The Transfeminine Review

Welcome back to the 2025 TFR Reader’s Choice Awards! Before you read this year’s fiction longlist, if you’d like to submit your ballot completely blind, you can click away right now and do so here.

It’s been a great first week of voting! This longlist has been constructed from the 65 ballots that have already been submitted by you, the reader, voting blind to celebrate your favorite books of the year. Last year, we got around 200 ballots total and only 49 by the release of the fiction longlist, so we’re already well on pace to beat that record. If you want to help us reach our goal, voting remains open until December 26th at 11:59 PM EST!

Best Transfeminine Fiction is by far the most competitive and prestigious award on our slate of 39 categories. Of the 65 people who have voted so far, a whopping 94% have voted for the top category, with 28 books nominated (so far) for the top prize. Of those books, only 14 have received at least two nominations. If at least two people in a completely blind vote nominated the book for the best fiction of the year at this point in the voting process, then that book has earned a spot on the official longlist.

IMPORTANT CLARIFICATIONS

– You can still vote for any books you want. Remember, two votes is all that it took to get these books onto this list, and there are fourteen books that were only one vote shy! This is an early exit poll, not a final result, so if you don’t see your favorite book of the year on here (mine isn’t), then there’s still more than enough time to vote it into consideration.

– This is a purely democratic selection. This list is governed by popular consensus, not my personal curation or any other metric. If you feel like a book has been “snubbed,” then take it up with the people who’ve already voted, or better yet, vote yourself and encourage your transliterary friends to do so too. I have not cast my ballot yet. Please don’t shoot the messenger.

– I have only read some of these books. Ergo, I will not be providing full blurbs for any of them. The information on this list will purely come from publicly available marketing details and the data on the poll.

In order to make this as fair as possible, I’m going to be listing these books in alphabetical order by author’s last name. There will be no sorting based on genre or other factors. I will not be including any information about other categories, nor will I be disclosing how many votes each individual book has received.

Around a week out from the voting deadline, I will be releasing an official shortlist for this award containing the books that have passed a higher threshold of votes. I don’t know what that threshold will be yet – it will very much depend on how many folks vote between now and then. No book on this longlist is guaranteed to make the shortlist, so if you want to see your favorite book make that next stage, then I would encourage you to vote before then and to get your friends to vote as well.

Without further ado, here’s the 2025 Longlist for Best Transfeminine Ficiton!

1. The Longlist
   1. Lessons in Magic and Distaster – Charlie Jane Anders
   2. A Mask for the Sun – Kay F. Atkinson
   3. Magica Riot: Full Bloom – Kara Buchanan
   4. Disappoint Me – Nicola Dinan
   5. Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
   6. Keeping the Peace – Tris Husband
   7. A Hungry Light – Zin Nabelle
   8. Glitch Girl! – Rainie Oet
   9. Stag Dance – Torrey Peters
   10. Woodworking – Emily St. James
   11. A/S/L – Jeanne Thornton
   12. A Rotten Girl – Jemma Topaz
   13. Machines of Consent – Sophia Turner
   14. One of the Boys – Victoria Zeller

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The Longlist

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A young witch teaches her mother how to do magic–with very unexpected results–in this relatable, resonant novel about family, identity, and the power of love.

Jamie is basically your average New England academic in-training–she has a strong queer relationship, an esoteric dissertation proposal, and inherited generational trauma. But she has one extraordinary secret: she’s also a powerful witch.

Serena, Jamie’s mother, has been hiding from the world in an old one-room schoolhouse for several years, grieving the death of her wife and the simultaneous explosion in her professional life. All she has left are memories.

Jamie’s busy digging into a three-hundred-year-old magical book, but she still finds time to teach Serena to cast spells and help her come out of her shell. But Jamie doesn’t know the whole story of what happened to her mom years ago, and those secrets are leading Serena down a destructive path.

Now it’s up to this grad student and literature nerd to understand the secrets behind this mysterious novel from 1749, unearth a long-buried scandal hinted therein, and learn the true nature of magic, before her mother ruins both of their lives.

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Cora has been avoiding home. She doesn’t quite mean to, but it happens anyway. A lot of things have been weighing on her, as the world stands to change yet again, crawling inexorably out of the cold inconvenience of community subsistence living and back into the gentle, familiar embrace of industry. Factories are raised. Electricity is on the horizon. The fleet’s glory will, some day, be reclaimed.

Cora can’t stop wondering how long until humans don’t want to do the work anymore, and the age of the fabricant begins again.

