Trauma narratives work to describe the ways in which people are affected by events throughout their lives, it is through these narratives that victims of trauma manage to tell their stories. To an audience experiencing these traumatic events through fictionalised events one might gain an understanding or an empathy for the ways in which the traumatised experience things. And whilst this is the centre for many trauma narratives it is exemplified in the trauma narratives of what Judith Butler describes as ungrievable peoples in their book Frames of War, lives like that of the poor black american, or the palestinian child, their stories are often cast aside as they force “us” to confront the precariousness of the way the world is constructed.
Transfeminine trauma narratives cross that gap in precariousness by forcefully inviting the reader to experience the trauma that transfeminine people experience. As the reader is forced to experience transfeminine trauma and retraumatization alongside the characters they are given an insight into how the transfeminine is affected by society. Though these traumas are sensationalised and extrapolated through exaggerated metonymy to deliver a more powerful effect.
The novel Manhunt (2022) by Gretchen Felker-Martin and the novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2016) by Torrey Peters explore transfeminine trauma through fictionalised exaggerations of the transfeminine experience; these explorations of transfeminine trauma serve as both a recuperation of transfeminine trauma and as a tool to bridge the gap between wider society and the transfeminine.
In this paper I aim to dissect the trauma narratives that are presented to the readers from a transfeminine perspective in Manhunt, as well as a work that Manhunt refers to intertextually. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones; and explore how they close the epistemic gap between the wider societal “us” and the ungrievable transfeminine subject through trauma narratives.
The transfeminine has a history of being portrayed as monstrous in media. This portrayal has taken on many forms, such as a gross creature (Lois Einhorn from Ace Ventura), a trickster pervert or sex fiend (Dr. Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror Picture Show), or a beast that only seeks to harm (Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs). In Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl (2007) she discusses the ways in which transfemininity is portrayed in media. In her chapter on transfeminine portrayal she describes the phenomenon of “the deceiver” (Serano 2007, 36) a risk to society that comes from a “male” attempting to deceive the world into believing he is a she for nefarious gain, Serano places the deceiver in opposition to “the pathetic” (Serano 2007, 36), a failed transsexual woman whose attempts at femininity are not seen as a threat, but rather a joke to be mocked.
It is partially through this portrayal as a deceiver or a pathetic, something akin to the pan-european monster of the changeling, that the transfeminine is monstered, and placed firmly on the side of the ungrievable other. The dynamic that Serano describes here is not one that is exclusive to media, it is a cultural pillar of understanding the transfeminine. Understanding the cultural persistence of this image of the transfeminine and its origins is vital to understanding how transfeminine trauma narratives portray the experiences that transfeminine people live.
Serano describes the cultural omnipresence of transfeminine monsters through a critique of the feminist author Janice Raymond and her work The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979) in Whipping Girl. Raymond’s work centres the transfeminine as a threat to women through a position that describes how the transfeminine is in reality a type of man who transitions to gain access to women to cause them harm. It is in this critique where Serano points to how the personal beliefs of Raymond are shaped by a cultural transmisogyny and mirror the depictions of transfeminine people in media. Serano points towards how Raymond states that the transfeminine, especially the lesbian transfeminine, assumes femininity to harm women. (Serano 2007, 139)
Serano’s critique of The Transexual Empire has been mirrored by other transfeminist writers such as Talia Baht in her critique of Raymond; The Transmisogyny Bible: A Critical Dissection.(2024) Here Bahtt explores the culturally catholic influences that Raymond incorporates into her bio-essentialist view of transfeminity, and how those influences reinforce the idea that the transfeminine is only transfeminine to bring harm to women by deceiving them. Bhatt explores the way that the transfeminine is transformed into a deceiving man in Raymond’s work and how that has further influenced the manner in which transfeminine people are perceived by a wider society as well as in academic spaces.
This image of the transfeminine as a monster one that is persuasive, integrating itself into all discussions of transfemininity, and it is reflected in the ways that transfeminine people discuss the ways they navigate the world. My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage (1994) by Susan Stryker has stryker portraying herself as something alike to Frankenstein’s Monster, a monster that is excluded by society because of what it appears to be. To society the transfeminine is a type of monster, and to the transfeminine being the monster is just a fact of life.
In her essay Stryker engages with the distance that exists between cis and trans women in society and how that affects her on a deep and intimate level. Stryker explores the very material differences that exist, describing her emotions surrounding these differences, from the inability to give birth to the feeling of artificiality that surrounds the femininity of her body. These reflections of the distance that exist have parallels that can be drawn between her essay and the themes that are present in transfeminine literature whether or not the trauma is a central element of the narrative if it is just a feature.
