The Transfeminine Review

Oh, Fictionmania.

It’s our community’s hellsite (affectionate) and hellsite (derogatory). It’s the yawning chasm out of which our literary community emerged from the aughts. If you’ve ever engaged with the TG/TF genre (Transgender/Transformation), the transfeminine community’s underground genre, then you’ve almost certainly been there at least once, and boy oh boy is there a lot to unpack.

The first thing that you need to know is that this is Very Serious Literary Criticism. I don’t think that anyone’s ever sat down and really tried to document the structure of this website, and there is so much fascinating discourse and deep diving to be done here. ERGO, I will be treating this tier list with nothing less than the GRAVITY and the DUBIOUS TRANS HUMOR that it deserves.

Secondly, in the interests of avoiding redundancy, I’ve combined several categories that overlap with each other. You can tag as many categories as you want on Fictionmania, so there tends to be a lot of overlap between some of these anyway.

And lastly, while my sterling decade of reading TG/TF basically every night since I was thirteen has prepared me well for this pivotal moment in my career, I must add the disclaimer that, of course, these are all my opinions, and I am not here to judge or cast moral aspersions on anyone else’s degenerate trash gutter rat art ❤ Unless you’re racist or using AI, then I will absolutely cast moral aspersions on you.

I’ll take it category by category and offer my Very Important Insights for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

This article was made possible by our wonderful Sponsors! If you want to contribute to essential transgender journalism like this, then please feel free to go support our work on Patreon – your contributions help us keep Academic Quality Scholarship like this 100% free and available to the general public.

1. Dumpster Fire
   1. #49 – AI-generated
   2. #48 – Cultural Change
   3. #47 – She Males
2. Extremely Dubious
   1. #46 – Age Progression/Age Regression
   2. #45 – Physically Forced or Blackmailed
   3. #44 – Workplace Situations
3. Why is it Here?
   1. #43 – Puzzles
   2. #42 – Comics
   3. #41 – Poetry
   4. #40 – Not TG
4. It’s Fine
   1. #39 – Non-English Story
   2. #38 – Shared Universes
   3. #37 – Humor
   4. #36 – Smoking/Tattoos/Piercings
   5. #35 – Lingerie/Uniform
   6. #34 – Seasonal/Halloween/St. Valentines
   7. #33 – The Operation
5. Somewhat Uneven
   1. #32 – Pop Culture
   2. #31 – Historical/Medieval Times
   3. #30 – Femdom/Authoritarian
   4. #29 – Bad Boy to Good Girl/Good Boy to Bad Girl
   5. #28 – Multiple Transformations
   6. #27 – Female to Male Transformation
   7. #26 – Real Life Situation/Transitioning
   8. #25 – Action/Adventure
   9. #24 – Undercover/Detective/In Hiding
   10. #23 – Bondage
   11. #22 – Fast Transformation
6. The Good Stuff
   1. #21 – Chemical or Drug Induced Changes
   2. #20 – Sweet/Sentimental
   3. #19 – Non-Human Transformation/Turned into an Object
   4. #18 – Bizarre Body Modifications
   5. #17 – Identity Theft
   6. #16 – Stuck
   7. #15 – Deals, Bets, or Dares
   8. #14 – Tricked or Secretly Forced
   9. #13 – Horror
   10. #12 – Sci-Fi
   11. #11 – Body Suits
   12. #10 – Accidental Transition
   13. #9 – Slow Transition
7. Icons of TG/TF
   1. #8 – Victorian Times
   2. #7 – Identity Death
   3. #6 – Crossdressing/TV
   4. #5 – Caught with Consequences/Crime Punishment/Sexual Punishment/Revenge
   5. #4 – Mind Altered, Hypnosis, Brainwashed
   6. #3 – Body Swap/Mind Transfer/Mind Possession
   7. #2 – Bimbo
   8. #1 – Magical Transformation

Dumpster Fire

#49 – AI-generated

To start things off on a spicy note, let’s talk about how AI-generated slop has completely ruined modern TG/TF sites!

Language Learning Models (LLMs) work at their best with a consistent dataset of easily formulated writings; it is not ‘intelligent,’ it simply analyzes thousands upon thousands of examples to determine a predictive algorithm for the next ‘likely’ word in the sentence.

It might be surprising that the trans literary community would be an ideal, if not perfect, model for these systems to learn to write fiction. But if you know anything about the history of the TG/TF genre, it’s not a mystery why it’s so easy for an AI writing program to dash off some passable, albeit uncanny, trans erotica. TG/TF is one of the most conservative literary genres of the 20th century – there are stories written in 1960 that resemble ones in 2010 down to the word choice and sentence structure. What this means is that an LLM has a contiguous dataset of over 60 years, largely digitized, with very recognizable patterns and simple language, to parse and regurgitate into a grotesque fascimile of the human muse.

