The Transfeminine Review

And finally, here we are. The final Shortlist of 2025 for the TFR Reader’s Choice Awards, celebrating the best books in our most prestigious category, Best Transfeminine Fiction.

With the other Shortlists (Poetry, Nonfiction, Author, and Debut), the lists continued to shift right up until today. That wasn’t the case with Best Fiction. There are four books that have clearly and definitively separated from the rest of the field – each within five votes of each other, but nine ballots away from the next closest novel.

Contemporary fiction had a phenomenal showing in this year’s awards – all four of these novels take place at least partially in a contemporary setting. This year’s Best Fiction shortlist features some of the best literary writing and prose craftsmanship of the whole decade to date, and I’m extremely excited to see which books will pull out the win in the end. Any of them is more than worthy of the title.

All that’s left to do now is get out there and vote! Voting will end on December 26th at 11:59pm EST, and you can find the voting link right here.

With all that being said, for the final time this year, it’s my absolute joy to present the Shortlist for the Best Transfeminine Fiction of 2025!

1. The Shortlist
   1. Stag Dance – Torrey Peters
   2. Woodworking – Emily St. James
   3. A/S/L – Jeanne Thornton
   4. A Rotten Girl – Jemma Topaz

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The Shortlist

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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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And that’s the last shortlist! Thank you so, so much to the 162 people whose ballots helped to craft these lists – I’m incredibly proud of this community for coming together and building a far more vigorous voting sample than last year. We’ve got less than a week left until voting closes, and then I’ll see you all at the end of the month with the results!

If you haven’t voted yet, the voting link can be found below. Voting will close at 11:59pm EST on December 26th, so make sure to cast your ballot before then.

Thank you so much again to everyone who’s already voted, and everyone who’s planning to vote over the next few days! A happy holidays to all who celebrate, and I’ll see you on the 31st with the final results.