The Transfeminine Review

UPDATE SCHEDULE

My goal is to post once a week for this blog. Life is busy, though, and I might not always have an 8,000 word essay locked and loaded for the public consumption. So, rather than aiming to release one post at the same time each week, I’ve come up with a system where there are several possible slots for update days! There’ll be some weeks where we post updates in all three slots and some weeks when we’re on vacation. But the most important thing for our team is that the schedule will contain flexibility for me and my editors :))

Essay Sundays – Literary Criticism, Journalism, In-Depth Book Analyses. In other words, our ‘core’ content. Whenever we’ve got a big project in the works, you can bet that it’s gonna be a Sunday essay. Our primary goal with essays is to produce substantive analysis that creates new value and understandings for the community. I have no interest in copying information that you can easily find elsewhere – if that means it takes us a week or two longer to get an essay ready to print, then we’ll prioritize quality over quantity. Research takes a lot of work, and cutting corners is lame! But our hope is that any time you see a post on a Sunday, it’s something that you’ll know is worth reading.

Casual Wednesdays – Recommendation Lists, Reading Vlogs, Update Posts, etc. In other words, your ‘classic’ literary blog content. These essays will probably have less research and editing, and will be a more laid back examination of the work I’m doing, thoughts I’m having about my reading, casual updates about the industry and whatnot, etc. The day for the fun frivolous stuff we all enjoy reading after a long day’s work.

Guest Post Fridays – Guest Columns and Interviews. We want to hear from you too! I’m currently planning an interview series that’ll mostly focus on the industry and trans fiction as a trade. Additionally, if you enjoy writing literary criticism and you’re interested in writing a guest column or doing a guest interview for the blog, there’s potentially an opportunity to have your article posted here (more information on that below).

MISSION STATEMENT

THE TRANSFEMININE REVIEW is an ad-free hobbyist blog dedicated to the works of authors and writers who identify under the transfeminine umbrella. As a passion project, we adhere to the following guiding principles about our work:

• Every book deserves a fair shot. Whether it’s self-published or traditionally published, world-renowned or obscure, the most haute of the literary avant-garde or the dingiest bargain bin erotica, we don’t care – it’s our goal to assess the entire field of contemporary transfeminine literature, and make our judgments based on the merits of the books, not their authorship or circumstances. This extends into a principle of non-discrimination: we hold self-pub, poor, working-class, racialized, indigenous, non-Western, disabled, sex-working, etc. authors to all be worthy of the same consideration. Our only constraint is the lens of the transfeminine, and those authors who identify/have identified within it. Lesser but additional attention will also be paid to literature from other trans and queer communities as well as cishet literature that concerns transfeminine bodies and lives.
• Our goal is increase the accessibility and visibility of books by transfeminine authors. Books are expensive and trans folks are often socioeconomically disadvantaged. This creates a significant gap between trans authors and their typical target audience. We intend to pursue this goal in a number of ways, including but not limited to building our database of transfeminine literature and authors, producing critical secondary scholarship for books that have received little to no academic attention, creating education content and recommendations lists to help people enter the genre, interfacing with authors about their work and the state of the field, and generally attempting to provide community support as one of the only secondary sites for trans women writers on the internet.
• Our primary aim is the documentation, study, and record-keeping of books that have already been written, NOT to keep up with new releases or publishing industry buzz. It is very likely that my reading will remain several months or years behind the current wave of trans publishing. Not only are hardcover new releases more expensive, but I am also less interested in helping authors sell new books, and more interested in assessing the history, longevity, and social impact of books that have already been released. For example, I’m writing this mission statement of August of 2024, and I have only read a single book published so far this year. Thoroughness and depth of study are preferred over recency and popularity. It is my hope that the appeal and impact of this blog can extend beyond trend-chasing, and it is my intention to avoid getting swept up into hype when producing essays and articles. Authors with new releases, feel free to check out the Support Our Work page for more information about sending in review copies of your book.

BETHANY KARSTEN – EDITOR

I grew up on American Girl Doll novels and Rainbow Fairy books pilfered from my sister’s room at night, and a copy of Marvin Redpost’s Is He a Girl? hidden in the back of my closet for no reason whatsoever. My first literary love was Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds, and my favorite book was Tamora Pierce’s In the Hand of the Goddess. After sprouting like a beanstalk in middle school, I found solace in YA novels buried in the depths of TGStorytime, questionable gender-bending erotica from the Amazon bargain bin, and my completely clueless fem!MC self-insert fanfiction, only to rudely discover at fifteen that nobody else had realized I was a girl (I played sports and stuff). Disgruntled at the oversight, I immediately set about to change this.

