"It’s not that I want to be a boy. It’s that when I look in the mirror, I expect to see a boy."

How Nick Krieger's memoir changed my life

It’s not that I want to be a boy. It’s that when I look in the mirror, I expect to see a boy.

Nick Krieger, Nina Here Nor There, p. 156

Nick Krieger’s memoir Nina Here Nor There has shifted the course of my life more than once. This book was the first one I read about a transgender person.

It was the first book I saw myself in. I was 37 years old.

In the way that the Amazon algorithm can know you before you do, it recommended this book to me. That fact that it was about a “journey beyond gender” and not “transgender,” neither here nor there, drew me in. One year before, my friend shared that his second child came out as nonbinary, they/them pronouns. I kept quiet, but it shifted something in me, a deep familiarity. That nonbinary gender idea percolated until it boiled out of me in May 2017, declaring “I’m nonbinary” in a shout in my sister’s car.

I bought the Kindle e-book on June 17, 2017. That places the purchase after I came out to my sister before I came out to my (ex)husband. I devoured Nick’s words, peering through this window into a butch lesbian and transmasculine life I had never known existed. Nick introduced me to packers, strap-on dildos, chest binders, and top surgery. I read every chapter with fascination. Never had a nonfiction book corralled my attention like this.

I would not have felt that strong affinity if I started with a “This is how I transitioned to be a man” book. It was too far from where I was at the time. I had only just used the term nonbinary to describe myself, as in, “I am not a woman, and I never have felt like one, but now I have a word for it.” It would be months before it occurred to me to think of nonbinary as a form of trans and months beyond that to accept that I am a man. Krieger’s detailed account of his life leading up to deciding to get top surgery was exactly what I needed at the time. It was within my “latitude of acceptance.”

Krieger reassured me that I didn’t have to “know” my gender identity since childhood and that it can be confusing and messy and take time to unfold. His narrative countered the only one I knew: Transgender people “just knew” they were transgender from early childhood, that all trans men start as lesbians and pray to god every night that they’ll wake up with a penis, and that it’s an all-or-nothing transition. Krieger, like me, was attracted to men, which made me feel a little less like an alien.

I know now that trans narratives have been directed and stifled by medicine, by cisgender doctors, into a strict binary and heteronormativity. Trans people, in turn, especially nonbinary and gender nonconforming ones, have reshaped their narratives to fit into the doctors’ expectations to access care. They had to check all the boxes of hyperfemininity or hypermasculinity, and heterosexuality. Until the late 1980s, if a trans man revealed that he was attracted to men, not women, he would be denied care. Likewise, trans women “couldn’t” be lesbians. The point of transition, the doctors believed, was to avoid being gay, so to transition into homosexuality made no sense to them. They pretended it didn’t exist. In turn, this erasure made it impossible for people like me to see versions of themselves.¹

Fortunately, I found Krieger at the beginning of my gender exploration. His line quoted above has remained highlighted in my mind, even now, eight years later. It is how he explains his gender to his mom: “It’s not that I want to be a boy. It’s that when I look in the mirror, I expect to see a boy.”

That! THAT! He put into words exactly how I had felt my whole life but could never articulate. I felt seen. I found someone like me, there, in words.

About a year later, when I realized I was a trans man and my straight husband was struggling with this idea, I asked him to read Krieger’s book. I thought it would help him understand me. He read it and emailed the simple question, “Is that how you feel?” Instead of asking him, “Which part?” I wrote several pages about how I felt about my chest (conflicted, but ultimately wanting top surgery), then chickened out and didn’t give it to him for months. He did not react well. Six months later, we agreed on a divorce, and I started my medical transition.

Krieger wasn’t done with me yet, though. A little over a year into my medical transition, a person on a local transgender Facebook group asked for book recommendations. Something like “What book (memoir, fiction, whatever) greatly impacted your gender journey?” I recommended Nina Here Nor There, not thinking much of it, nor taking note of who the person was who asked. A week later, though, this person had bought the book, read it, and responded to my comment with three paragraphs of thoughtful analysis. Now they had my attention.

I checked out their profile picture: a cute, blond person, butch presenting, but limited information on their public profile. I started to notice them when they did post or comment on the group, including when they asked about what dating apps queer people use these days. But I had a girlfriend, and it was the first few months of the pandemic, so I made no effort to reach out.

In late July 2020, a friend organized a COVID-safe outdoor birthday party in a park. My heart raced when I saw that this cute blond was also marked as “Going.” I arrived late, carrying my picnic blanket and a smaller cooler of beers, and spotted the person across the socially distanced circle. I knew their name on Facebook, but with trans and nonbinary folks, it’s safer not to assume that’s their correct name. I was dying to meet them, but shy, and waited until a mutual friend introduced us.

“Hey, Will,” the friend said, “this is Josh. Josh, Will.”

I smiled big and waved, “Hi, Josh, nice to meet you. What are your pronouns?” Turns out, this was the first event where he introduced himself with his chosen name, Josh. He’d been on testosterone for three weeks, his voice still high, with a Southern accent. He was earning an MFA in memoir, I soon learned, so I bragged about having told a live story on a local storytelling show and my desire to write a memoir.

After I asked him his pronouns, Josh and I never stopped talking.

In the weeks following, we both broke up with our girlfriends and then had our first date. Five weeks after we met, I told Josh, “I am going to marry you.” And I did. In our wedding vows, I said, “They don’t write stories about people like us, two trans princes. So we get to write our own, together.”

For our first Valentine’s Day together, 2021, Josh contacted Nick Krieger and told him what he had meant to me on my gender journey. He hoped Nick might reply with a few words, at best. Instead, Krieger sent a 30-second audio recording acknowledging the part his book played in my life and in meeting Josh and wished us great happiness. Playing it back now makes me cry, over four years later.

1. See Slagstad K. How the Idea of Social Contagion Shaped Trans Medicine. New England Journal of Medicine. Oct 24 2024;391(16) and also Shuster, Stef M. Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender. New York: NYU Press, 2021.