7 Fantastic (And 4 Offensive) Stories About Trans People And The Apocalypse
Where do non-binary people fit into the apocalypse?
TRANSlating The End Of The World
I’m sorry to tell you it’s all over.
Look out the window, or over the horizon, wherever you are, and what you see leaves no doubt.
It’s the end of the world as we know it.
To survive, you’ll need resources. Whatever is at hand, then whatever you can find, and ultimately whatever you can make. What do you grab first?
A lot of you might first reach for food, clothes, hopefully your pets.
I’d reach for my hormones. I’m trans and, well, since I can’t make my own, mine need to be store bought. But since pharmacies are about to take a dive, that essential dose of magic is about to become hard to find.
For better or for worse, here are six fantastic (and four offensive) visions of where trans people will fit into the apocalypse.
The Good
1. The Last of Us
Joel and Ellie, a pair connected through the harshness of the world they live in, are forced to endure brutal circumstances and ruthless killers on a trek across a post-outbreak America. — Google
The trans narrative in ‘The Last of Us Part II’ is compelling. There’s so much more to be done.
Ian Alexander Wants to Tackle His Trans Last of Us Role in the Show’s Second Season
2. Manhunt
Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they’ll never face the same fate.
Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren’t safe.
After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics―all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons. — Amazon
Chapter-by-chapter
Skip to Part 3 Chapter II for the death of JK Rowling…medium.com
3. The Power
In this stunning best seller praised as “our era’s Handmaid’s Tale”, a fierce new power has emerged — and only women have it (Washington Post).
In The Power, the world is a recognizable place: There’s a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family.
But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power: They can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways. — Amazon
‘The Power’ review: Sci-fi thriller upsets gender dynamics — but then what?
‘The Power’ actor Daniela Vega on her transformative role as a rebel nun
Naomi Alderman Discusses THE POWER, THE FUTURE, And How To Fight Nazis
4. The Fifth Season
This is the way the world ends…for the last time.
It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world’s sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts with betrayal, and long dormant wounds rising up to fester.
This is the Stillness, a land long familiar with catastrophe, where the power of the Earth is wielded as a weapon. And where there is no mercy. — Amazon
Though Jemisin’s world is racially diverse and, in some ways, egalitarian — both men and women can be designated Breeders or hold Leadership positions; trans individuals are accepted in some castes, but not in others — orogenes are slaves, and though they might lie to themselves about it, accepting what they’re taught, that doesn’t make their oppression any less vicious.
5. The Seep
A blend of searing social commentary and speculative fiction, Chana Porter’s fresh, pointed debut explores a strange new world in the wake of a benign alien invasion.
Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka is a fifty-year-old trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle — but nonetheless world-changing — invasion by an alien entity called The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence — until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seeptech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated.
Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina follows a lost boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind. A strange new elegy of love and loss, The Seep explores grief, alienation, and the ache of moving on. — Amazon
6. An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon
Aster has little to offer folks in the way of rebuttal when they call her ogre and freak. She’s used to the names; she only wishes there was more truth to them. If she were truly a monster, she’d be powerful enough to tear down the walls around her until nothing remains of her world.
Aster lives in the lowdeck slums of the HSS Matilda, a space vessel organized much like the antebellum South. For generations, Matilda has ferried the last of humanity to a mythical Promised Land. On its way, the ship’s leaders have imposed harsh moral restrictions and deep indignities on dark-skinned sharecroppers like Aster. Embroiled in a grudge with a brutal overseer, Aster learns there may be a way to improve her lot — if she’s willing to sow the seeds of civil war. — Amazon
Genderqueer Ancestry in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts
(Re)Visioning Gendered Futures in Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017)
7. Y: the Last Man
Y: THE LAST MAN, winner of three Eisner Awards and one of the most critically acclaimed, best-selling comic books series of the last decade, is that rare example of a page-turner that is at once humorous, socially relevant and endlessly surprising. Written by Brian K. Vaughan (LOST, PRIDE OF BAGHDAD, EX MACHINA) and with art by Pia Guerra, this is the saga of Yorick Brown — the only human survivor of a planet-wide plague that instantly kills every mammal possessing a Y chromosome. Accompanied by a mysterious government agent, a brilliant young geneticist and his pet monkey, Ampersand, Yorick travels the world in search of his lost love and the answer to why he’s the last man on earth.