As a teenager, I attempted to search for trans YA literature, and, finding nothing but Meredith Russo, Alex Gino, Zoe Taylor, and Karin Bishop to sate my appetite, immediately went back to dumpster diving on Fictionmania and Fanfiction.net. In the meantime, I would read a shitton of classic literature, have a brief but regrettable Nietzsche phase, read the entirety of the Critique of Pure Reason, fall deeply in love with Anna Karenina, and transition a little whenever I felt like it. By the end of 11th grade, everyone was on the same page about the whole ‘girl’ thing, which was conveniently just in time for a global pandemic to start! I coped by writing several excessively long novels that should never see the light of day then headed off to college, where the first seeds of this project would be planted.

In 2021, it occurred to me that if I was trans and liked writing, there were probably other trans writers too. After a brief spurt of discovery, I proceeded to have a very standard experience of crying over Nevada and Detransition, Baby then bounced hard off of the difficulty spike of finding anything else. The sudden unpalatability of most cis literature rocked my reading sensibilities, and I wouldn’t read another novel for a few months. It wasn’t until Fall of 2022 that I took an Early Modern Trans Literature class that would completely blow my socks off: holy shit people have been writing this stuff for ages!

And then: how the hell did I not know about this?

Passionate rage, my dear reader! If there were novels with trans themes from the 1600s, then surely there must have been others written between then and Nevada. But how to find them? I might have stewed over this question for months were it not for a lovely comment on my fanfiction by Alyson Greaves – who just so happened to be, as a friend offhandedly pointed out to me the next day, the author of a serialized web novel entitled The Sisters of Dorley, which had begun to develop a small but entirely respectable following for its elevation of classic transgender erotica and light novel tropes. Out of idle curiosity, I decided to return the favor by reading Alyson’s work, and ordered both of her books off of Amazon, which would arrive at my college dormitory two days later.

I would proceed to binge all 1,350 pages of the first two Dorley books in less than twelve hours.

To say that Dorley was a revelation would be an understatement. It was the sort of book I had been seeking for nearly two-thirds of a decade, and I would never have found it were it not for total happenstance. And if I hadn’t found The Sisters of Dorley despite spending years orbiting the same circles as Greaves on Archives of Our Own, how many other incredible self-published authors were languishing in their corners of the internet, excluded from publishing deals and isolated from their eager target audiences? How many incredible trans authors were born with the simple misfortune of writing before the so-called ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ and the advent of their social acceptability as ‘authors,’ or even ‘writers?’ I spent my entire trans adolescence actively searching for those books – had they merely been hidden? How many more great novels by trans women were lost to that dark?

Well, as it turns out – quite a few.

The Transfeminine Review is the continuation of a months-long attempt to read every single novel ever written by a trans woman, no matter how bad or obscure. While I didn’t quite accomplish that goal, I did read over one hundred novels in 2023 before taking a few months off to finish up with college, laying the groundwork for the blog you’re reading right now. This blog is my attempt to share the knowledge I’ve learned and the books I’ve read over the course of this process. Many of them are rare, expensive, or both. They’re often violent, graphic, shocking, taboo. The vast majority of them are or once were self-published, and have received little to no recognition or legitimization from traditional avenues. Nevertheless, a small but growing corpus of transfeminine literature does exist, and when you really sink your teeth into it, there’s far more depth and nuance to it than appears on a surface trawl through the Google results for ‘transfemme authors’ – beyond Topside Press, beyond Metonymy and Arsenal Pulp, beyond the narrow slice of trans women writers who’ve found emergent success over the past decade. A fuller survey reveals a diversity of genre, trope, conceptualization, and experience which goes largely unrepresented in the sorts of books that win Lambda awards, and academic scholarship on contemporary transfeminine literature would be remiss not to explore these submerged traditions and literary histories to their fullest extent.

It is my earnest hope and goal that in writing this blog, I can help other transfemmes with literary inclinations circumvent the frankly ridiculous amount of time, effort, misery, and money it took me to find and compile all of these texts. I was a competitive debater for several years, tried my hand at journalism, wrote a college thesis – digging all of this up took all the research know-how and academic savvy that I’ve got, and frankly most of us don’t have that luxury. The landscape for trans women in publishing has completely changed since I read my first trans novel in 2017, and it’s my hope that the work I’m doing here can help keep those cogs turning in the right direction. Let this blog stand as a resource and testament to the labor of trans woman writers, and to the perseverance of the trans readers who found their work despite some of the most obnoxious barriers to entry in the field of publishing.

Bethany Karsten has a B.A. in Philosophy. She currently resides in Philadelphia.