I find AI-gen TG/TF extremely offensive in no small part because it does not take a lot of effort to write a mediocre TG/TF story. Frankly, you can write some dogshit grammar with atrocious structure about the most morally hideous thing you’ve ever seen on paper, and as long as the boi gets the boobs, there’ll be people who read it. A TG/TF story can literally be as rote as a clinical description of a man turning into a woman. Like. That’s the barrier of entry here.

It is morally and aesthetically repulsive that there are ‘writers’ lazy enough not just to write that slop, but to steal from other writers. The fact that there are authors who are too lazy to write shitty TG/TF is just. I hate it on so many levels.

Burn it. Burn it with fire.

#48 – Cultural Change

The only reason this is not on the bottom is because in very rare circumstances, I have seen interesting and nuanced takes on this – mostly by trans women of color – that actually treat this with the gravitas and heaviness it deserves.

That’s the only redeeming factor here.

Mostly, however, this category is a giant compilation of the most virulent racism I have ever read in a fictional medium. The unbelievable amount of antiblackness, Islamophobia, Orientalism, gross charicature of Thailand especially and Asia more broadly, xenophobia, and just sheer nastiness that the Whiter and more conservative pits of the transliterary community have output over the last few decades is, simply put, fucking nauseating.

This is the kind of shit that the people who liked the whole ‘transracialism’ moment in the mid-2010s read on a nightly basis.

It’s categories like this that make a lot of contemporary trans writers ashamed to have ever been an active part of this website.

#47 – She Males

Let’s be so real – these stories are almost never written by trans women, and they’re almost never for trans women either. It’s mostly fetish porn for white dudes who get off on trans bodies, but don’t actually like trans women or what they represent.

Is it great that the primary hub for trans fiction for over a decade has an entire category dedicated to fetishizing its subject matter?

No. No it’s not.

Extremely Dubious

#46 – Age Progression/Age Regression

Now this one is a mixed bag. On one hand, you can get some really sweet and interesting young adult fiction that really digs into the trans fantasy of a childhood do-over. There’s also the whole ‘turned into a mother’ genre that can, at its best, reflect in really interesting ways on the transfeminine wish to give birth/be pregnant. For those merits, I can’t really justify throwing this one down into the Dumpster Fire tier with the others.

However.

What you also get in this category are extremely gross stories that use the age-shift plot device to play out some really gross underage and incest taboos. And I hate those stories so much that they’re enough to drag what would otherwise be a rather innocent and hopeful category nearly all the way down to the bottom of the list. Let’s keep the early YA and the sweet stories about motherhood, and torch the rest of it.

#45 – Physically Forced or Blackmailed

I want to note that this is separate from the ‘Caught with Consequences’ category, which’ll be higher on the list. Specifically, I rate this category so low because I’ve found that many of the most disturbing rape and torture fantasies that the cis authors have about trans women get filtered through this category. Some of the most nauseating TG/TF I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading starts from the premise ‘what if we kidnapped a man and raped him until he became a woman?’

Obviously, there are a lot of good stories here too. The Sisters of Dorley probably falls into this category. But wow, are the lows lower than the fucking Marianas Trench.

#44 – Workplace Situations

This might be a controversial placement, but look. I get it. The 1970s and 1980s had a total fetish for workplace harassment, and a lot of early TG/TF stories were written by white collar men who either secretly wanted to transition or got off to the thought of it. If you’re a bored trans woman in the closet sitting in your cubicle and fantasizing about a better life, I can totally understand why you might want to write a story about getting hypnotized into wearing a slutty skirt and crawling under the CEO’s desk. Whatever.

Not to cite Alyson Greaves again, but Show Girl probably fits into this category, so like. Under an extremely skilled (trash goblin) pen, this can also be done well.

That does not change the fact that I loathe the way many of these stories give zero shits about sexism or bodily autonomy, and just gleefully luxuriate at the sexual subservience of trans women within the system of capital. It’s nasty, and I don’t like it, and honestly the fact that it’s even a category dates this website back to the 90s better than any user interface ever could.

Why is it Here?

#43 – Puzzles

What.

#42 – Comics

Just go to TGComics. Like I genuinely do not understand why you would go to Fictionmania for TG/TF comics when TGComics exists.

#41 – Poetry

I mean, this is cool. I have never once clicked on it, but I’m glad that people are expressing themselves through verse?

#40 – Not TG

It’s cool that there’s a space for regular authors on the site to share some of their unrelated work, but I can’t really justify ranking it any higher than this. I’m glad it exists, though! Hopefully people got a chance to branch out, experiment, stretch their wings.

It’s Fine

#39 – Non-English Story

I’m always happy to see inclusion for trans voices outside of the Anglosphere, but there really isn’t much of anything to say about this category.

