What I've Been Reading: Manhunt
This brutal addition to the ‘gendercide’ genre shows that a world without men can still be relentlessly violent.
In a world without men, violence against women still exists.
Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, a grisly, post-apocalyptic queer horror novel, makes plenty of hard-hitting points. Arguably, this is the most salient.
Based loosely on ‘gendercide’ novels of the past, Manhunt centres three main protagonists: Beth and Fran, two trans women, and Robbie, a trans man. They’re fighting for their lives in a world ravaged by a plague named t.rex, which makes monstrous, flesh-eating zombies of anyone with too much testosterone in their systems. It’s not just cis men who are vulnerable to the virus; cis women with conditions like PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome) can also fall victim to t.rex, as can trans women without the right hormones in their system. Zombie-men are lethally dangerous, but they’re also hunted. When captured and killed, their balls are chopped off, fried and eaten to keep hormone levels in check –– hence the two dangling cherries on the book’s macabre yet darkly hilarious front cover.
Yet the cannibalistic, zombified men aren’t the main threat in Manhunt. TERFs are.
TERF death squads are emerging across the United States, and their ranks are swelling slowly. Their leader is Teach, a formidable warrior with an ‘XX’ tattoo –– a stamp of biological legitimacy, used as a tribal tattoo by other TERFs — and a singular obsession with abolishing trans womanhood. Teach’s headquarters are plastered with downloaded selfies of trans women, their presence a constant reminder of a threat that needs to be eradicated. Ramona is arguably Teach’s favourite disciple and her protégé of sorts, yet Ramona’s growing dependence on alcohol threatens to betray a hidden fascination with — and fetishisation of — trans femininity.
Finally, there’s Indi. Previously a fertility specialist, she’s a hot commodity in this plague-ravaged landscape. Indi uses her skills to process oestrogen, supplying it surreptitiously to Beth and Fran, both of whom are her close friends.
First, fair warning –– this book is not an easy read. It’s filled with adrenaline for sure, but its pace is meandering and its descriptive passages often stretch across entire paragraphs. The world-building here is meticulous, with Felker-Martin crafting in-depth descriptions of barren landscapes, obstacle-laden battlegrounds and gore-packed death sequences. It’s gruesome, and graphic. Knives are rammed through jaws, cracking bone and matting grass with fresh, dark blood. Bodies are slashed up, harvested for organs and discarded like trash.
For trans readers, there are endless trigger warnings: from in-depth rape scenes to violent outbursts of transphobia, there’s a lot to consider before picking up this book.
What I love most about Manhunt is that its characters are deeply flawed. Fran and Beth are positioned as polar opposites: Fran is slim, femme and beautiful, more concerned with assimilation and cis approval than anything else; Beth is her rugged, resilient counterpart, a tooth-and-nail fighter with a face slashed open and stitched back together. Their friendship is fraught with jealousy and punctuated by the occasional fuck, which stems mainly from convenience: Fran gets to feel delicate and desired, whereas Beth gets to bask in the warm, validating glow of fucking a conventionally attractive beauty.
Robbie is their unexpected hero. His first appearance comes in a stomach-churning gang-rape scene, which genuinely made me scream out loud and cry. Beth lays her life on the line and gets fucked in return, the heart-wrenching scene a tidy summation of Fran’s complacent dependence on Beth as a protector. It’s also a hugely political scene, which looks at the differences in experience between trans women who ‘pass’ and those who don’t. When Robbie emerges as their saviour, the glint of surprise in their eyes points to the cultural invisibility of trans men. He’s maybe my favourite character in the book; fiercely driven by the idea of social justice, constantly wrestling with the morality bound up in his every decision.
Manhunt is filled with horrific battle scenes, but it’s also packed full of intimacy, camaraderie and filthy, hot sex. It’s maybe some of the best-written erotica I’ve ever read, and it deifies marginalised bodies: fat, queer and disabled bodies take centre stage. The fucking isn’t perfect, by any means. But it is realistic. There’s the occasional flash of dysphoria, the complexity of being attracted to somebody not because of how you feel about them, but how they make you feel about you. It’s a tough job to explain how fucking someone can feel wildly gender-euphoric even if you’re not attracted to them on a deeper level, but Felker-Martin does it wonderfully.
