Memoirs of a Man's Girlhood Followed by the Body of N. O. Body

An extraordinary intersex and trans memoir written early in the twentieth century published alongside Paul B. Preciado’s radical critique of binary sexual assignment

“This is a book of truth”: Thus begins the powerful and deeply moving anonymously published testimony of N. O. Body from early in the twentieth century. Having been assigned female sex at birth, a young man recounts his childhood and youth as a girl. He speaks of his doubts, his solitude, the rejection as well as the fascination he provokes, his discovery of sexuality, and the temptation of suicide when he falls in love with a woman.

In December 1905, N. O. Body meets Magnus Hirschfeld, the future founder of Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, who supports him in his efforts to change his official “sex,” which he does by obtaining a male birth certificate, and encourages him to write his memoirs.

More than a century later, Paul B. Preciado receives this autobiography, Karl M. Baer’s Memoirs of a Man’s Girlhood, originally published pseudonymously, like a message in a bottle, and writes a tribute to Baer and to the dissident survivors of normative binary sexual assignment.

The Body of N. O. Body, an essay published alongside the memoir as a diptych, is a new history of sexuality with and against Foucault, a political genealogy of the proper name, and a cry for the abolition of binary systems of sexual assignment and gender at birth.