I read The Masker by Torrey Peters a few months ago and it cracked my brain in half, again.

It was the first trans fic I’ve read since my brain cracked in half for the third time, after I realised that gender was fuckin fake shit. I wasn’t really expecting that to have a great impact on My Personal Quest, but I think it did honestly. The Masker is more or less an exploration of trans sexuality, of the whole fictionmania, nifty forcefemme/sissy/whatever phenomenon in closeted transfemmes. It’s posed as forcing its protagonist (Krys, closeted half-aware crossdressing-kink poster) to make the choice between siding with one of two sides in a scuffle at a local trans meetup group thingy:

You have Sally, the harshly cisnormative, gatekeeping, binary sex shamer trans woman. She’s sort of like halfway between a Susan’s Place boomer and an imageboard assimilationist, if you know what I mean. Her bit is that she’s pissed she has to share space with the Masker, Felix. She’s all like, “I didn’t go through everything”–Sally waves up and down her body–“to be in the same club with that kind of pervert,” that sort of thing. Also she is a former cop.

Then there’s Felix. He (using the novella’s pronouns) is the filthy dirty fuck-yourself-you-are-a-hot-girl crossdressing fetishist who moonlights as an attractive young man when he’s not wearing silicon women’s skin. He’s not overly complicated beyond being an absurd misogynist, I guess. They both kind of represent extreme ends of that one crackpot transphobe guy’s typology, weirdly. Such is life on imageboards, I guess.

Krys sort of exists at the intersection of both, shame, gender envy and “you will never be a woman” instinct bubbling together alongside real fuckin validation and enjoyment from dirty sissy stuff and forcefem fiction. An instinct to dress up pretty and femme, take photos of a highly indecent nature. You know, the good stuff.

The crux of the plot is basically that Krys is involved with both of them, and they both like her for their own weird reasons. Sally views her as a Not Like Other Crossdressers, and Felix is a weird horny fucker who’s willing to cosplay a beautiful effeminate man for Krys. But Felix keeps showing up to local transfemme events and Sally hates him to death for it, basically taking a transmed gatekeeper stance on him. She wants Krys to phone the cops on him when the next local transfemme event is held at a very transphobic casino, except Krys is an allosexual fiend and reveals, while Felix is palming her crotch, this plan. Felix demands she call the cops on Sally instead.

The Masker seemed like it should be horrifying and distressing to me, like it’s just brainworms in a can. It sounds like it should be a brainrotter, right? Better books than this have dealt me psychic damage in past. Honestly though, I think I appreciate its outlook at the end of the day. It’s a very blunt rejection of the typology; both Sally and Felix are misogynists at the end of the day, right? Whatever their specific views, they both come down to weird exclusionary gatekeeping shit. So, fuck em.

The most telling thing about The Masker in this respect, though, is that it’s far from the least sexual thing I’ve ever read. Passages describing Krys’ sexual escapades are written with a close intimacy and a total lack of judgement. It has detail that verges on tender: Krys hasn’t or can’t decide what to call her anatomy. I’ve never heard the term “pink fog” before, but it’s like, Oh Yeah, okay. The Masker says: Fuck Yourself. You can do both, you don’t have to make a choice between these because they’re bullshit constructions, and they’re not really reasonable ways of relating to your body. It’s fascinating. I kinda dig it.

Thing is, I doubt I would have been able to take any of this in a year ago. Again I suspected this book was gonna be excruciating, but I think the whole bit where my brain got rewired was really healthy for me, I guess. I think I had a lot more fucked up stuff woven into that than I realised, which sadly is not surprising.

It helps to be able to view binary genders–“woman” in particular–as constructed and heterosexual in this context, the way The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto describes, instead of as some sacred totem not to be infringed upon. I think that conception, the hopeless grasping of binary gender for validity caused a lot of strain to me when I read these things before. People are allowed to do funny things with gender. I think I am finally reading with a combined sense of slight remove and greater understanding. It’s really cool.

I’m sitting here wondering if I need to go re-address other stuff I’ve read. I think I’d maybe feel a lot better about Manhunt with this in mind, but I doubt Light from Uncommon Stars would be greatly improved by this view, Idk. I’m pretty sure this is a net positive though, because I’m pretty sure Psycho Nymph Exile would have been harder to read before.

TL;DR lines like “Maybe I don’t pass as a woman, but at least it looks like I eat their hormones” and “The dress is classic sissy fetish-- super-pretty boys dressed in ridiculously feminine satin outfits-- frills and bows dripping in profusion not seen on a cis woman since the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire” now make me laugh instead of groan, which I dig