means to pass. I expected essays on the borders of gender being so zealously policed that cis people are misgendered or mistaken as trans; on what it’s like to pass as, say, a trans woman but not as cis; in-depth explorations of navigating a gendered world as a genderqueer person excluded by barriers most people don’t even notice. There was a bit of that, but this book really did leave me wanting more. In a way that’s a good thing, because I do feel inspired to write my own essays and create artwork about the subjects that I felt were un(der)represented here, to fill in the gaps with my own contributions. But yeah. I would have liked something more intentional.

CONTENT WARNINGS: transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, colonialism, classism, eviction/homelessness, imprisonment, police brutality, domestic violence, gun violence, rape, incest, suicide attempt, drug use