'This book is a book of truth': thus begins the powerful and deeply moving anonymous testimony of N. O. Body. 'Born a boy' but 'raised as a girl', a young man recounts his youth with the wrong sexual assignment. 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 Sciences, who supports him in his efforts to change his official 'sex', which succeeded in 1906, and encourages him to write his Memoirs.
More than a century later, Paul B. Preciado receives these Memoirs like a message in a bottle, and writes a tribute to Karl M. Baer and to the dissident survivors of normative binary sexual assignment.
The Body of N. O. Body, an essay published alongside the Memoirs 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.