In the introduction to this paper I bring up the work of Judith Butler and their theory of precariousness and grievability that they write about in the book Frames of War from 2009. Their framework in discussing positions in societies and how certain groups are viewed as insiders or outsiders that can or cannot be grieved in our society. This separation exists in transfeminine narratives, where there is a difference that is constructed between the cisgender and transgender woman. In working from this framework of grievable and ungrievable that is outlined in Butler’s work that I begin my analytical work from. By defining who in society is deemed enough of an outsider to not be grieved we can begin understanding a core aspect of transfeminine trauma narratives, and that is the experience of being an outsider to society.
Alan Gibbs in his book Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (2014) writes about the difference between the trauma narratives of two movies about the holocaust. Gibbs describes how the holocaust is presented in the movie Schindler List(1993) as a story that takes place during a traumatic event and how that contrasts the movie Shoah(1985) that directly incorporates the trauma that was experienced during the holocaust and centres it within the narrative[^1]. Both of these movies work with trauma on separate planes, and each manner that trauma is integrated affects how the story is told. A similar distinction can be made about how transfeminine literature describes trauma. There are contemporary transfeminine narratives like that of Naomi Kanaka’s Just Happy to Be Here (2024) and Torey Peters’ Detransition Baby (2021) that heavily feature aspects of the trauma that transfeminine people experience. The transfeminine social exclusion in Just Happy to Be Here and the transfeminine trauma related to motherhood in Detransition Baby are not the central themes of the works, however they are prominent themes that influence the development of the narratives. Conversely there are contemporary transfeminine narratives where the trauma is placed in the centre of the narrative, narratives like Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021) by Alison Rumfitt that differentiate themselves by directly engaging with transfeminine trauma and the societal tropes and narratives that feed into that trauma, It is by directly engaging with the transfeminine traumas that transfeminine trauma literature separates itself from broader transfeminine literature that features traumatic elements.
It is of note that both of the works that I am writing about engage with the manner that the transfeminine is viewed as through a lens of horror, one is more psychological and the other is more of a thriller, but both have ties to how trauma is represented in horror as described by Roger Lockhurst in his analysis of Stephen King’s work in the book The Trauma Question (2008). The literary history of writing about trauma through the lens of horror with fantastical elements that King worked in is a solid groundwork for analysing transfeminine horror that features fantastical elements. In his analysis of Stephen King, Lockhurst places a focus on how trauma is represented in King’s work as a form of literary device that informs the development of the horror he writes about. The traumatic events that the characters he writes about are directly linked to the manners in which horror presents itself in each individual work. One such traumatic representation that Lockhurst describes is in the long story The Library Policeman (King, 1990), where the protagonist Sam is transformed by his traumatic experiences into what Lockhurst describes as a “post traumatic automaton”
The “post traumatic automaton” as Lockhurst calls it refers to a person who is so consumed by their trauma that they become a form of automaton, their decisions are fully informed by their trauma. This motif is one that appears in multiple works of traumatic fiction, where the recurring memories of an event, Nachträlich, impose themselves on the events of the Narrative. Lockhurst’s analysis of the representation of trauma within King’s works well in conjunction with the way that Stryker represents her own trauma surrounding her transfemininity as the two writers together introduce an aspect of trauma analysis that places a focus on the unique way that trauma affects transfeminine people and the manner in which that trauma is represented in works with a fantastical and horror elements like that of Manhunt and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones.
By understanding the manner in which transfeminine trauma is something done to transfeminine people through repeated actions and societal perceptions it becomes possible to observe how the monsters of transfeminine trauma literature are rooted in the discrimination faced by transfeminine people. It is through utilising this understanding of the unique trauma that is experienced by transfeminine people that it becomes possible to fully understand how Gretchen Felker-Martin and Torrey Peters represent transfeminine trauma in their writings.
Because of the monstering that transfeminine people experience as a part of turning the transfeminine into an ungrievable person, and the transfeminine internalisation of this monstering, a portion of transfeminine media has developed that incorporates this experience of othering as monstering and tells the story of what it is like to be the monster that society paints you as. This is because the trauma that is felt by the transfeminine is a unique one that is only felt by the transfeminine as they are an other in society that have their own unique ways of experiencing trauma. By incorporating the societal monstering that the transfeminine experiences, transfeminine trauma literature is able to explore the unique ways that this monstering affects the transfeminine.
Both Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones by Torrey Peters approach this idea of the transfeminine as a monster in society. In Manhunt the risk of the transfeminine becoming a monster is approached literally, and that threat hangs over the heads of the cast throughout the story, and everything they do is seen in reflection of this sword of damocles that could at any moment turn them into a violent monster. Whereas in Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones, the transfeminine does not become explicitly monstered, rather the novella explores how she is affected by the social monstering and how she responds to that monstering.
