Beyond the Gender Binary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author, gender non-conforming performance artist, and speaker, Alok Vaid-Menon, comes a short, compassionate, and deeply personal primer on gender’s expansive, multifaceted nature.

“When reading this book, all I feel is kindness.”—Sam Smith, Grammy and Oscar award-winning singer and songwriter

“A literary vessel of light for those who are looking for hopefulness, honesty, and a stimulating education in the exploration of themselves. This book is a twenty-first-century survival guide for queer-identifying people of all walks of life.”—Princess Nokia, musician and co-founder of the Smart Girl Club

Gender is a story, not just a word.

In Beyond the Gender Binary, poet, artist, and LGBTQIA+ rights advocate Alok Vaid-Menon deconstructs, demystifies, and reimagines the social definition of gender, challenging the world to view it not in black and white, but in full color. Taking from their own experiences as a gender-nonconforming artist, Alok shows readers that gender is a flexible and creative form of expression—the only limit is your imagination.

Presented by Pocket Change Collective, a small book series with big ideas from today's leading activists and artists, Beyond the Gender Binary allows readers to express themselves freely, and encourages love in all its forms.

Alok Vaid-Menon is a gender non-conforming writer, performance artist, and public speaker who has been featured by HBO, MTV, NBC, The Guardian, The New York Times, and more. Their creative challenge to the gender binary has been celebrated around the world.

Ashley Lukashevsky is an illustrator and visual artist born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, currently based in Los Angeles. Ashley uses illustration and art as tools to strengthen social movements against systemic racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant policy. She aims to tear down these systems of oppression through first envisioning and drawing a world without them. Her clients include Refinery29, Broadly, The Washington Post, Planned Parenthood, Girls Who Code, GOOD magazine, Brooklyn magazine, ACLU, Red Bull, Snapchat, Air Jordan, and Logo TV. Ashley is also the illustrator of the best-selling Antiracist Baby, by Ibram X. Kendi.