#38 – Shared Universes

There are between ten and twenty categories on Fictionmania that are specifically designated for collaborative projects in specific worlds and continuities between writers. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, and all of them feel very dated to the late 90s and the mid 00s. I don’t have strong opinions about these, honestly – if you like them, you like them, and if you don’t, they’re just taking up space on the categories list. YMMV.

#37 – Humor

I recognize that humor and satire is the black sheep genre of basically any book classification system, but I’m seriously struggling to come up with a time that a Fictionmania story made me laugh. Not saying they aren’t out there! But of all of the genre categories on the website, this probably feels like the most underdeveloped, especially when you contrast it against trans humorists in other arenas and mediums.

#36 – Smoking/Tattoos/Piercings

Look – plenty of trans women smoke. I don’t get it, you couldn’t pay me to touch a cigarette, but they do.

But like. A ‘smoking’ category? What is this, an airport?

#35 – Lingerie/Uniform

This is probably a controversial pick, because I know that the sissy community absolutely eats for this shit. And it’s classic, it’s timeless, I get it. There’s another category later that hits on a lot of what I like about these stories, so this isn’t me writing off the topic entirely. In the year of our Lord 2025, though, I think most trans women would agree that TG/TF that only cares about the clothes is superficial at best, and kinda invalidating at worst.

#34 – Seasonal/Halloween/St. Valentines

Halloween stories can be a lot of fun! Costuming is a natural vehicle for trans shenanigans, and there’s a long history of those stories. I’ve also read no small share of Christmas fics.

That being said, this is still the Hallmark Channel of TG/TF erotica.

#33 – The Operation

I have conflicting feelings about this one.

On one hand, in a world where finding accurate medical information for trans women could be really difficult, this category offered a place for trans people to vent both their hopes, worries, and experiences with gender affirming surgery. That type of grounded exploration can be super valuable, and in the passing culture of the aughts, I think there’s some really meaningful storytelling that happens here.

By the same token, though, ‘the operation’ was also often a plot device used in some of the most unpleasant and repugnant stories on the site. Way too many stories treat this category as short-hand for ‘mutilation,’ and portray some incredibly gory and violent ideas of medical transition that have little to no grounding in reality.

There’s also the looming specter of Conundrum syndrome, the ‘once I get my vagina I’ll be a real woman’ argument.

I wanted to rank this both lower and higher, but at the end of the day, the truth is that GRS was a basic reality for a lot of trans women in the heyday of this website, and this category reflects that in all its messiness. So, ultimately, I stuck it in the middle of the list.

Somewhat Uneven

#32 – Pop Culture

If you want the very definition of ‘mixed bag,’ this category is 100%. This can mean basically anything – fanfiction, creepy stories about real-life people, cultural references, so on and so forth. It really varies story-by-story, which makes it challenging to say much of anything about it.

#31 – Historical/Medieval Times

Note that this is only bundling the ‘Historical’ and ‘Medieval’ categories. ‘Victorian’ is a lot higher on the list.

My hesitations with this category are rather similar to the ‘Cultural Change’ and ‘Workplace’ categories. Way too often, this category is used as an excuse to write grotesque sexism or rape fantasies, slave play, racism in a historical context – nothing good. The ‘Medieval’ category especially has always felt like it has a bit of Game of Thrones syndrome where the trappings of Medieval Europe are basically just an excuse for the author to write out sexist fantasies about a woman’s place in the world.

Given how broad the category is, though, there’s a ton of really good material here. It can also be really challenging to find historical fiction by trans authors, which means that this is often the only place to find it for a certain area. So even with its nastier side, you can’t really generalize about this one.

#30 – Femdom/Authoritarian

Look. There are people who live for this stuff. I’ve never really understood it, it’s not my community, and I’ve never been able to get through much of it.

If this is your jam, go off. It’s not for me.

#29 – Bad Boy to Good Girl/Good Boy to Bad Girl

We’re getting to the part of the list where people will start to have Opinions(tm)! So here’s a controversial one – I don’t like morality change stories, or specifically ones where the whole emotional crux of the narrative essentially relies on riffing upon the madonna/whore complex.

The core ideas that go into a ‘bad’ or ‘good’ girl are so deeply constructed by a cultural Christianity that I often feel uncomfortable reading these stories as a Jew. It’s very deeply vested in a Neo-Aristotelian view of the world, vice and virtue, saints and sinners. And a lot of the stories tackle that! There are some really interesting pieces that dig into the whole ‘sex is sin’ paradigm, and especially in the ‘corruption’ subgenre, there are a lot of fascinating explorations of that Christian worldview and the fucked up ways that trans people exist within them.