In Torey Peters’ novella, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a pathogen spreads through humanity eradicating the ability for humanity’s endocrine system to function.The novella is written in a non-chronological manner with the narrative alternating between exploring the aftermath of the contagion as well as the events leading up to the day that the pathogen is unleashed upon humanity. In the sections that take place pre-contagion the protagonist describes a series of moments where she was excluded from society and empathy on the basis of her being transfeminine and the acceptance she received from other transfeminine people despite the distance she places between herself and other transfeminine people. In the post-contagion sections the protagonist describes finding community amongst other trans women once more, and the empathy and care that comes from that connection as well as further descriptions of societal ostracisation from those who believe it was trans women who started the virus out of envy/jealousy.
Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones doesn’t demonstrate the trope of the transfeminine deceiver that Julia Serano outlines as a literal monster as is done in Manhunt, rather the novella grounds itself in more subtle demonstrations of the manners in which transfeminine people are monstered. This is shown partially through the rumour that it was a trans woman who was patient zero of the virus that eradicated the ability for anyone on the planet to produce hormones.
“In my sickness delirium after the shot, I told my traveling companion, a young evangelical, about Seattle: ground zero for the Contagion. Confessed myself as Patient Zero. She told me the poison made me imagine things. But when she stripped me, to get me out of my sweat-soaked clothes, and found my cock, she believed me. Trans women started the Contagion, everyone knew. They were jealous everyone else could breed. She told me the poison was God’s retribution.” (Peters 2016, 49)
Through this passage the audience told that society sees trans women as envious, coveting the bodies of cis women for what they can do. This attitude towards transfeminine people is a sign as to how the transfeminine is perceived by the society that exists in the novella, it is a subtle monstering that affects trans women greatly, but if it were to be pointed out it could easily be dismissed.
Whilst it is true that the virus originates from a trans woman with a heavily loaded emotional basis within Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, the central motivation for this is quite different. The creator of the infectious version of the endocrine-destroying virus states in response to being asked why she chose to develop the infectious virus “I was thinking that I want to live in a world where everyone has to choose their gender”. She wanted the world to have to experience the same choices she had to, as a transfeminine person. (Petters 2016, 30)
The dichotomy between the transfeminine asking for empathy and the societal dismissal of the transfeminine agency in favour of believing societal myths of the transfeminine is a reappearing motif in the novella, with the protagonist encountering it repeatedly. We see this quite clearly in the chapter titled “winter, seattle, one year to contagion”
““Yeah, that’s transphobia,” my crush agrees, “but not trauma.” He glances at my now finished drink, and I take it as a rebuke.” (Peters 2016, 44*)* Here a trans man is denying the experiences of a trans woman and her friends, he is telling the transfem narrator that the countless experiences of rejection and societal exclusion she is sharing with him. This denial of vulnerability and trauma is one that gets repeatedly demonstrated throughout the chapter, culminating in a complete denial that transfeminine people are traumatised at all, and that they are never sexually assaulted. It is through this denial of agency in describing their own lives and the wish to take control of the narrative that the novella forces an empathy with the transfeminine. We the audience are given a list of small events that on their own seem small, but to the transfeminine narrator we are shown that these moments are not isolated and rather are a collective pressure that is present in not only the narrator’s life, but that of her transfeminine companions.
Only, this is not made evident to her date, who again rebuts her exposition on the traumatising pressure, this time with an escalation.
“My crush sighs and pulls out an ace. He knows people that have actually been raped, have actually been beaten—hell, half of the trans dudes he knows have been, and they aren’t paralyzed with anger, convinced they’re constantly persecuted.” (Peters 2016, 44)
Once again the transfeminine narrator is denied agency in describing her trauma, though it is pertinent to consider the last phrase, “convinced they’re constantly persecuted”, Here the date is again engaging in the pressures that are felt by transfeminine, his comments are not without judgement and this contributes to the aforementioned pressure buildup. This is a very poignant representation of the ways that transfeminine trauma isn’t taken seriously and are instead minimised and sidelined.
The audience is invited in to see the ways in which society pressures transfeminine people and traumatises them through a function of monstering. It is also in this exploration of the moment that the narrator experiences a moment of nachträglichkeit where the narrator re-experiences the traumatising effect of the constant and traumatising pressure of a society that dismisses her agency in favour of monstering her for a small slight against those who are not transfeminine. Transfeminine is traumatised through a lack of empathy and understanding, and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones portrays this as the central thesis of its incorporation of transfeminine trauma literature.
