Slowly taking over the Eastern seaboard
NPR has a “book review” that in a surprise twist turns out to be a polemic attacking feminist women.
In an apocalypse where a virus turns anyone with enough testosterone into a feral, cannibalistic beast, who survives?
In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s electric debut novel Manhunt, the book’s nightmare world is populated with everyone left –
That’s a confusing half-sentence. I guess it means the survivors are the ones who populate the nightmare world, unless it means everyone left wing. Anyway…
the book’s nightmare world is populated with everyone left — mostly cisgender women, but there are also plenty of non-binary people, transgender men, and transgender women.
Oh, that kind of nightmare world – where we no longer have women and men, girls and boys, but various Specialty Brands.
Oh, plus a faction of authoritarian trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) slowly taking over the Eastern seaboard, killing trans people just as quickly as the infected beasts will. Told from a trans perspective, Manhunt is a fresh, stomach-turning take on gendered apocalypse.
Ahhhhhh of course – the monster in this book is feminist woman.
To be upfront, Manhunt is not for everyone. It is gory, and brutal, and sickened me more than any other horror novel I’ve read in recent memory. I am sure it will challenge many trans readers (like myself) as much as it will challenge cis readers.
So trans readers pretend to read and cis readers actually read?
The book begins with Beth and Fran, two trans women on the hunt for feral men. In this reality, trans women, some non-binary people, and cis women who have polycystic ovarian syndrome — a condition that can increase testosterone levels — have few options for keeping their estrogen up. Synthesizing it from the estrogen-laden testicles of the beasts is one of these options.
…
The three of them return to Boston (with harvested testicles in tow) to Indiresh, a cis woman fertility specialist that processes their estrogen, only to find that a militia of TERFs has rolled into the city. Afraid for their lives, Beth, Fran, Robbie, and Indi skip town when Indi is hired as a doctor at an underground bunker.
Uh huh. Radical feminists gonna eat yo mama.
I’m not surprised this kind of fiction exists, but it sounds absolutely dreadful. As is the “review”:
This is a main point of gender-critical feminism and a problem with gender identity ideology. It is the gender ideologues who are enforcing gender with “you’re feminine, you must be a woman”.
Well, that was illuminating. Is that really what they think TERF views are? That “transwomen” are monsters, rather than, you know, MEN? “Monsters” is an appropriate label for some of the more vicious activists, but not the entire class of men-who-pretend-to-be-women.
Always interesting to see what gets defined as violent, eliminationist rhetoric, and what doesn’t. I mean, it’s not surprising, but it’s interesting.
I find it somewhat irksome that classic sci-fi would be repackaged and repurposed to suit Genderist insanity.
What about non-binary readers? Are you ignoring them? They read tonight, but not tomorrow night?
This sounds like the trans version of The Turner Diaries.
Though I don’t think NPR did a review on that one.
Kudos to Beth and Fran for their resourcefulness, but where are they sourcing their post-apocalyptic androgen blockers? Eye of newt? Toe of frog? As long as their lady-testes are intact, they’ll be going feral along with all the other adult human males no matter how much DIY HRT they concoct. (Also: what happened to deriving estrogen from the urine of pregnant mares? Seems easier than harvesting human testicles.) And as for women with PCOS . . . I don’t know exactly how this endocrinocalypse is supposed to work, but I do know that even a woman with very severe PCOS would not have anywhere near male-typical testosterone levels. (Women with androgenic tumors would be in trouble, though.)
So fanfiction is getting published for real these days?
A lot of readers are into kink–you know, bindage. Of course there are also a lot of non-bindary readers as well.
They just can’t help projecting their own violent fantasies onto gender critical women.
So improperly socialized men are portrayed as beasts who can be killed so that trans women can maintain their self-image?
Who are the good guys here?
NivV: I will say The left Hand of Darkness was an awesome novel. But it’s FICTIONAL and set on an alien world.
And also Le Guin, so not ten-ton-anvil-subtle allegory.
What’s the deal with woke authors’ penchant for producing transparently propagandist power fantasies?
Wait… Estrogen-laden… Testicles? What the everliving fuck is he on about?
BKiSA – in males, estrogen is produced in the testes. I guess the author was trying to get plausible deniability on sexism by not killing “cis” women and harvesting their estrogen, which would obviously be in higher abundance than in men (plus, admitting it is in higher abundance in women is not acceptable because that would be admitting the differences between the sexes). By turning the men into beasts because of testosterone levels, they become less human and therefore more dispensable.
They must continue to coopt women with PCOS, because there are a lot of us. If they can force women with PCOS into their intersex/trans ideology, they think they have an ace in hand to trump claims about why testosterone matters, especially in areas like sports. This is what they did with DSD athletes like Caster Semenya, I swear there were several years when I thought “woman with naturally high testosterone” meant she has PCOS and I was 100% against the testosterone regulations because I thought they were targeting women with PCOS. Now women with PCOS are used to drive up the numbers of people who have DSDs to “prove” sex is not binary. Women with PCOS are women. Not all of us grow beards, or can’t have children. We are not men, or anything close to male.
Fair enough, iknklast, though I’d think if the internal logic were remotely consistent the man-bies (Yombies?) would have rather low estrogen levels. Honestly this book sounds worse than Xombies and less interesting than the News Flesh trilogy.
It occurs to me that the Streisand effect will probably sell more copies than this rubbish deserves, but that’s marketing for you.
BKISA @ 16
I suspect the fact that it was reviewed by NPR will sell a lot of copies, but yes, Streisand Effect as well. Nothing brings attention like complaints.
I hope Holly Lawford-Smith’s book sells a lot of copies, in part thanks to attempts to ban it.