Nevo Zisin photographed in Sydney in March, 2017. Credit:Daniel Munoz The corner restaurant specialises in the kind of street food Zisin lived off during a gap year in Tel Aviv in 2014, a crucial time in his transition marking the first year on hormone replacement therapy. Zisin has dressed deliberately for the occasion. His wild curls are held back in a ponytail. He wears shirt and shorts, the very picture of gender neutrality. A lighter necklace hangs around his neck to remind himself of his inner "fire". Presentation matters for someone who has interrogated their own identity since the age of four and regards their gender as fluid. He requests that he be addressed in the pronouns of they/their or he/him. ''That is my claim to fame," Zisin shrugs, "I'm constantly confusing people. But I think everything is really confusing. You talk to anyone – no one knows really what they are doing and mostly it's a performative confidence and so I think we need to lean into the discomfort of not knowing and just being question marks.''

Zisin's autobiography: Finding Nevo, How I Confused Everyone. The autobiography comes a year after a backlash erupted over the transgender activist's appearance as a "case study" in a video resource for the much-maligned Safe Schools campaign. Australian Christian conservatives claimed Zisin's story encouraged impressionable minors to undergo sex-change surgery without parental consent as they mobilised political opposition against the anti-homophobic bullying Safe Schools program. Zisin's explicit naming was to plunge him into a ''pit of despair''. ''Firstly, there is no such thing as a sex-change operation, it doesn't exist,'' Zisin says. ''Lots of trans people get different operations or none, it's a myth. There is no all-in-one, turn a machine, come out a different gender. That's not the way it works. ''Secondly, I was never going to get that surgery, I was only ever planning on getting chest surgery. I'm not sure how I was advocating for surgeries I wasn't involved in. It was also said I was talking about doing them without my parent's consent when my parents were with me the entire way. I came from a Jewish family. Family is important. I was never abandoning my family to do what I want. They were at the centre of these decisions. It was pure slander and pure defamation.''

Zisin scans the menu and recommends the shakshuka, a hearty one-pot dish of eggs baked in a spicy red pepper and tomato sauce, a dipping plate of hummus made with fava beans, and a fold of puff pastry stuffed with vegetables not unlike an Italian calzone. Zisin's mother Sharon Swiatlo – Zisin lives with her in Caulfield, smack in the middle of Melbourne's "bagel belt" – makes a "mean" shakshuka. Zisin's speciality is a tahini made with the sharp tang of pickle juice. Zisin was not even in kindergarten when he set on the fact he was a boy. Zisin refused to go to the girl's section at department stores, would only wear boys' clothing, and would correct anyone who referred to him as a girl. Accused of being a drama queen, Zisin retorted: "I'm a drama king." "I didn't just decide at four years old I'm not going to be a girl, I'm going to be a boy. There was something in me that felt I had to present myself differently. I wouldn't say it is entirely a socially constructed thing, or entirely biologically determined. I think there is this mish-mash of in-betweens." Zisin spent a year learning how to a be ''good'' Jewish woman to undertake the traditional coming-of-age ceremony of the bat mitzvah. Upon return from a trip to Israel he shaved his head for charity and found himself at the centre of rumours that he was a lesbian.

''I was very stoked to be this straight woman with bald head and rocking with the stereotypes,'' he says, and yet felt ''backed in the corner''. When Zisin eventually came out as gay at age 14, "I was so scared, I thought, 'well right right now I am [lesbian] but I don't know if I want to be in the future'. I always have doubts about everything, all the time and so does everyone. "I'm not sure about anything 100 per cent." At the same time, "I always do things full throttle ... Keeping up with myself is difficult for me." Zisin's Melbourne private school was the first Australian Jewish school to join the Safe Schools Coalition and he credits the support he received with saving his life. As a gay activist he took part in a documentary, Love in Full Colour, which screened for the first time at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival in 2015. By the time he sat with his mother to watch its premiere Zisin was presenting as male.

Zisin's gender dysphoria had worsened and he had come out as transgender to his mother in his last year of high school at age 18, changing his first name to one selected from a Hebrew baby's book. Lunch is served and Zisin declines alcohol: "Not after the other night." Three-quarters of the book was written in a rush of about four weeks while "drinking wine'', the look back over a life of 21 years being painful, nostalgic and cathartic to recall. It's a ''lie'', Zisin says, to say that his gender variance is a mere phase, as critics of medicalised transition assert, or that he's too young to know who he is. ''At what age does one know who they are, that's what I want to know,'' Zisin says. ''And what isn't a phase? Is it the guy you dated in high school that you really regret, or that course you dropped out of, or that job you stayed in for far too long, or the relationship that was abusive?'' While it's exhausting to be a ''walking search engine'', the book is a chance to reach young people like himself undergoing the transition and bring more ''trans'' stories into the mainstream because, he maintains, "gender diversity needs to be normalised and understood".

"It's a story of life and growing up and body image and insecurity and coming to terms with realities we are faced with. These are symptoms of the human condition. It's not just a trans narrative.'' Attitudes are shifting. A swim teacher studying Indigenous cultures and creative writing at the University of Melbourne, Zisin was quizzed in the pool a few months back. "Are you a boy or a girl?'', the boy asked him. ''I said, 'I don't know, both?' He's like, 'You can't be both.' I was like, 'Why not?' He said, 'Ýou can't be both unless you are transgender. You don't look transgender.' Loading "So I was like, 'Well, I am.' And he said, 'Cool, can I do backstroke now?' To hear a seven-year-old use that word is mind-boggling and that's not the first or last time that's happened. Kids have these open minds and they get things on a fundamental level. They understand being a girl doesn't necessarily mean pink."

Zisin's favourite piece of writing in the book is the last chapter. He imagines himself at a party with his previous selves at ages six, nine, 13, 16, then at 18 with his newly-minted name. Nevo asks his future self, ''Are you happy?'', and he replies, ''Well, I'm certainly trying.''