In this near future dystopia a virus that targets testosterone has ushered in the end of the world. The virus drives them to live in their inhumanity. They travel around consumed and imbalanced raping and pillaging. That’s basically the only conceit you need to accept going into this. What if people with a certain level of testosterone were to essential be infected with a kind of psychosis.

Two protagonist trans women negotiate this world. Forced to hunt these men to procure estrogen to combat the virus that threatens to transform them into the very thing they hunt. Without access to hormones, it’s this, or simply allowing themselves to become worse than death: the embodiment of physical aggression and conflict and trauma they’ve had to combat their whole lives.

When they hook up with other trans folx and as well as an outpost of sorts filled with cis women militarized and tyrannically ruled by literal TERFS, meaning they believe they are feminist, yet do not acknowledge any kind of woman that isn’t born to the biologically determinist viewpoint.

The tension is masterful here because there are plenty of cis women that pass this Nazi ideology (and determinism was literally founded and proliferated by Nazi science rhetoric. Look it up. As well as nature versus nurture, etc.), meaning they present as these women think women should—whose bodies produce enough testosterone that makes the virus take them.

This creates factions that replicate those we see in the real world. The queer community has divisions: passing as cis, primarily, but also being socialized and therefor internalizing patriarchal ideology and exclusionary proclivities. And because this cis exclusionary colony could and should be working together with the trans people, to fight back against their literal common enemy: men, the colonists choose to withhold hormones and murder the trans people; illustrating that they’d rather die than work with people they refuse to see as humans, and as women. Despite… literally not being or behaving like… men. A byproduct of this is that many of the colonists actually need to be rendered more vividly by the author and humanize them more than their views of the trans people, because it is literally, visibly, a rhetoric that makes no sense. They just choose not to help other people that could help them fight against men and devote their time and energy to murdering people that need help.

Another genius byproduct of the virus is that it shows the reader how the issue affects everyone. More than simply trans women. And the hateful rhetoric robs people of their ability to extend empathy to another person, and justify it. But also: how do we determine right now if a person can compete in sports for either gender? By their testosterone level. Which has excluded plenty of cis women from competing as well.

On top of a well thought out central conceit though, the book is also propulsive. Excellent flow. It reminds me of a pulpy action flick, with actually great, if vivid, gory physical conflicts. Sexual assault is granular as well. There’s a never ending heightening of emotion for absolutely anything the two trans characters go through. The sex is given as equal granularity and the conflicts are, which I thought would be off putting but I think somehow creates a humanization for them. When you could die at any time. And have the threat of sexual assault and death from men be be a spectre, coupled with women also threatening them and, in some cases, fetishizing them as another means of dehumanization—it makes sense to me that sex would be as vividly rendered as the hyper focus of life-and-death situations.

That said. It is really gruesome. I listened to it on audio and I think that was the right move for me. Because narration (which was excellent by the way) aids in a kind of cinematic, removed perspective, I didn’t get too grossed out like I thought I would. On the page, since it’s self-generated, I’m sure it’d have been more difficult for me. The tragic and heinous things that occur are, as mentioned, equally counter balanced with the loving parts.

Every person feels three dimensional. No one is unimpeachable. It’s not some kind of power fantasy, when it easily could have been. It is concerned with showing that the real horror is how even when systems erected have passed on institutional knowledge to people, no matter who operates that power, it is inherently dehumanizing, ugly, and evil. It divides people who love one another. It literally kills, while it dehumanizes people in the far more grotesque ways than people are prepared to acknowledge. You simply do not have the option to look away here. It is exactly what horror is supposed to do.