In the story of Manhunt every human in the world becomes infected with a virus called t. rex, that mutates the carrier into a monster if their testosterone reaches a certain level. This means that anyone who has a certain level of testosterone, is at risk of becoming a monster, weather it is a trans woman, menopausal cis woman, cis man, etc. this monster is described as one whose entire existence revolves around sexual violence against women. What we see here is a mirroring of the transmisogynistic deceiver trope that Serano outlines in whipping girl. The transfeminine is seen as a risk to “real” women in the apocalypse, and that is because in the universe of Manhunt, they are. Serrano’s monster is portrayed literally
In the apocalypse of Manhunt the transmisogynistic image of the “dangerous AMAB” through the trope of the deceiver is a reality, portraying very literally the cultural perception of the transfeminine. Placing a strong focus on the trauma that is experienced by transfeminine people in society from a transfeminine perspective. Manhunt follows a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland as they navigate the complexities of an apocalypse where people who have a testosterone-dominant endocrine system are transformed into monsters. The two primary focalising characters, Beth and Fran, are trans women who hunt the people who have been transformed into monsters in order to gather their organs to synthesise oestrogen for cis women living in fortified cities.
Throughout their travels Beth and Fran experience a myriad of events that directly mirror real-world examples of institutional transmisogyny magnified through the lens of a post apocalypse. These events include examples of sexual assault, V-coding, forced labour, extreme punishment for digressions and much more. These traumatic events are taken literally, alongside the trauma that lies behind the ways that the transfeminine characters are monstered and are seen as having the potential to become monsters. This literalism of the trauma that transfeminine people experience is central to the way that the work deconstructs and reclaims the image of the transfeminine monster. This is because there really is a risk that the transfeminine transforms into a man that will harm others in the world of Manhunt.
This risk is one that the protagonists are acutely aware of, constantly fighting to suppress their testosterone levels to prevent the inevitable transformation into a man. With the protagonist Beth describing how her oestrogen supplements and testosterone suppression prevent the transformation into a man, letting her keep her humanity as a woman, later in the story we are told about how men born after the virus infected the world are castrated to prevent them turning into monster, as well as a story of a cis woman with PCOS transforming into a monster in a “wombyns only space”. The exact mechanisms of how this works is not described, but in effect creates a literalism between the societal myth of the deceiver that Juilia Serano outlined and the in-universe risk that the transfeminine protagonists might transform into a monster.
Transforming into a man is a painful one, but plays an important role in understanding how the monster that people with testosterone-dominant hormone profiles transform into is a symbol.
“The plague, t. rex, was as reliable as the atomic fucking clock. First relentless hunger pangs. Mood swings. Fever. Dermal fissures that wept pus and cloudy blood before scabbing over, bursting, and scabbing over again until the skin was nearly an inch thick in places. (Felker-Martin 2022, 5)”
This transformation straddles the line between literalism and metaphor, as it mirrors the effects felt by transfeminine people when they are unable to maintain an oestrogenic endocrine system and detransitioned. The different elements of the transformation, such as; the increased metabolism, emotional changes, a higher body temperature, and acne[^2] are all represented by the different physical transformations that produce the monster that is a man. It is in this description of what a man is in Manhunt that the reader is invited in to experience the transfeminine trauma of monstering for the first time.
The masculinising effects of testosterone are traumatic to the transfeminine, the effect of dysphoria is one that is omni-present in the lives of many transfeminine people. This trauma is a quiet trauma that slowly eats away at the transfeminine, one that she sees reflected in herself and masculine features that transfeminine people are perceived to have. By utilising the effects of testosterone, albeit in an exaggerated manner, on the human body as the monstrous features of the primary monster in the novel Felker-Martin not only creates a powerful metaphor for the dysphoria felt by transfeminine and the traumatising effects that come from the effects of an androgenic puberty and also incorporates the societal perception of the transfeminine and the trauma of being perceived as a man. The latter is part of the perception that I earlier referred to when mentioning the “dangerous AMAB”.
A key part of the monster that Felker-Martin describes in what men become after infection is the drive that they gain to sexually assault not just women, but anything that moves. With their urge to assault being described as the primary driving force in life post infection. Though an exaggeration, this feature is a key part of the perception that men possess an inherent danger to women and is a very clear metaphor for the way that transfeminine perception as a monster is centred in the supposed danger to women that transfeminine people possess. This is a deliberate forefronting and literalism of the supposed threat of sexual violence that underpins the narratives around transfeminine people and how transmisogyny is based on the perception of the transfeminine as a danger.
