There’s Robbie, a trans man grown isolated and paranoid over years spent sniping the cis hordes in the woods, and Indi, an overweight doctor who refines tradable estrogen from the severed balls Fran and Beth bring home. We open with two ‘manhunters,’ Beth and Fran, stalking their prey through a New England forest, and as the novel progresses we meet our other main viewpoint characters. In a zombie apocalypse where testosterone transforms men into ravening beasts, trans women survive off estrogen extracted from the testicles of the creatures who once ruled the Earth, and try not to get killed by a growing movement of fascist TERFs. In this context, the appearance of Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a refreshing change of pace. In 2022, with anti-trans legislation being introduced across the US and an ostensibly feminist hate movement gaining traction, these stories’ rigidly chromosomal conception of gender starts to look downright insidious.
I remember reading The Power in 2017 and being surprised by the fact that intersex people are featured for precisely one scene before being dropped from the narrative entirely, and trans people are not mentioned at all.
That last clause, the ease with which these works dismiss trans people, has become harder and harder to ignore in recent years. “There was a big, uh, Y-chromosome flu, and then all the X-chromosomes got activated by a spilled jar of Chemical X-acto-tron… so all the women turned into Storm, and all the men exploded, and probably something happened to trans people too.”
The subgenre was best formulated by Daniel Lavery in 2020: These are stories set in the future which depict a radical shakeup of gender politics while displaying a curious rigidity about karyotypes. There is a subgenre of science fiction that I am tempted to label chromosomepunk.
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