My Race Is My Gender

For every person, the embodied fact and experiential truth is, my race is my gender. This is the meaning of intersectionality, a Black feminist understanding of identity that is foundational to critical race theory, and it is intimately explored in life writing and photography in My Race is My Gender: Portraits of Nonbinary People of Color. Nonbinary, genderqueer, gender fluid, agender, and androgynous forms of identity and expression can present challenges to social binaries that are as unique as individuals themselves, as we have learned from several large anthologies by nonbinary writers published in recent years. One of the first nonbinary collections to illustrate memoir with photographic portraits, My Race is My Gender is also one of the first to center Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Asian perspectives, with its six contributors presenting an intergenerational look at what it means to belong to marginalized queer communities in the U.S. and feel solidarity with a global majority at the same time. People of color who are nonbinary in multiple ways show us that pursuing gender freedom and resisting racism are one in the same movement, and that learning to recognize nonbinary genders can also be an antiracist practice.