What turns me off about these stories, however, is the way that a moral binary gets projected onto a gender binary, irrespective of which way you paint the duck. Regardless of what it’s trying to say about its subject matter, I find that the underlying structure of the binary often subverts good intentions on the part of the author and twists their ideas back in service of a gendered ethical hierarchy – often one ordered by a White Christian worldview, no less.

I could write a whole essay about this, probably. This will suffice for the moment.

#28 – Multiple Transformations

I’m sorry, the whole ‘Let’s play a board game that’ll transform us every time we play a card’ genre is exhausting.

For a genre that turns on themes of transformation, I really do think that this category proves that even here, there can be too much of a good thing. When the characters just morph, and morph, and morph, until they’ve changed so many times that they’re barely even recognizable, I often find that when it’s done in an erotic context (not horror), it can be ungendering. Like that deep, deep exhaustion of getting so hyperfixated on the logistics and bodily mechanics of transition that you completely lose sight of why you wanted it in the first place.

It’s just very depersonalizing. I get it, but I really hope that trans women who read a lot of this are able to find themselves a healthier media diet.

#27 – Female to Male Transformation

Let me be clear – this is absolutely not a knock on my transmasc family. It’s more to say that stories of FTM transition are almost always an afterthought in this genre, for both better and worse. This isn’t down here because it’s bad – anything but – but rather because it’s a total afterthought in a writing community dominated by trans women and cis men.

Make of that what you will.

#26 – Real Life Situation/Transitioning

The TG/TF girlies are really good at a lot of things, but realistic fiction? Ehhh.

Honestly this is just the most boring, vanilla category on the whole list. It’s rarely taking an interesting viewpoint or perspective on transitioning or the Real Life test. When it does, it’s almost always a cross-over with another genre. Contemporary trans literary fiction makes this look like high school writing.

Since it is such a blank canvas, you can’t really go lower with it. I’ve read some phenomenal stuff here. But it’s just such a nothingburger.

#25 – Action/Adventure

There’s a real genre issue here – the short and formulaic nature of most TG/TF fiction doesn’t really jibe super well with the action genre. Most of these stories are either stories about a badass trans woman action hero that just happen to have a transformation at the beginning, or they feel like extremely rough drafts of a formula that wouldn’t be perfected until the emergence of TGStorytime and later Scribblehub.

Fictionmania can’t do multiple chapter fics, which doesn’t help.

#24 – Undercover/Detective/In Hiding

I had a really interesting chat with Robyn Gigl a few months ago about why trans women don’t really engage as much with the mystery or detective genres. IMO I think a lot of it comes down to an inherent distrust and dislike of anything cop-adjacent, which, valid. It does mean that this is kind of a neglected genre, though I do find the standard of quality to be higher than most of the ones listed thus far.

Good stories, but I suspect that the audience mostly isn’t transfemme.

#23 – Bondage

I mean, it’s fine? But it also doesn’t really have anything to do with trans stuff and I wouldn’t really describe it as a genre, so… I guess if you’re into that, it’s there for you.

#22 – Fast Transformation

I know that this is a weird category to end this section with, but I do genuinely think that this category is objectively worse than its ‘Slow Transformation’ cousin. I’ve never been a fan of ‘blink and you miss it’ TG/TF that takes about a paragraph to turn its MC into a girl before going from there – it’s just such a less compelling way to explore transition.

Frankly, I’ve always seen this trope as a sign that the author is more interested in exploring what it’s like to be a cis woman than a trans woman. And I get the fantasy of wanting to be cis, and there was a time in my life where I would happily indulge in this. But having fully transitioned, it just rings kinda hollow for me.

Transition is a process. It takes years. And the fast transformation trope is a seductive little poison pill, it’s immediate gratification. It’s wish fulfillment, sure, but it doesn’t give its characters a chance to breathe, or process, or even think about their situation.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that this category is a perfect encapsulation of how good TG/TF is not always good trans fiction. Many of the best stories in this category explore characters that aren’t very trans at all.

The Good Stuff

#21 – Chemical or Drug Induced Changes

The years go by, and X-Change Pill stories stay exactly the same…

It’s hard to rank this one, because it can mean anything from literally just taking HRT to magical gender pills to getting kidnapped and drugged at an underground facility. She’s versatile!

What I like about this category, though, is that it’s one of the few places where I see people really exploring and playing with the more medicalized aspects of modern transition. So much of the way we receive and take HRT is dictated by strict diagnosis standards and stuffy gatekeepers. If you’re joking around about estrogen with your endo, there is a legitimate worry that you might not get it! So HRT and hormones are often, while not a taboo subject, not one with much room for discussion either.

The drug-induced changes category gives trans people the freedom to imagine their own healthcare, and that’s enough to raise it up here, despite its common overlap with many of the rapier categories on this list.

#20 – Sweet/Sentimental

The world has never been particularly kind to trans women – but in these stories, if only for a little bit, it can be. That’s powerful, and even though I don’t find much substance here now, I can’t imagine how reading these stories might have felt in the 90s.

