There are also men resisting this apocalypse, trans men, “out there, making their own manhood in the wreckage of the world.” Robbie, a trans man, comes to Fran and Beth’s rescue in a wonderfully queer inversion of the damsel in distress motif. Later, they must fight for autonomy with TERFs and bunker brats, privileged liberal cis women, within a climate of sexual desire and dehumanization. The trans women heroines, Beth and Fran, must avoid TERFs while hunting men for their testicles and kidneys/adrenal glands, converting these trophies into estrogen in order to stay alive. In this world, pregnancy is death, for the gestated rape baby matures quickly and eats its way out of the womb, and in weeks is a full-sized adult. This is a world split into two terrifying binary factions: fascist TERFS on one hand, and on the other, “T-Rex virus”-infected men mutated into beasts on the hunt for warm bodies to rape and kill. The main characters in Manhunt, navigate violent transphobia accelerated to extremes. In Side Affects, Hil Malatino analyzes transition narratives beyond the “exclusively curative and against the transphobic demonization of transition as unnatural, irreal, and inauthentic.” Malatino identifies emotions trans people cycle through, including future fatigue, numbness and withdrawal, envy, rage, and burnout all of these emotions are amplified by systemic incompetence, individual, cultural, and political malfeasance, day-to-day micro-aggressions, and personal cognitive-emotional habits and states (Malatino’s necessary work on Trans Care is free to access here).
In their celebration of transness and queerness, both Malatino and Felker-Martin tear, rip, and chew into oppressive cis-het norms. Whether through theory or fiction, both books defiantly stake out emotional territory at a time when anti-queer and anti-trans legislation are at an all-time high.
What does being trans feel like? When cis people ask us what it is like to inhabit a body in transition, they are really asking a comparative question: what did it feel like before? And what does it feel like now? Both Hil Malatino’s Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad, an academic work analyzing transition narratives beyond “exclusively curative” frameworks, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, a satirical horror novel, respond wholly to this question.
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