This is how The New York Times summarizes Manhunt, a novel the newspaper celebrates alongside works by James Baldwin and Adrienne Rich as among the “Top 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature”:
Men are monsters, infected by the T. rex virus, which turns anything with enough testosterone into a vicious, braindead killing machine. In what remains of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Beth and Fran, two old friends and trans women, are forced to pick off the changed men in order to harvest their testicles, the best supply of estrogen around and their only means to keep from joining the plague of men.
In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 post-apocalyptic horror novel, transgender protagonists kill biological men and eat their testicles, all while on the run from an army of what the novel calls TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists)—or, in normal parlance, women who know men cannot become women.
Indeed, according to Manhunt’s fans, the book’s real villains are the TERFs rather than the men. The plot, replete with rape and bizarre sex, portrays its transgender characters first enslaved by the TERFs and then savagely avenging themselves on these women. Along the way, it does not miss the opportunity to describe the violent death of J. K. Rowling.
The author, Felker-Martin, a 6’4” 36-year-old male who goes by “she” and “her,” is not shy about his violent fantasies. These spill over into his support on social media for the very real-life violence perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians, writing of Rowling that he hopes “someone splits her skull,” and gloating over the shooting of Charlie Kirk (for which DC Comics cancelled a new “Robin” series Felker-Martin was writing). By every indication, the book and its author are both demented.
Yet Manhunt has been ecstatically celebrated in mainstream and elite media institutions. The New Yorker calls it “a filthy, furious delight,” The New York Times says it’s “tons of fun.” Esquire, Library Journal, Gizmodo, and Booklist put it on their year’s best lists, while Cosmopolitan declared it one of the best horror novels of all time.
Lilly—formerly Andy—Wachowski, one of the two transgender brothers who directed the Matrix movies, is developing Manhunt as a television series.
Writers have always produced scabrous satires, but what is notable about the mainstream lionization of Felker-Martin is that his reviewers do not treat the book as satire. Instead, they make claims for its realism. As the reviewer for NPR wrote, “enforcing gender kills people, That’s true today; Manhunt just takes it to an extreme.”
Manhunt is at least intended for adults. Can the same be said for Felker-Martin’s 2024 follow-up, Cuckoo, a NPR best book of the year about “seven queer kids abandoned by their parents at a remote conversion camp”?
The American Library Association’s Booklist tells us that the book “fairly vibrates with rage at those who seek to harm or fail to protect queer kids.” In addition to rage, the book includes anal sex with strap-ons and a variety of sexual horrors.
Yet Macmillan Publishers, parent company of the book’s publisher Tor, includes Cuckoo in its 2024 list of “Adult Books for Teens,” quoting Booklist (“Teen readers who can handle the content will feel seen by this queer-informed horror novel”) and Library Journal (“Seething with anger at horrors both real and supernatural, Felker-Martin’s novel sets out to incite readers and inspire them to protect queer kids”).
Also marketed explicitly to teens are the violent trans fantasies of Andrew Joseph White. White’s bestselling 2022 debut, the YA sci-fi novel Hell Followed With Us, published by Peachtree Teen, is described on Amazon as “A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors.” The oppressors here appear to be evil Christians or “those who use God as a cover for genocide.”
Again, the book received glowing reviews in trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal. Again, reviewers emphasize that the book’s paranoid apocalyptics are simply reflections of reality, that, as The New York Times reviewer writes, Hell Followed With Us “respond[s] with a long, sustained scream to the various strains of antitransgender legislation multiplying around the world.” Also, again, Lilly Wachowski is involved in the production of an animated film based on the book.
Felker-Martin and White are only two examples of what for the last decade has been a stream of queer- and trans-themed genre fiction—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, romance—pumped like artificial hormones into the body of popular culture. I first became aware of this a few years ago while working on a book about fantasy literature. That had me checking the new book announcements in Locus, a magazine devoted to news about fantasy and science fiction publishing. The magazine features the Black Lives Matter and trans flags on its website, leaving no ambiguity about its official politics.
But I was struck more by the publishing news: month after month, new titles emphasizing queer and transgender content, often by major publishers and often marketed to teenagers. I remember in the summer of 2022, when the books by White and Felker-Martin appeared, also seeing announcements for Wrath Goddess Sing (HarperCollins), an “epic fantasy, re-envisioning the Trojan War with Achilles as a transwoman”; We All Fall Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the start of a YA dark fantasy series about “four young queer people”; Youngblood (Penguin), a YA fantasy about “queer teen vampires”; and Heat Wave (Tor Teen), the third in a “young-adult queer superhero fantasy romance” series. Locus’s award for best Young Adult book was given to transgender author Charlie Jane Anders three years in a row—2022 to 2024—for his genderfluid science fiction trilogy Unstoppable.
As horrific incidents of violence perpetrated by trans-identified individuals followed, most recently the murder of children praying in a Minneapolis church, I began to wonder about the possible effects of this pop culture proliferation.
Transgender activists have mounted so-called “days of rage” to demonstrate against what they claim to be an anti-trans genocide taking place. Journalists such as Andy Ngo have reported on the violent transgender terror cult known as “Ziz,” as well as the preponderance of transgender members of violent Antifa cells. The embrace of the Hamas terror regime by large parts of the American left is often accompanied by violence involving transgender rioters for whom the Palestinian kaffiyeh has become as much their uniform as the Covid mask.
Now there are reports that a message related to the online “furry” subculture, a disturbing and memetic sexual ideology adjacent to transgenderism, was found on ammunition in the rifle used to murder Charlie Kirk. Kirk’s assassination also comes on the heels of multiple tragic shootings by transgender individuals.
People watching these developments are now more willing to point out that, by encouraging the fantasy that people can change sex, transgender ideology naturally attracts mentally unstable individuals who are more likely to commit acts of violence.
But what if the fantasies being sold to confused and young readers are themselves explicitly violent, like those of Manhunt and Hell Followed With Us, fantasies of rage and alienation, apocalypse and violent revenge? What if the imaginative worlds occupied by increasing numbers of readers are meant to effect not what J. R. R. Tolkien, in discussing fantasy, called the “regaining of a clear view,” but the inculcation of resentment, messianic superiority, and hatred of the healthy and normal?
Of course, writers entertain all kinds of extreme and transgressive notions in fiction without intending them to be put into real-life practice. The influence of culture on behavior is omnipresent, but not always direct. Sci-fi and fantasy have long portrayed outsiders and heroes who act on violent impulses, while at least some of the recent glut of queer and trans fiction follows on the earlier mainstreaming of—quite heterosexual—supernatural romance (Twilight), kink (Fifty Shades), and sexual violence in fantasy (Game of Thrones).
But the extreme militancy and mutilation connected with transgender ideology is of a different order. None of the just-named bestsellers is connected with a movement that enacts its fantasies surgically and chemically on the bodies of young people.
What is most disturbing, then, is not the seething hatred, fashionable alienation, or end-of-the-world fantasies of one or another author, but the accompanying celebration and amplification in media and publishing: rhapsodies in The New York Times, starred recommendations by library journals, and contracts with major publishing houses—and film production companies.
Why are they celebrating this insanity? Perhaps it is a version of what Tom Wolfe described half a century ago as “Radical Chic,” the guilty western liberal’s decadent infatuation with revolutionary savagery. But this latest version is even more depraved.
Transgenderism is a rejection not only of Western civilization but of nature, biology, and physical integrity. Its raging campaign of surgical and chemical mutilation, targeting young people, is a nihilistic deathwish—currently widely celebrated by media and publishing as art and fun.