Now Cora returns home to keep an old promise, hope in her heart that she can still find her sanctuary among her lovers, and though her return comes with a strange coldness, she is greeted by Minerva: daughter of Sarah and Annalise, now a young woman eager to explore the world, and understand her long-absent mother.

But all is not as it seems. Minerva has secrets of her own, a dark and fearful prophecy calling her to the bowels of the earth, and waiting there beneath the pale surface of humanity’s new home is a final trial for the beleaguered dregs of human civilization: a trial to be faced by Cora alone.

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Claire Ryland has just about figured this whole magical girl band thing out. The people of Portland really love Magica Riot, so much that they’ve been asked to play a concert at the biggest venue in town!

But when not one but two villains decide to make their presence known, Claire, Sara, Cass, Hana, and Nova have to figure out a new approach to their magic and their music…with some help from unexpected friends!

Magica Riot Full Bloom is the sequel to 2024’s queer magical girl novel Magica Riot, and the next installment of the Maidensong Magica series. An action-filled musical adventure inspired by classic magical girl anime, tokusatsu shows, and the vibe of the American Pacific Northwest, Magica Riot Full Bloom expands on Claire’s story of trans self-discovery and her LGBTQ+ found family while introducing new threats and challenges for the magical girls of Portland to deal with! A story of colorful adventure, eye-popping magic, and queer love, Magica Riot Full Bloom shows that being yourself gives you the power to help people and change the world.

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Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.

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The Baroness, an infamous exploitation film long thought destroyed by Nazi fire, is discovered fifty years later. When lonely archivist Ellen Kramer—deeply closeted and pathologically repressed—begins restoring the hedonistic movie, it unspools dark desires from deep within her.

As Ellen is consumed by visions and voices, she becomes convinced the movie is real, and is happening to her—and that frame by frame, she is unleashing its occult horrors on the world. Her life quickly begins to spiral out of control.

Until it all fades to black, and all that remains is a voice asking a question Ellen can’t answer but can’t get out of her mind.

Do you want it? More than anything?

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Akakios, child of Diodotos, wasn’t the most reliable friend Isadora ever had. Xe tended to drop in unannounced, never really cared about what was going on in her life, and seemed to only ever want to drink at their favorite bar before disappearing again. So when xe showed up on her doorstep with a gun in xer hand, claiming that xer wife Pelagia had just been murdered, Isadora didn’t really know what to do.

With Akakios now dead for a crime xe may not have committed, and everyone from the Archon of Elysium to ruthless gangsters to xer dead wife’s family telling her to drop it, Isadora tried to just keep her head down, throwing herself into her work as a independent detective and entangling herself in the petty drama of one of Elysium’s most exclusive communities.

Unfortunately, if what she wanted was to avoid confronting Akakios’ dark past, the Valley was probably the last place in Elysium Isadora should have been.

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“I’m going to tell you some things. They’re going to sound strange. But I’m telling you because I want to do things the easy way. The easy way is better. For both of us.”

She motions with her hand to underline the point. “Let me emphasize: I would like you to believe me. But it doesn’t matter. Your choice is not yes or no. Your choice is easy or hard. Understand?”

“Yes. Yes, mistress.”

“Good. I am part of an organization that has been looking for something for a long time. A prophecy has predicted the reemergence of a goddess thought to have been lost ages ago. The Devouring Light. But we couldn’t find her, and my fellows have given up the search. But I have found her because I have an insight they lack. Do you know what it is?”

That you’re somehow even more fucking batshit than the rest of them? Mike shakes his head.

She smiles, a crazed expression coming over her face. “I understand. That a woman. Is sometimes. Born into a man’s body. A.M.A.B. I, alone, considered that our goddess might have reincarnated wrong.”

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J—’s life is consumed by the roller coaster video game Coaster Boss, and by the power she exerts over the pixelated theme park attendees. Her life outside the game, however, is less controllable.

Me.
I’m such a big space. I break the universe, a glitch.

She’s navigating ADHD, the loneliness of middle school, and an overwhelming crush on a girl named Junie. J— is convinced that Junie sees her as who she really is, a person who isn’t “bad” just because she doesn’t stay quiet and sit still in class. As a person who is realizing that the name she’s been given doesn’t really fit her. And that maybe boy doesn’t either.

Glitch Girl! follows J— from fifth to seventh grade, from the beginning to the end of her obsession with Coaster Boss, and to the start of a new friendship. When J— meets Sam, a nonbinary classmate, she begins to realize that it’s okay to not fit into neat, pixelated boxes.

