Content note: TERFs… just like… so… many TERFS. And a LOT of gore.
Things are bad right now. I’m gonna assume that if you’re reading this and you’re queer or trans or have queer or trans friends (and if you’re not at least one of those things, I’m confused as to how you got here - hi though!) then you already know that, and you know why, and that I can just *gestures vaguely* gesture vaguely and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
When things are bad like this, sometimes it can be difficult when all my favourite media is about fascism and the end days. Sometimes you don’t want to be listening to podcasts about right-wing tactics when right-wing tactics are right there making everything shit. So you would think I would not have wanted to spend this week reading Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, because, well, it’s about the collapse of civilisation and militant TERF takeover. But in a deeply weird way, it’s been OK. Comforting, even. Somebody on Goodreads called it “the feel-bad classic of the decade” and… yeah, I felt that.
The book’s premise is a self-conscious riff on the gendercide trope I talked about briefly before. In the near future, a plague called t.rex has turned everyone with testosterone higher than a certain level into feral cannibalistic monsters who will kill and eat their own families and anything else that moves. But this is not a “what if no men” book. This is, specifically, “what if nobody above a certain testosterone level” book. Trans women can get the plague unless they can keep their testosterone levels down with hormones, either synthesised or stolen. Trans men can get the plague too, unless they aren’t on hormones. Cis women with high testosterone levels can get it. Because roughly half the population has not only ceased to become human but also taken to eating their former loved ones, society has completely broken down, with governments collapsing and resources hoarded by 'bunker brats’. Oh, and there are armies of TERFs running around building TERF military dictatorships.
This is a horror novel (or, to use the new genre term I learned today on goodreads, “splatterpunk” 👀) and it is… gory. It opens with somebody getting shot in the eye with a crossbow and basically carries on getting worse from there. The feral testosterone-creatures are still humanoid enough that their testes, like human testes, are the main site of oestrogen production, and so the two protagonists - both trans women - harvest balls to keep their own oestrogen supply going and to sell to menopausal women. That premise sums up the tone of the whole book, really - gross, vampy, but weirdly fascinating.
The TERF militias, too, are vampy in their way. Don’t get me wrong, they’re terrifying, and there is a lot of violence against trans women in this book (as well as trans women getting gruesome revenge). But they also drive around in camo trucks with ten-foot XXs painted on the side, saluting each other. They name a town Raymond (after Janice). Much like real contemporary TERFs, they are a heady mix of chilling and laughable.
The plague premise allows for a vaudevillian exaggeration of TERF talking points and lore, but doesn’t require any fundamental changes to it. It’s all still there: the chromosome obsession, the lionising of “biological” “womanhood” as innately good and pure, the positioning of trans women as deceitful infiltrators and trans men as traitors to womankind. It’s all just got higher stakes now. It’s not made clear whether the t.rex plague was released intentionally, but it’s left open as a possibility - and certainly the TERFs seem very happy about it. Teach, one of the TERF leaders, makes a speech to an assembly of pre-plague trans teens which could have come straight from the XXier corners of Twitter today:
“A male body is a time bomb,” she continued. “The male temperament inclines you to toss that bomb from hand to hand, to take foolish risks, to behave without thought to the greater consequences. No matter how real your girlhood, if you tell yourself you’ve had one, may feel, you have been raised as men. You have been raised to brutalize, to steal, to disregard the women who raised you and sacrificed their own lives to protect yours.”
If anything, this sounds a little more sane coming from TERFs in a fantasy world where most men’s bodies are liable to turn them into cannibals. But note that Teach does not actually reference the plague here: instead, like real TERFs, she talks about the inherent evil of a male body. Whatever you change about yourself, the TERFs say, there is always something deeper inside that betrays your inherent, biologically innate moral worth. With that established, the cannibal plague is just an added detail.
Even with armed TERFs, with things as bad as they are, there is a real cathartic satisfaction at this point - and to be honest, a lot of vampy joy - in a book about trans people arming themselves and fighting back. But there is more at work here. Manhunt is about survival as well as conflict: as well as literal blood and guts, there is the blood and guts of interpersonal conflict and trauma. In amongst the squishy viscera, it asks a heightened version of the big, unsolvable question that hangs over so many queer communities now: how do we co-exist and care for each other when everyone is hurt and frightened?
So much of the book is about characters pulling the ladder up after them - almost literally on occasion - when they can scramble up to a place of safety. At the centre of this is Sophie the bunker brat, one of the lucky rich kids whose parents had invested in some end-of-days real estate before the plague. She has a hoard of resources in her bunker, and the bunker itself is a resource - a safe place from the plague-ridden testosterone cannibals. Proximity to Sophie, to her wealth and whiteness and locked gates, is a commodity that keeps people safe - but of course, it isn’t, because safety that’s contingent on the whimsical generosity of someone immensely more powerful than you is not really safety. Much of the interpersonal drama in the novel comes from characters working through this idea in various ways. Sophie’s luxury bunker, like the TERF army, offers a form of highly conditional pseudo-safety which breaks down the moment it is structurally threatened, at which point everyone is out for themselves. As one character says when observing a band TERFs scrambling to save themselves and leaving their comrades in the dust, “they don’t even love each other.”
Back when I wrote about the preposterous talking point that somehow trans people did climate change, I said that the TERFs who can’t cope with joyful trans embodiment have made the mistake of seeing gendered experience as a finite resource, a scarce fossil fuel. But in Manhunt, we see the trans characters slipping into that mindset too, grasping for whatever they can and forgetting about their comrades along the way, recreating hierarchies - of ‘passing’, of whiteness, of abled-ness. They resent each other for pre-apocalyptic transgressions, regret and compare where their transition ‘timelines’ stopped when the world ended. One of the repeating refrains is communities deciding who to include and exclude, where to make their allegiances, where to draw lines. In some cases, exclusion is unavoidable - like when your loved one has too much testosterone, and is about to become a cannibal who will kill you. In others, the instinct to exclude is carried over from the pre-apocalyptic world.
In a way, it’s not surprising that these hierarchies emerge: in the plague world, the physical resources needed for transition are truly scarce commodities, requiring hunting prowess, chemistry skills, or proximity to magnanimous rich bunker brats to obtain. But the book argues that physical scarcity doesn’t mean we should abandon each other, and doesn’t mean we should limit the scope of our political imagination. In fact, it means the opposite: the characters discover repeatedly that they will not survive without community. It’s not an idealistic message - frankly, they may not survive with community, either - but there is more hope that they might. The collapse of everything means both abandoning hope, and embracing it:
“I know the world’s dead, but that means we get more of a say in what happens to the people left in it, not less.”
Manhunt is not a hopeful book, exactly. But it’s a book that offers little glimmers of hope, among the pitch-black irony. It reminds of the anarchist concept of prefigurativism - the idea that the means we use and the ends we aim for are one and the same, and the ways we treat each other and relate to each other are our politics. As Adrian Kreutz puts it, prefiguratism
is a way of showing what a world without the tyranny of the present might look like. It is a way of finding hope (but not escapism!) in the realms of possibility––something that words and theories alone cannot provide. [...] As a form of activism, prefigurativism highlights the idea that your means match the ends you can expect. It highlights that social structures enacted in the here-and-now, in the small confines of our organisations, institutions and rituals mirror the wider social structures we can expect to see in the post-revolutionary future.
The fun thing about seeing this idea in post-apocalyptic fiction is that it’s not so much prefiguring as postfiguring: using the collapsed future as a place to explore what our political/interpersonal commitments really mean, when everything else is stripped away. In the hope that, perhaps, we might realise a little earlier in this timeline.