Though not an explicit example of the nachträglichkeit derived from the trauma of being seen as a monster or a danger that the characters experience it is a moment where the horror of what happens when a transfeminine woman can no longer “deceive” the world around her and the mask slips, and it is here that the threat of becoming a man that is a danger to women is made tangible. A true moment of nachträglichkeit comes later in the novel in a chapter called “dee licious”.
“After T-Day, it got worse. Fran could still picture the viral video of a trans girl succumbing to the virus whilst under observation at St. Vincent’s after bottom surgery, her skin splitting along her shoulder blades in the camera’s shaking frame, bloody foam dripping from her chin as she lurched through a privacy curtain and someone out of sight started to scream. She could still hear the pickup-fuzzed whisper of spotless green linen against antiseptic tile. In the year before the internet collapsed that video had been everywhere, spreading like black mold over twitter and facebook” (Felker-Martin 2022, 36)
The deceiving monster that threatens the safety of women is violently unveiled, and then in turn internalised by one of the protagonists Fran. This internalisation of the risk that one possesses is much like how the image of the deceiver is internalised by transfeminine people in general, as described by Susan Stryker in My Words to Victor Frankenstein (1994). This moment is one of many that impact the lives and decisions of the main cast, sticking throughout time, not allowing the transfeminine to forget the risk she poses.
Fran remembers the moment where another woman, one just like her, turns into a man. This moment sticks with her as it is a turning point in how transfeminine people are treated by the wider society. This scene demonstrates that it is not the possession phallus that defines the possibility of transforming into a man, rather it again draws a link between the real-life perception of the transfeminine as a type of deceiver and the in-universe danger that transfeminine people possess. This reification of the bioessentialism behind the risk of the transformation is what affects Fran as her specific trauma is directly linked to the risk that she could be seen as a man in any context.
Fran’s characterisation within the novel is partially built upon how her dysphoria and the way that being monstered affects her intertwines with her trauma. In the second act of the novel, whilst staying at a doomsday bunker that was built before the collapse of society. We are demonstrated this in how Fran reacts to being told that a vaginoplasty is still possible for her. Fran becomes a “post traumatic automaton”, making choices that are purely informed by her trauma surrounding her phallus and the potential it holds. In becoming this automaton Fran distances herself from the other transfeminine protagonist Beth, and aligns herself with those who would bring harm to a transfeminine person the moment the transfeminine demonstrates a potential risk of harming a “real woman” because it would give Fran a possibility to “escape” her trauma.
We see this specific aspect of transfeminine trauma mirrored through Beth’s perspective in chapter six, titled “safe space”, In reference to the common practice that many organisations and groups use to signal that a place is safe from the wider bigotries of society, or at the very least tries to be. This motif is reified within the chapter on page 113 where we are shown the signage on the door of a house from Beth’s past: “THIS IS A SAFE SPACE FOR PEOPLE OF ALL GENDERS, RACES, FAITHS, AND SEXUALITIES!” (Felker-Martin 2022, 113). It is here that the reality of the lived experience of Beth and two other transfem people clashes with the signalled virtue of the house they are being kicked out of. This contrast starkly demonstrates a moment where transfeminine people are monstered for a potential to turn into something inhuman and violent despite them not having done anything of the sort yet. In an act of self preservation the people of the house who are immune to the disease that is spreading around the globe choose to condemn three trans women to death. This decision is one that deeply affects the lives of the trans women, as they are the ones who would die at the hands of the virus, a fate that is prevented by maintaining an oestrogen dominant hormone profile. This is however irrelevant to the people of the house; the trans women are seen as men, and men have the potential to become monsters. This potential to become a monster is a motif that is omnipresent.
It is further down on the very same page where the traumatic elements we see in the flashback are brought to completion as one of Beth’s companions is violently killed by a former housemate as she lets out anguished screams at being kicked out to die amidst the apocalypse and left to die.
“The air conditioner. Beth hadn’t seen who pushed it. A hand. Curtains swirling. Bone. Blood. A sound like an egg cracking against the rim of a metal bowl. The slow, sluglike glide of the yolk over stainless steel. It looked too real. TV with the motion smoothing on, the actors’ faces home-video raw and sharp. Tara screaming. Her nails digging hard into Beth’s arm. (Felker-Martin 2022, 113)
The reader is not spared the gruesome details and is forced to (re)experience the traumatic event alongside Beth in her flashback. The killer is not revealed, making explicit the act of murder that was to exclude trans women from the safe space was a violence that could come from anywhere. Finally the flashback ends with the suicide of Beth’s other companion for the same reason the group was exiled, the fear of becoming a monster. This flashback demonstrates in a microcosm the ways Beth is repeatedly traumatised throughout the apocalypse, which is in turn a mirroring of the ways society treats transfeminine individuals. The potential to become a monster hangs over their heads, and is used to degrade them into a lesser type of person, one who it is acceptable to exclude and even kill if there is a hint of potential violence towards a “real woman”.