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In this collection of one novel and three stories, bestselling author Torrey Peters’s keen eye for the rough edges of community and desire push the limits of trans writing.

In Stag Dance, the titular novel, a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit plan a dance that some of them will volunteer to attend as women. When the broadest, strongest, plainest of the axmen announces his intention to dance as a woman, he finds himself caught in a strange rivalry with a pretty young jack, provoking a cascade of obsession, jealousy, and betrayal that will culminate on the big night in an astonishing vision of gender and transition.

Three startling stories surround Stag Dance: “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” imagines a gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. In “The Chaser,” a secret romance between roommates at a Quaker boarding school brings out intrigue and cruelty. In the last story, “The Masker,” a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip turns dark when a young crossdresser must choose between two guides: a handsome mystery man who objectifies her in thrilling ways, or a cynical veteran trans woman offering unglamorous sisterhood.

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Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced—and trans. Not that she’s told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn’t exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit.

Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High’s resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It’s a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She’s also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty—and loneliness—that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn’t the only one struggling to shed the weight of others’ expectations.

As their unlikely friendship evolves under the increasing scrutiny of their community, both women—and those closest to them—will come to realize that sometimes there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you really are.

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It is 1998; Lilith, Sash, and Abraxa are teenagers, and they are making Saga of the Sorceress, a game that will change everything, if only for the three of them.

18 years later, Saga of the Sorceress still exists only on the scattered drives of its creators. Lilith might be the first trans woman to ever work as an Assistant Loan Underwriter at Dollarwise Investments in Brooklyn. Sash is in Brooklyn as well, working as a research assistant and part-time webcam dominatrix. Neither knows that the other is there, or that Abraxa, the third member of Invocation LLC, is just across the Hudson River, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s grandparents’ Jersey City home. They have never met in person, and have been out of touch for years, but none have forgotten the sorceress, or her quest, still far from finished.

This new book by Lambda Literary Fellow Jeanne Thornton, one of trans America’s brightest literary stars, queers our notion of nostalgia as it expertly blends literature with technology.

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Pearl is a trans woman writer on the cusp of literary greatness… or so she thought until her agent informs her that her first book has sunken like a stone for its failure to “connect with normal people”. Normal people. Heterosexual people. Cisgender people.

Jaded from the knowledge that this industry rarely lets in people like her, Pearl comes up with a plan: write a commercial male/male romance. Except the market’s all about authenticity these days, isn’t it? The plan gets complicated, drawing her into a web of escalating deceptions where she poses as a cisgender gay man and comes ever closer to destroying all her relationships, and her own life.

A Rotten Girl is a satirical drama that explores gender, public personas, the commodification of queerness—and the reality of what it is like to be a trans woman in a hostile world.

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Dr. Jess Stockton is a scientist with high goals and even higher ambitions. Through her efforts, she has created a device based around consent which has revolutionised society and drawn no small amount of attention both good and bad.

Roh is a freerunning messenger for the underground with the solitary goal of survival. When tested in the lab for the consent device, she displays a very odd set of biometrics which should be impossible in humans.

Machines of Consent follows two trans lesbians in a sci-fi adventure as they find each other and try to escape an oppressive force bent to use them for nefarious ends. Both cyberpunk and spicy blockbuster, it’s a thrill ride from start to finish.

Do you consent to the heat?

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Grace Woodhouse has left a lot behind. She used to have a great friend group, an amazing girlfriend, and a right foot set to earn her a Division I football scholarship—before she came out as trans. As senior year begins, Grace is struggling to find her place in early transition, new social circles, and a life without football. But when her skills as the best kicker in the state prove to be vital, her old teammates beg her to come out of retirement, dragging her back into a sport—into a way of life—she thought had turned its back on her forever. When a chance meeting cracks the door to college football back open, she has to decide how much of herself she’s willing to give up for the game she loves.

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And that’s the longlist! There were so many amazing books that came out this year, and this is only the tip of the iceberg for what’s out there. Remember that you can still vote for anything for Best Fiction, not just the books on this list. If any of these titles sound interesting, make sure to check them out so you can participate in the 2025 TFR Awards before voting closes at 11:59 PM EST on December 26th!

Shortlists will come out for all five marquee categories on December 21st! And remember, there are thirty nine categories up for grabs in this year’s awards, and so many amazing authors who deserve your praise and recognition. Thank you so much to everyone who helped to put this longlist together – and don’t forget to vote!!