"What we're doing to them... It's the same shit men did to us before"
"They are men"
"No. They're not, and I think you know it"
I know, as a cis man, I'm not exactly the person that Manhunt is for. Still, I want to get my thoughts on it out here because, well, I have a lot of them, and I've also seen the brigading this book has faced from people who haven't read it and I want to add a voice to the chorus of people talking about how incredible it is.
Gretchen-Felker Martin's Manhunt was one of my most anticipated reads in recent times and my only regret is that I didn't get to it sooner. Let's set the stage: in the near future, a virus nicknamed 't-rex' (and not, as I frequently had to remind myself, 'the t-virus') has ripped across the world, turning anyone with a sufficient level of testosterone into a slavering monster. Trans women, like our heroines Beth and Fran, are able to survive this post-apocalyptic landscape only by harvesting estrogen from (among other sources) the testicles of these 'new men'. They, together with their doctor companion Indi, team up with Robbie, a trans man who has been going it alone in the wilderness. In addition to the ravening hordes of men, they must contend with a billionaire 'bunker baby' riding out the end of the world in a tiny dictatorship, and - perhaps scariest of all - a growing empire of TERFs.
These last are, of course, where all the negative press has come from. But Felker-Martin's portrayal of these TERFs is beyond the caricatured revenge fantasy that rags like the Daily Mail have painted her as writing (not that, of course, bigots don't deserve caricature or revenge fantasies). This is an in-depth understanding of their ideology and organisations that can only come from someone who has faced down their hate in reality. Felker-Martin deftly explores why someone might be drawn to the 'gender critical' ideology without shying away from portraying its implications, the dehumanisation, hate and violence that are integral to it. To Teach, the terrifying leader of the TERF militia spilling out to conquer new lands in the name of the XX, this is not the end of the world, but the world as it should be, or at least the world their ideology expects - men no longer able to hide their biological predestination to be rapists and murderers, trans women able to be scapegoated as be ticking timebombs of male violence, and women's fear of those men able to be redirected into violence against trans women. In a particularly telling scene, Teach lectures a group of boys on how her group is necessary to stop them growing into positions of male domination over women - despite the obvious absence of cis men in the society she is creating, despite the hormone treatments necessary for these boys to even grow up without succumbing to the virus, for Teach the patriarchy is contained within their bodies, not social relations. Even if there are no men, TERFs will create patriarchy by themselves. Felker-Martin doesn't shy away from how patriarchy - and specific men - have harmed each of the characters in their pasts, including Ramona, one of Teach's lieutenants. But right from the off we can see how the antagonists reject solidarity with trans people who have every reason to fight patriarchy, instead choosing to visit horrendous violence upon them.
Felker-Martin's prose is sometimes like a sodium flare, sometimes like acid, but either way it burns. It scintillates and seethes, moving seamlessly between heart-rending emotional honesty, dizzying action and unflinching horror. I have no hesitation in describing what she does as mastery of the craft. She has a clear talent for teasing out tension until it's tighter than the string of Beth's bow, and even more powerful when let loose - both within a scene and over the course of the novel. There were, if I'm really nitpicking, a couple of points where the pacing threw me or a time skip felt briefly jarring, but these were easily moved past. She also has an incredible ability to get inside a character's head, and present them to the reader with emotional honesty and power. I've seen a lot of trans people on social media talking about how authentic her writing of trans characters is, which I can't speak to, but I can definitely say that it feels authentic in general. The characters boil with emotion, with memory, with pet peeves and grievances, with trauma and scarring, with adaptation, self-doubt, ferocious dedication, with insight. They are the weight of the novel, and their struggles, triumphs and heartbreaks hit the reader in the heart every time. Felker-Martin can plumb the depths of trauma and grief, invoke the giddiness of love and lust, and reach to the core of joy in trans solidarity and sisterhood with equal ease and it is truly something to behold.
I implore you to read this book. I implore you to seek out trans people's thoughts on it too, as there's obviously a limit to how much I can say about it. But if literature is, at least in part, a way to live other lives than your own, to experience things as other people than yourself experience them, then I feel very privileged to have been able to look through this lens for the duration of this book. This is one of the best things I've read in a long time. It is truly horrifying, shockingly exciting, and emotionally raw - and it also has something to say to which we should all be listening.
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