The perception of transfeminine as a type of monster that poses an innate risk to those who are not transfeminine is central to the narratives of both Manhunt and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. As the two stories are works that explore the ways that the transfeminine is not only seen as a danger to the world around them, but as a vindictive and deceiving group that constantly possesses a potential to “do harm”. The stories counteract the narratives that are built up around the transfeminine by inviting the audience into the trauma that is experienced by transfeminine people through this monstering and othering.
Though in Manhunt the origin of the pathogen is unknown, the inverse is true in the case of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. This is because in Peters’ novella the creation of the pathogen is directly linked to the constant thematic throughline of transfeminine people not being extended empathy or understanding and the effects that has on transfeminine people. As touched on earlier the pathogen was created by a transfeminine person who wanted people to have to experience the same choice that transfeminine people experience when transitioning. However the contagion is only unleashed upon humanity after the protagonist experiences a transmisogynistic and violent attack from two cis people, and willingly infects them as an act of revenge for all the ills that she has faced at the hands of a society that constantly works to other transfeminine people.
The pathogen, and by extension the novella, is a development of the transfeminine desire to be understood. It was created in an attempt to bridge the gap between the general population and the transfeminine who is othered by society and turned into an ungrievable person through a lack of understanding that derives from societal monstering. This desire for empathy is an important thematic element that encircles almost every decision made by transfeminine people in both Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and Manhunt.
Throughout Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones we as an audience are constantly shown the term “T4T”, an acronym for the phrase “trans for trans” that was originally used between trans women who were seeking relation with other trans women. In the novella the protagonist describes how the acronym developed into a symbol of solidarity between transfem groups. With her describing how she was included into transfeminine social groups despite her mistreatment of someone close to her and further on into describing how it became a marker of who is safe after the apocalypse. This is shown to be because it is only other transfeminine people that truly understood the experience of being transfem.
The protagonist also describes how this intimate understanding of other transfeminine people and their traumas creates a unique type of solidarity and community. She describes this through the transfeminine insult “brick”, describing how the word is used to degrade trans women who don’t pass due to their “square” features. The protagonist goes on to describe a secondary meaning behind the term; how it being used as an insult is an auxiliary usage to the implied meaning by calling transfeminine people bricks.
“…masonry: as in brick-on-brick love—only bricks get stuck to other bricks.” (Peters 2016, 42) This is where the term brick becomes a symbol for transfeminine solidarity. As transfeminine people are excluded from society, they seek each other out and build their own communities and collectives that support each other, like bricks being stacked together to construct a house. This metaphor is one that underpins the theme of empathy that exists within the novella, that transfeminine people are the only ones who will love other transfeminine people in a world that isolates the transfeminine., and that it is transfeminine solidarity that holds them together.
The brick metaphor moves into the scene that was analysed earlier in this paper in the chapter titled “winter, seattle, one year to contagion” through descriptions of discrimination that transfeminine people feel in the world of dating*.* By directly following a metaphor for the manner in which transfeminine people love each other with descriptions of how transfeminine people are seen as undesirable in the dating market and a scene that describes how transfeminine people are not understood by wider society Peters creates a story that centres the transfeminine need for empathy.
Felker-Martin in Manhunt Directly references the ideas brought up by Peters. This intertextual commentary on the theme of transfeminine empathy in the face of societal exclusion is the primary theme of the third act of the novel, with the novel’s paratext directly quoting the passage in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones where the terminology and meanings behind the word “brick” is described. This citation is the introduction of a major thesis of the novel as well as a construction of the dynamics that would take place in the final act.
The final act of the novel is the culmination of the tensions between transfeminine people and cis women that are present within the novel. In the act, our protagonists find themselves in a transfeminine commune, surrounded by other transfeminine people, it is only when they find themselves in this commune that they find themselves truly comfortable. Beth and Fran experience the empathy they missed from wider society in this apocalypse. As Beth and Fran find community, the primary antagonistic force of the story (the TERFS) gear up to invade the commune and destroy it.
In the epilogue, after the battle and in the aftermath of the final conflict a; conversation between Beth and a dying TERF traitor called Ramona who sympathised with transfeminine people takes place. Ramona has developed throughout the novel, going from someone who staunchly believed in the anti-transfeminine rhetoric that surrounded her to someone with sympathy for transfeminine people. This conversation centres the empathetic core of the novel.