I’m glad this category has existed for as long as it has.

#19 – Non-Human Transformation/Turned into an Object

You guys know I’m a sucker for weird trans fiction, and this is the prime location for it on Fictionmania. Some of the strangest and most inventive things I’ve ever read are in here, and I think that rocks. And obviously there’s enough furry content to sink a ship.

This category particularly interests me from a transhumanist standpoint, because it poses really gripping questions about what it means to have a body or a gender, and how that moves through and beyond us. It’s also an old category – unlike some of the ones on this list, you can trace this stuff all the way back to Greek mythology, and earlier. An ancient tradition in its quiet modern form.

#18 – Bizarre Body Modifications

I debated lumping this in with the last category, but ultimately I decided that both in theme and content it needs to stand alone, even if my feelings are similar.

BodMod is interesting because it really digs its teeth into the bone marrow of dysphoria and dysmorphia, and the various neuroses and insecurities of the trans psyche. It’s a category that pairs extremely well with both horror and the various non-consent categories, and its presence in the story is almost always an efficient vehicle to rupturing biological sex on the page, and through it our underlying assumptions of gender and hierarchy. It’s a really compelling trope, even if what makes it great is better encapsulated in some of the upcoming categories.

#17 – Identity Theft

I kinda hate this category lol. It totally squicks me out, I don’t read it, I don’t like it.

Yet somehow, here it is all the way up in the top twenty.

There is an existential angst that a lot of trans lesbians have to deal with when coming to terms with themselves – do I like her, or do I want to be her? And this type of story, however discomforting, really digs into the nauseating ethics and implications of that. It interrogates trans imposter syndrome, it questions what it means to be a ‘real woman,’ what it even means to have an identity. At what point do you stop being yourself and start being someone else?

#16 – Stuck

This is a simple one, but a classic. Oh no, I turned into a girl and I can’t turn back! It’s an interesting category because it explores many of the same issues as the noncon categories, but in a much gentler and compassionate tone. It’s reluctance without rape, and that can be so very hard to find in the trans imagination.

#15 – Deals, Bets, or Dares

One of the core tropes of what would eventually become eggfic. Who doesn’t like to see the bros competing over who can be the better girl?

#14 – Tricked or Secretly Forced

This one is quite uncomfortable a lot of the time, especially when the noncon elements come to the forefront. It often leans more toward the sissy community than the trans community, and that may understandably turn many off from the trope.

What I find compelling about this, however, is how it challenges our understanding of how we ‘know’ we’re trans. Is it a choice we make for ourselves, or has someone else – God, our bodies – decided for us? While there are certainly a fair share of gross rape fantasies here, the best of this category enters into a really interesting discourse about what it means to have free will as a trans woman, or if free will in a state of transition is even a possibility.

#13 – Horror

In a world where Gretchen Felker-Martin, Hailey Piper, May Leitz, Alison Rumfitt, and so many other incredible trans horror writers are at the top of their game, it is absolutely undeniable that this category is horribly dated. The general quality of the writing is also pretty bad as far as these categories go.

But, I mean. C’mon. It’s trans horror. We all know why it slaps so hard.

#12 – Sci-Fi

I never quite know what to do with TG/TF science fiction. To be clear, it’s very much its own distinct thing from science fiction that has trans characters in it – what this means is moreso using futuristic technology to turn someone into a woman.

At it’s best, this category is just doing science fiction. At its worst, it’s just a particularly complicated iteration of ‘The Operation.’

At the end of the day, I think what lifts this category for me is how top-quality the writing often is compared to other parts of the genre. Sci-fi is another one of those blank canvas genres that can be whatever the author wants, and there are some real gems out there that use it in such creative and innovative ways that I couldn’t possibly rank it lower.

#11 – Body Suits

I mean, this trope gave us Kimmy by Alyson Greaves. Need I say more?

#10 – Accidental Transition

While some of us may have known that they were trans since the womb, it’s fair to say that the majority of trans people get taken by surprise when they realize they’re trans. It’s not something we’re acculturated to expect, we aren’t taught as kids to see the signs; if anything, visible expressions of transness in childhood are violently discouraged.

What I love about this subgenre is that it embraces and explores the disorientation so many of us experience upon questioning. It takes the self-evidence of that ‘oh, shit’ moment and literalizes it. In the accidental transition narrative, the trans character doesn’t constantly have to explain that they ‘want to be’ a woman – they simply become one, and it’s utterly apparent to anyone who looks at them, often moreso than even themselves.

It’s wish fulfillment, yes, but there’s something very tender in it.

#9 – Slow Transition

There is nothing – and I do mean nothing – better than a good slow burn.