How Y: The Last Man’s creative team has subverted familiar trans stories
FX Explains How ‘Y: The Last Man’ Will Handle Trans Characters
“A lot has changed since the graphic novel,” said Landgraf at FX’s Television Critics Association Press Tour session on Friday. “One of the things the show will make clear is that there are women with two X chromosomes and men with an X and Y chromosome — but there are also women with two Y chromosomes and men with two X chromosomes. So what happened was all the mammals with a Y chromosome — with the exception of this one man and this one monkey — died in one event. But there are numerous men in the show that had two X chromosomes, and they’re important characters. It’s also made clear that a number of women died that day who had a Y chromosome and probably didn’t even know it.”
Elaborated Clarke: So in our world of the show, every living mammal with a Y chromosome dies. Tragically, that includes many women. It includes nonbinary people and includes intersex people. But that’s also true of the survivors. I think every single person who is working on the show — from the writers to the directors to the cast and the crew — are making a show that affirms that trans women are women, trans men are men, nonbinary people are nonbinary, and that is part of the sort of richness of the world we get to play with.”
The Bad
1. Femlandia
A chilling look into an alternate near future where a woman and her daughter seek refuge in a women-only colony, only to find that the safe haven they were hoping for is the most dangerous place they could be.
Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice — either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.
Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving — and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born — and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.
Should you read Femlandia? Well, probably not. The author and her stories are incredibly transphobic. But her book Femlandia does mention trans people, and so it is an example of the current landscape of post-apocalyptic novels that at least note the existence of trans and intersex people.
Despite secretly keeping and housing boys for their sperm, Femlandia’s strict “NO TRANS WOMEN ALLOWED” policy is still in militant effect, giving us immediate red flags. But upon learning this, our protagonist barely quibbles and the subject is brushed past never to be addressed again. This is classic terf mentality, and despite it coming from the “baddies” of the story, the fact that our protagonist also cares so little and doesn’t argue the fact just adds insult to injury.
Dalcher does absolutely nothing to accommodate for a trans person’s perspective, opinion or experience in this world she has created. — Goodreads
2. Herland
Herland is a utopian novel from 1915, written by American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who bear children without men. The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination. — Wikipedia
The fantasy of such a place is an old one that had its heyday in the lesbian-separatist movements of the Seventies and Eighties, and also a regressive one that excludes people who are intersex, transgender, gender-nonconforming and genderqueer. I’m not interested in inhabiting the binary dream of Herland any more than the versions of reality pronounced by Marche. But I’ve been wondering why our current revolutionary moment seems so tangled up in the language of binaries — wondering why I keep bumping up against its essentialism, as if the utopian hope of #MeToo were encased in an eggshell.
3. The End of Men
Only men carry the virus. Only women can save us all.
The year is 2025, and a mysterious virus has broken out in Scotland — a lethal illness that seems to affect only men. When Dr. Amanda MacLean reports this phenomenon, she is dismissed as hysterical. By the time her warning is heeded, it is too late. The virus becomes a global pandemic — and a political one. The victims are all men. The world becomes alien — a women’s world.
What follows is the immersive account of the women who have been left to deal with the virus’s consequences, told through first-person narratives. Dr. MacLean; Catherine, a social historian determined to document the human stories behind the “male plague”; intelligence analyst Dawn, tasked with helping the government forge a new society; and Elizabeth, one of many scientists desperately working to develop a vaccine. Through these women and others, we see the uncountable ways the absence of men has changed society, from the personal — the loss of husbands and sons — to the political — the changes in the workforce, fertility, and the meaning of family. — Amazon
Christina Sweeney-Baird’s The End of Men (2021) shows the male plague through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. None, however, find the new world an improvement. As in Afterland, there’s an intense focus on sperm: though only 90% of men die of plague, there is somehow a critical shortage. The government enacts a form of eugenics, restricting the precious substance to mothers it deems fit. This move may be uncomfortably reminiscent of the politics of Herland, but the impression is not that Sweeney-Baird is a fan of eugenics; she is imagining things she thinks would happen if there were a male plague, not suggesting what should happen. — The Guardian
4. Afterland
In Lauren Beukes’s 2020 novel Afterland, a threatened male is again the focus, after 99% of all male humans are killed by a flu that triggers prostate cancer. Survivors are incarcerated by the government and prevented from reproducing until a cure is found. The few free men are pursued by baby-hungry women and hunted by profiteers who want to harvest their sperm. The main character has broken her son out of a research facility and is fleeing with him through a post-apocalyptic world. — The Guardian
Did not finish due to transphobia. You have created a world, could you not also create one where transwomen are unaffected by the virus just like their cis counterparts? How about deciding that taking hormones prevents them from getting the prostate cancer that is killing cis men? Trans women were only mentioned once and it was to specifically indicate that they are killed by the virus that only kills men. It is so unnecessary.
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