““I gave up… everything,” she said, her voice cracking into a pained sob. “You have… no idea… what I lost. What I sacrificed… for you people.”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” Beth turned, heading for the front door. “You’re lucky we don’t fucking hang you.”” (Felker-Martin 2022, 290)
Here we see that Ramona engages with the transfeminine plight in society as an outsider, Beth explicitly tells Ramona that she doesn’t understand what it is like to be a transfeminine person. The audience is shown that despite Ramona sacrificing her life and position in her social groups for transfeminine people she still sees them as something other. There is still a separation between the hegemonic us of cis women and the other that is transfeminine people. It is also through this conversation that we are reminded of the thematic element of empathy in this act and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. Transfeminine people are the only ones who understand and create community with each other, T4T becomes a symbol for the transfeminine empathy that is central to the survival of transfeminine people in the face of a society that exclusively sees them as outsiders.
Yet through discussing this gap and separation, what it feels like to be constructed as an outsider and isolated from wider society, and the consequences of that the audience is again invited to cross the bridge of what it means to sit outside society, to be ungrievable. For a cisgender audience moments like this are not moments of trauma-porn, rather they are moments that are constructed to create empathy between the two groups. Trauma is used as a narrative tool in the works to invite understanding and care, as understanding trauma can lead to empathy.
Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones opens on a scene where the protagonist is learning to care for pigs that are used to synthesise large amounts of oestrogen in a similar manner to insulin pigs. She is engaging with this as part of a plan to steal a breeding pair of pigs and begin her own oestrogen supply for herself and her fellow transfeminine people whom she has found community with in the apocalypse. The production of hormones is something that is kept out of the hands of most people in the novella, especially to transfeminine people.
The pig being used to produce hormones in the same manner as pigs were once used to produce insulin is not an unimportant feature, the invention of insulin synthesis was revolutionary and life-saving. This makes the symbolism of hormones and pigs within the confines of the novella a symbol of how hormone treatment is seen as a life or death need for transfeminine people. It is not made explicit that transition is not a choice, it is survival. By drawing the connection between survival and transition Peters makes a statement on the necessity of the protagonist’s action, she does it out of a need to survive and a need to help other transfeminine people.
The pigs however, are in the hands of a person who is not transfeminine, rather they are controlled by a man who embodies the antithesis of trans femininity. “He’s got the macho bravado of all the T-slabs, complete with the aggression and rages—plus he’s six-foot-five if he’s an inch” (Peters 2016, 9) This incredibly masculine man, referred to as a “T-slab” controls transition, for the transfeminine, and in him maintaining control of transition the transfeminine is denied agency in her own body once again. It is only through subverting the systems and stealing her own pig that the transfeminine can achieve true liberation from the structures that degrade her femininity within the systems that exist in our society. This act of subversion of the status quo is an act of reclamation of their womanhood in the system.
This metaphor is expounded on in the Manhunt where the reclamation of womanhood from wider systems becomes a literal act of consumption. In the post apocalypse of the novel the ability to synthesise hormones has become difficult as the resources needed to do so have long since collapsed. Instead the hormones needed to stave off the transformation into a monster are synthesised from the monsters themselves. Certain internal organs can be used to synthesise oestrogen that is then sold to cis menopausal women to prevent their transformation. As there is a denigration of the transfeminine in the world of Manhunt there is a refusal to share the resources of processed oestrogen with them, leaving transfeminine people to take things into their own hands and supplement their oestrogen through alternative means. The method of oestrogen supplementation that the transfeminine characters use is the consumption of the testicles of the transformed men.
The consumption of the testicle, the literal symbol of masculinity, to maintain womanhood is an incredibly layered metaphor, but one of the main elements to this metaphor and the central one to this analysis is that the consumption of the testicle is a symbol of reclaiming from the monster that society sees the transfeminine as. Where Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones uses the reclaiming of control of hormones by wider society as a metaphor for the reclamation of transfeminine liberation, Manhunt uses the literal consumption of the symbol of manhood as a symbol for the way that transfeminine people will reclaim control of their lives in the face of a society that actively turns them into monsters.
This act of reclaiming is a mirroring of one of the bigger themes of the novel that I have already touched on in my analysis, that being the theme of reclaiming symbols in general. Much of the depiction of the transfeminine within the novel is informed by social elements. The depiction of the transfeminine as a being that has the potential to transform into a monster mirrors societal depictions of transfeminine people as a ticking time clock to become a monster. The enslavement of the transfeminine, for labour and as sex slaves, mirrors how the transfeminine is pushed into menial labour and the phenomenon of V-coding in society. Much of the novel revolves around taking these ideas and depictions of the transfeminine and recouping them into a narrative that is wholly transfeminine.