One of the things I’ve written about a lot in my personal notes but haven’t quite articulated yet in an article is how the early genre of TG/TF is a phenomenological genre, i.e. one that’s deeply vested in the lived experience and bodily sensations of its subjects. It’s the delicate attention paid to the feeling of pantyhose, or the exploration of a newly soft body, or that first experience with gender affirming sex. It’s about a narrative solely concerned with situating the reader within a body that is changing – and there is no better way to tease that out than a story that takes its sweet, sweet time.

I think of a good slow transition story as a luxuriant chocolate mousse. It’s meant to be lingered in. It’s an exploration of every crevice and dark corner of the main characters life, it’s about the sensation of transness, a lived experience beyond an intellectualized one.

This is the sauce of great TG/TF in my humble opinion, and I’ll stand by that.

And yet I would still rank the final eight categories above it – not because they’re necessarily better, but because they fundamentally define and shape the genre in ways that a slow transition cannot.

Icons of TG/TF

#8 – Victorian Times

If you’re not aware of the history of this genre, this might seem like a very confusing placement. Let me explain.

The origins of the Transgender/Transformation genre can be directly tied to the 1890s, when a genre of British underground erotica called Petticoating, Petticoat Punishment, or Petticoat Discipline began to emerge. Although the verbiage of the petticoat has fallen out of common use, it doesn’t change the fact that this is the oldest continuous formal tradition in the entire field of trans publishing, and that many of the stories have history that can be traced back over 130 years.

Yes, people still write Petticoat Punishment fiction to this day. It’s not nearly as common or ubiquitous as it used to be. But in its essentials, it has not changed one whit, and on that merit, this category is an invaluable resource to any historian of trans literature.

#7 – Identity Death

For a long time while I was a teenager, I truly, genuinely believed that I had killed my male self.

It wasn’t true. It was a cognitive distortion and a maladaptive thought pattern, a survival mode I used to embrace who I wanted to be in a world that seemed content to leave me as anything but. But that specter of death, ego death, identity death – it carried me through high school. I’m not sure if it was a violently suppressed feeling of self-harm or if it was a philosophy that saved my life.

Maybe both.

Everyone’s life is different. But there is something fundamentally relatable to the trans experience in the identity death trope. There is a collective, generational memory of the father who says ‘I have no daughter.’ It’s losing a family, a home, safety, security. It’s losing your life. It’s dying and being born again.

Not everyone can stomach identity death stories, which is why it’s toward the bottom of this section. My editor NobleHeroine in particular can barely read a summary of one.

But it opens the door to discussing trans life in purgatory in a way that little else can.

It gives us the space to grieve, and move on.

#6 – Crossdressing/TV

It may be less intelligible to a reader in the 2020s, but this category was the heart of the transfeminine literary community for a long, long time, and its impacts shouldn’t be understated. What are we to make of transvestic literature in view of the trans literature renaissance of the 2010s? How do we understand this core piece of literary history in a new era that’s discomforted by it?

I don’t have the answers, and it’s a question that I’ve barely ever seen anyone grapple with. People seem largely content to leave the era of crossdressing stories in the past.

We would be better served, I think, to engage with it as an interlocutor.

This is our history too. Never forget that.

#5 – Caught with Consequences/Crime Punishment/Sexual Punishment/Revenge

Oh, sissy porn. What a genre. What a time.

Even more so than transvestic fiction, sissy stories sit very uncomfortably in the modern transliterary canon. They’re ignored or spurned, and not for inconsiderate reasons. But there is so much to think and talk about her vis a vis our cultural understandings of transfemininity, about how these stories, as the dark antagonist of the transliterary narrative, have helped to shape our prose in turn.

This genre encapsulates so much of the complex and often twisted relationship that cis men and trans women form with each other through fiction. Though we rarely acknowledge it, TG/TF fiction is one of the few true shared spaces between our communities; a place where our imaginations blend, and scrape, and fuck.

It’s uncomfortable – especially for the trans lesbians, especially for those of us who don’t feel that draw toward heterosexual men. I think it’s fair to say that the discomfort has morphed from an aversion to a quasi-taboo over the last decade.

But I think it is a sharp mistake to lay all blame for the uglier and more violent parts of our literature at the feet of cis men who like sissy porn. Frankly, I’m disappointed when that’s the most interesting take someone can muster about it. Trans women may not be the ones who always write it, but many of us in these circles are still active consumers of sissy porn and all of its softer variants. TG/TF writers on both sides of that ‘divide’ are equal culprits in the virulent sexism, racism, rape culture, and bigotry that pervade the underground literature. It is a systemic issue; it is an issue that arises out of a power dynamic between cis men and trans women in the TG/TF space, one which privileges the male voice to be certain, but which in many of its newer incarnations, the trans woman is fully complicit.

