In an undated but not too distant past, Dutch writer and artist Valentijn Hoogenkamp, who now identifies as non-binary and uses the he/him pronouns, discovered that he had the deadly BRC1A gene mutation, inherited from his mother. The latter had ovarian cancer, which Hoogenkamp was at the risk of getting. He was also declared susceptible to having breast cancer in the future.
Considering this grim prognosis, instead of living under a sentence, Hoogenkamp decided to get a double mastectomy and hysterectomy after his mother died. He had a “sweet boyfriend” at the time, a man named Mort, who had pledged not to leave him no matter the outcome of the procedure, and a close friend, Charlotte, who held his hand through the days of surgery and a long, hard recovery. But by the time Hoogenkamp woke up in his hospital bed, something had radically shifted at the core of his being.
It wasn’t so much that he had become someone else—rather, it was as though the person who had been hiding under layers of flesh, blood, sinews and years of social conditioning had suddenly broken free and emerged into the world.
Hoogenkamp’s slim memoir, Antiboy (translated by Michele Hutchinson), opens with him in the hospital bed as “Antiboy,” the new name he chooses for himself. It’s a heart-wrenching story, whimsical and novelistic by turn, that doesn’t fit into neat narratives of coming out. Hoogenkamp doesn’t get top surgery because he wants to transition into another gender. Rather his decision is dictated by circumstances though eventually it unlocks a truth he had kept secreted within himself for years. “I don’t just want to survive,” as he says at one point, “something wants to reveal itself.”
Coming out is a deeply private experience. Each individual must negotiate its fallouts (for invariably, there are fallouts) as their circumstances dictate. But coming out as non-binary is probably even harder, both within and outside of the queer community. Public awareness of what it means to be gender non-conforming is much lower, compared to what L, G and T stand for in the alphabet soup. When it comes to chosen pronouns, people default to going by the optics of what someone “looks like” and objections are usually met with sniggers or outright hostility.
According to a multi-nation survey conducted by market research company Ipsos in 2021 (the time Antiboy is set), around 1-3% of global adults identify as transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming. Public awareness of the exact meaning of these terms, the report adds, is commensurate with the above numbers (which is less than 5%). The fact that gender exists on a spectrum and is becoming increasingly fluid with the younger generations is yet to be fully grappled with by an overwhelming number of people.
Hoogenkamp’s experience of coming into his chosen self is harrowing and traumatic, that too in a country like the Netherlands, which legalised same-sex marriage as early as 2001. One can only imagine how tough it must be to resist the straitjacket of sexuality in societies like India, where LGBTQ+ rights are suspended in a limbo of part-recognition and part-resistance.
As Hoogenkamp reckons with the changes in his anatomy, he remembers vignettes from his past, especially the medical travesty that had preceded his operation. A renowned cosmetic surgeon he consults makes no secret of his disapproval of Hoogenkamp’s decision not to have implants. “Aesthetically undesirable” is how he describes such an outcome, while insisting that a pretty girl like Hoogenkamp deserved nothing less than the lifelike replicas of her glorious, natural breasts. “I’ve come here with a high risk factor for cancer,” Hoogenkamp recalls, “and the doctor’s idea of consolation is to keep on telling me I won’t be ugly afterwards.”
Other doctors urge him to have a baby before undergoing hysterectomy. But the patient cannot be persuaded. When he asks his dying mother for advice, she asks him to stick to the script: Be with Mort and build a life of domestic bliss, complete with children. Hoogenkamp’s mother had also endured a loveless marriage to a good but unexciting man for the sake of her children. It is only with her final wish—to have I Want to Break Free by Queen blasted out of an amplifier as her coffin is lowered into the ground—that she decides to draw attention to who she actually was.
However, life has been different for Hoogenkamp—from his childhood experience of being bullied at school for being an oddball, to a rocky coming of age, to his unruly and uncontained desires that had led him into the arms of both men and women with equal abandon. “I thought femininity was something that could be learned,” he writes at one point, only to realise after much privation that “my sexual orientation was being wanted. I was sick to death of feeling unwanted.”
Hoogenkamp’s path to becoming Antiboy is paved by a million heartbreaks. When he stubbornly embraces his breastlessness and the spiky short hair to go with it, he disappoints Mort, who can no longer recognise the person he was once madly in love with. “I tried to explain to Mort that I was attracted to women, but also to him, that it really didn’t matter to me,” Hoogenkamp writes, “but he said it should matter to me, just like it mattered to him that I no longer felt like a woman.”
Despite taking care of Hoogenkamp as he recuperates, Mort refuses to hold hands with him in public for fear of being labelled gay. Behind closed doors, he is no longer attracted to Hoogenkamp sexually.
Antiboy’s most intense emotional upheaval comes from Slimane, with whom he had, a lifetime ago, a torrid lesbian affair. In the present of the narrative, Slimane has transitioned into a man, but remains elusive and unpredictable as ever. It is by reviving their friendship and through the gentle ministrations of the devoted Charlotte that Antiboy begins to find the ground under his feet again. People congratulate him as if he has been born again, but that’s not really what he wants.
The book ends with the author going to visit his grandmother, who has dementia. With his men’s clothes and cropped hair, he is like a stranger to the elderly woman. Nothing helps, not even a framed photograph Hoogenkamp holds up before her. “I say my girl’s name and my new name, because my name is a word, I believe in words, that if I find the right words, everyone will come back,” he says abjectly.
Pleas like this continue to haunt contemporary India, where despite the legitimacy that has come to LGBTQ+ rights in the recent past, the Transgender Person’s Amendment Act of 2026, has given a body blow to the right to self-determination of gender, leaving trans and non-binary people in a psychological and emotional limbo.