There’s fat sex, too. I felt a flicker of recognition in one sex scene ,where Indi hesitates briefly to lower her full weight onto her partner for fear that she’ll hurt them. She eats alone, haunted by the memory of an ex-husband who would watch her mouth in repulsion as she chewed. Despite this traumatic past, there are moments where Indi’s body is treated with the same reverence as other characters, when viewed through a loving lens. These moments of tender respite feel genuinely ground-breaking.
You won’t necessarily glean any of this nuance from looking at some of the book’s feedback. Reactions have been wildly divided, and the book has been vilified by — obviously — TERFs for its brutal portrayals of their unhinged obsession with trans people, trans women in particular. J.K. Rowling is named extremely sporadically, yet these brief mentions have been enough to rile up TERFs into a frenzy. The book’s feedback has been bogged down with ‘culture war’ bullshit, which obviously wasn’t unintentional. But as the first trans woman to ever release a horror title on a major platform, anything Felker-Martin did was bound to be politicised by default. Why not lean into it and say “Fuck TERFs” with your chest?
That’s not to say that the TERFs in this book are one-dimensional. They aren’t, and they’re actually fleshed out in ways which lead to some pretty interesting scenes. In one poignant moment, a rebel TERF makes a memorable statement: “We’re just doing to [trans women] the shit that men used to do to us,” she says. Ramona’s feelings on trans womanhood grow more complicated as the story progresses, leading to moments which expertly sum up the internal conflicts between personal and political.
Second-wave feminists used to paint a world without men as utopian, void of patriarchy and freed of gendered violence. Manhunt digs deeper, and probes more deeply at the traits we see as innately gendered. Violent structures don’t disappear without men upholding them. Equally homicidal women just take over instead.
Felker-Martin pulls no punches in examining mainstream feminism’s histories of white supremacy, or its blinkered insistence on defining and exalting only the “right” kinds of woman. The most privileged women survive the earliest years of this post-apocalyptic world, and they wreak havoc. Again, no spoilers, but the book makes an excellent point that women with power become drunk on their authority quickly. They might not be the ones actually doing the killing — they have their paid lackeys for that — but they have blood on their hands regardless.
We’re at a moment in political history where trans people have never been more visible, but they’ve also never been more hunted — both literally and metaphorically. Felker-Martin literalises the violence of anti-trans bills, transphobic media coverage and the constant, looming threat of TERFdom, fleshing out a world which feels relentlessly bleak. I read one Goodreads review which argued this book falls flat because there’s nothing to hope for, nothing to make readers root for a cast full of characters who all feel like they’d rather be dead.
Initially, I could see the point this reviewer was making. Now, I disagree. Not only are there scenes which celebrate the resilience of trans solidarity, there’s also a lingering expectation that books are supposed to make us feel comfortable, especially when they’re written by marginalised authors.
It’s a blistering and often deeply troubling read, but I deeply admire that Manhunt pulls no punches. It’s not interested in guiding readers through strife to a happy ending, and it’s not willing to dilute the messiness of its trans characters to play into the respectability politics argument that we’re straightforwardly good people, and should therefore be treated better. Well, no — we’re marginalised, dealt a shitty hand and often exposed to huge levels of trauma. Obviously, trauma fucks people up. It’s a cliché to say that hurt people hurt people, but it’s true — and this book faces that truth head-on rather than burying it under the rug.
The reality is that trans people aren’t inherently good, and nor should we have to be. We’re forced to compete against each other for the scraps of representation we do get, and it’s constantly insinuated that one “bad trans” can fuck up any hope of progress for the rest of us. It’s a disgustingly brutal novel, but it’s also a deeply necessary addition to the ‘gendercide’ genre, and one which occasionally sent jolts of electricity through my body. Manhunt pulses with rage, and that’s part of its brilliance. In many ways, it does a stellar job of summarising just how fucking bleak it can be to exist as a trans person in a world that would rather legislate you out of existence.