There is no simple answer. Anyone searching for one will invariably fail to understand the sissy genre, no matter how much research they do.

I know for a fact that some people will read this section, this whole article, and immediately go to their high horse and declare everyone involved in the TG/TF scene to be morally irredeemable, or whatever. That’s not what I’m trying to say. Whether we like it or not, this is part of our history and literary heritage, and it falls upon us to reckon with it so we can pass down an accurate history of our own times to future generations.

#4 – Mind Altered, Hypnosis, Brainwashed

By this point, you’ve probably gathered that explorations of non-consent in its various forms are one of the core themes of the TG/TF genre. I would argue that of all the nonconsent tropes on this list, mind control is both the most effective and the most iconic.

Gender is a coercive process, and it begins when we’re very young. It’s an unspoken thing; a mother buying dresses for her daughter, a father who’s willing to pay for gymnastics but not basketball. We are all disciplined and inducted into our assigned sex, and that can be a devilishly hard thing to unlearn – and yet, in some subversive sense, can become the root of a deep and inquenchable desire.

Patriarchy and sexism are structures of pleasure. It’s pleasurable to be a sexist man, to be a rapist. In a self-censorious way, it’s pleasurable to be the perfect ‘submissive’ woman, to surrender your autonomy. Society figures pleasure in rape.

We are all taught from a very young age that to be male is to have control and to be female is to lack it, and that figures very deeply into our understandings of transition.

A story. When I was just figuring out what it meant to be a girl in the world, I begged my mom and my grandma to help me buy femme clothes. And they didn’t, not really. My grandma did her best, but I didn’t like her fashion taste (if you’re reading this, I’m sorry); and my mom, bless her heart, never really tried. They couldn’t help me. They didn’t want to help me, and I didn’t want to be helped by them. I liked the idea of the women in my life taking control of how I looked and presented, but upon contact I couldn’t handle the realization that there was something intrinsically coercive in that, and for whatever reason, they didn’t particularly want to coerce me.

Trans women tell themselves that they wish someone would come and force them into a skirt, make them learn makeup, shove them out of the nest and keep chiseling the hole between our legs until we bleed. Transition is hard, and made so much harder by a society that actively tries to prevent it. And so there is a sickly desire to be infantilized. To have our choices taken away from us – to be a child again, to be coerced into action, but this time the right way.

It’s a desire for womanhood, interpreted through the pleasurable mores of a sexist world.

The vast body of transfeminine fiction that deals with hypnosis and mind control is a direct result of this vicious – and often sexually charged – dissonance between the patriarchal coercion of womanhood and our misinterpreted ‘desire’ to participate in it. It’s a transition coopted – a transition that surrenders control to a master, a transition that has not been taught to exist beyond that twisted understanding of womanhood as sexual submission.

And trans women are particularly vulnerable to this type of sexual assault.

We know it. Many of us have experienced it.

Our fiction reflects that reality.

#3 – Body Swap/Mind Transfer/Mind Possession

Man, I don’t even have a feminist rant about this one. It’s just a classic delight.

There is something so pure about stories of lovers swapping bodies, strangers who switch then fall in love, the T4T of a relationship transed by metempsychosis. One of the first novels I ever tried to write was about a boy getting swapped into a girl’s body, and how the two of them fell in love. That was in middle school.

This goes way beyond trans issues. It’s fundamentally grounded in an imagination of truly being able to know another person; how they are with themselves, their thoughts, how they feel. There is something uniquely vulnerable and revealing about that experience when interpreted across genders, and I really do believe that this is one of the rare places that TG/TF can find a mainstream footing beyond its niche and dark web of sex, bodies, and the grotesque.

#2 – Bimbo

Truly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a genre or aesthetic receive as much unadulterated scorn as the bimbo genre, and that’s because most people are operating off of either internalized misogyny or outright sexism, and haven’t really stopped to consider what these stories are trying to say. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes you can make while reading TG/TF is dismissing it as ‘erotica.’ While some TG/TF has strong erotic elements, and other stories are just porn, I think it’s a distinct error to claim that it’s a primarily erotic artform at its roots.

Bimbo fiction isn’t ‘fetishizing’ femininity. It’s not ‘mocking women,’ it’s not ‘sexist,’ and it’s certainly not an indicator of how transfemininity is a ‘warped perception of womanhood’ or whatever.

No – bimbo fiction at its core is a direct subversion of transmisogyny, and frankly that’s why most people hate it.

Let me explain.