Transfeminine othering and the reclamation thereof is a transfeminist tradition that has existed for a long time, and is exemplified by Susan Stryker’s personal essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix. In following Stryker’s footsteps Felker-Martin writes a transfeminine trauma narrative where the pain and monstering of being othered fuels the narrative, and also fuels the community that is found. The transfeminine trauma that permeates the novel is a narrative tool to build the empathy between the transfeminine and the rest of the world, but it is also there for the transfeminine to reclaim their trauma.
By telling a story that is shaped by the traumas of the transfeminine people as well as the ways that wider society degrades and demeans the transfeminine, Felker-martin creates a narrative where the transfeminine confronts these ills and recouperates them. This meta narrative is what gets depicted by the myriad of scenes throughout the novel of the consumption of the testicles of men, the monster that the transfeminine is seen as is consumed by the transfeminine as a symbol of re-incorporating the traumas that affect them. And throughout the novel the testicles become easier to swallow, as a symbol for the reintegration of transfeminine trauma into an individual that moves beyond the state of post-traumatic automata that surrounds the characters in the first act of the novel.
The first scene of testicles being consumed happens in the chapter “the prize drawer” where Beth and Fran eat them raw. The experience of eating testicles is not described in a positive light. “… the pungent gamey stink of the testicle coated her tongue like oil… She swallowed, fighting her gag reflex the whole way” (Felker-Martin 2022, ). This scene takes place early on in the story, just as we the audience begins to learn about how much Fran’s trauma affects her. The unpleasantness of eating testicles runs corollary to the lack of incorporation of trauma that the characters are burdened with. Later in the novel once the characters have recuperated some of their traumas and incorporated them into their new lives the experience of eating testicles is more pleasant, sauteed in butter and served over rice.
The literal consumption of the monster mirroring how the transfeminine trama becomes slowly reincorporated into the lives of the transfeminine character, allowing them to move on and find community and love amongst each other. With each event becoming easier to move through instead of being fixated on the previous traumatic elements such as flashbacks. It is also through the incorporation of the trauma that the transfeminine in the novel becomes whole, instead of conforming to what society demands of the transfeminine they find themselves in their own understandings of themselves, with the traumatic elements of the narrative shaping them and also becoming symbols in the face of mounting pressures from the wider society.
Trauma narratives have the capacity to relate the audience of the work to the traumatic events that are described in the narrative. This capacity for empathy is often used to relate othered members of society to that of the hegemonic majority. Trauma narratives like that of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward are poignant examples of this, creating a bridge between the black working class protagonists of the novel and the wider society. The books Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones by Torrey Peters are works that aim to achieve those same empathetic effects for transfeminine people.
By exploring traumatic events through the lens of the transfeminine protagonists with a horror/fictional twist the authors of these works allow the audiences into an understanding of the traumatic effects that being transfeminine in a transmisogynistic society brings. The two works utilise fantastical elements to apply a layer hyperbole to the experiences of being transfeminine in society. Where Infect Your Friend and Loved Ones layers the transfeminine exclusion with society othering and suspicion for ending the world, Manhunt layer the transfeminine trauma with metaphors that describe the experience of being seen as a potential vector for harm, whilst also describing the very real material inequalities that transfeminine people experience in society through those same metaphors.
The two works simultaneously build an empathetic narrative for the transfeminine trauma subject, whilst also reclaiming the symbols of transfeminine trauma in wider society as symbols that can be separated from the transfeminine. It is through this transfeminine perspective that the trauma becomes a symbol that can be recuperated and reincorporated into the transfeminine experience.
Bhatt, Talia. 2024. “The Transmisogyny Bible: A Critical Dissection”, Trans/Rad/Fem. April 24th, 2024 https://taliabhattwrites.substack.com/p/the-transmisogyny-bible-a-critical
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Felker-Martin, Gretchen. 2022. Manhunt. Tom Doherty Associates
Gibbs, Alan. 2014. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh University Press.
Kanaka, Naomi. 2024. Just Happy to Be Here. HarperTeen
Lockhurst, Roger. 2008. The Trauma Question. Routledge
Peters, Torrey. 2016. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Peters, Torrey. 2021. Detransition Baby. One World
Raymond, Janice G. 1994. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.
Rumfitt, Alison. 2021. Tell Me I’m Worthless. Cipher Press
Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl. Seal Press.
Stryker, Susan. 2011. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein. Above the Village of Chamounix - Performing Transgender Rage”. Kvinder, Køn \& Forskning, nr. 3-4 (juni). https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i3-4.28037.