A theory I’ve been developing in private concerns how trans women internalize and act out misogynistic expectation before they transition, or even realize they are trans. My hypothesis is that ‘transmisogyny’ takes on distinct characteristics from misogyny toward cis women not wholly because trans women were raised as men; but rather in the sense that even in a ‘male childhood,’ we were still raised as women too. Raised as women without any of the protections of female spaces, raised as women without the conventional wisdom of our mothers and grandmothers to guide us, raised as women in spaces predominated by men. In essence, the core idea I’ve been working on for a few years now is that we are coercively taught gender not entirely by direct oppositional sexism, but by the way that we parse different things out from sexist and patriarchal rhetorical based on who we are inside. I.e., that one of the primary modes through which sexism reproduces itself lies not in the active separation of men and women, but in the way that men and women receive the same messaging and position themselves in different ways within it.

Talia Bhatt’s been developing this idea a lot – you should read Trans/Rad/Fem if you haven’t yet. I’ve been hoping to write about it for a while, but there’s never been a good time. Hopefully soon.

The brilliance of bimbo fiction has absolutely nothing to do with a ‘caricature’ of cis women. It is a genre that fundamentally hinges upon the literary device of hyperbole in its strictest sense. If anything, it ought to be considered an absurdist genre.

Bimbo fiction is about the subjective experience of being raised as a woman in a heavily male context. It’s about what kinds of womanhood are and can be taught in a misogynistic space, a profoundly sexist space, but most importantly, how womanhood is taught to men, or those presumed to be. The bimbo does not represent the nympho slut who only lives for sex.

The bimbo is a teenage girl trying to exist in a world that thinks she doesn’t.

Bimbo fiction is about mental health crises, and forced sex work, and rape, and psychosis. It’s about sexual trauma.

‘Hyperfemininity’ in this context – bubblegum pink, cheerleaders, miniskirts, etc – has nothing to do with the actual degree of femininity a trans woman presents with. Unless you’re Gigi Gorgeous levels of uber-femme, you’re probably not gonna be spending your life in Barbie’s dreamhouse.

It’s about contrast. It’s about being the only woman in a high school locker room; at the swimming pool; on a football team; at a sleepover. It’s being the only woman who gets to sit there while the boys describe their violent rape fantasies; it’s being the only woman who goes to sex ed for boys and listens to all the fourth graders giggling about how they’re superior because they pee standing up; it’s about being the only woman in a friend group, at a gathering, at a summer camp, in a high school. The hyperfemininity of the bimbo archetype is about the exaggerated, subjective, violent experience of being taught how to be a woman in a predominantly male context.

Cis women don’t have that reference point. In 95% of cases, they don’t have that first-hand experience of an all-male space and the casual sexism that flies around in it. So when feminists make the argument of the ‘bimbo caricature,’ they seem to put the bimbo in contrast to a ‘normal woman,’ not a ‘normal man.’ There is a fundamental assumption, one deeply vested in oppositional sexism and transphobia, that any depiction of a woman must be inspired, fundamentally, by a woman, by womanhood; it is a commentary on her own body, and that of her sex. Woman cannot come from man.

What I would rather argue – and this applies to cis women too – is that the figure of the bimbo represents a cognitive distortion of patriarchy upon the self-image of its creator. Specifically, I don’t think the bimbo is a caricature of a cis woman’s body in the TG/TF context.

I believe that the bimbo is a caricature of a pre-transition trans woman’s body.

Yes. Even with the F-cups.

This is an idea that is almost never considered for the dumbest fucking reason. If the bimbo has giant boobs and a vajayjay, how could she possibly be a caricature of a male with a flat chest and dick? It’s simply impossible, says the transphobe who lacks imagination.

This is anything but an intuitive claim, but I think it’s a correct one.

Where is the woman inside of her? Assuredly not in her maleness, she learns young, and her body is nothing but. So the pre-transition woman must learn to engorge the missing parts of herself – but they’re vacuous, vapid. They have no substance because she is not allowed to conceptualize her body within them. She cannot have intelligence because she has a man’s mind – she can only be a woman in the absence of thought. The only part of her that can be a woman is her taboo desire, which is so evidently not male; but it’s refracted through the lens of patriarchy, it’s warped through the extrinsic pleasure structures of a sexist society. To make good on that sexual promise is to completely rip her flesh out and rebuild herself in that forbidden image. She is disembodied, yet mindless, and so she is only body. Tits and thighs and needy wanton cunt.

If she cannot be anything of a man, then the only things she can claim for herself are what the men around her loudly denounce – and those are the trappings of the hyperfeminine.

This is a theory I’m hoping to expand on in the future. For now, I hope it suffices to demonstrate why I believe bimbo fic to be one of the most important and interesting pieces of the TG/TF genre as a whole.

#1 – Magical Transformation

This is the oldest trope on the list. It goes back to the beginning of human civilization, that imagination – at times sacred, at others taboo – of a body that shifts, and changes, and merges. It’s no different today than it was when the story of Tireseas was new, and that’s the power of it.

I can think of no better way to end this list.

LAST WEDNESDAY: #10 – Trans Literature Doesn’t Require Big Tech to Organize

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