Trans Men/Mascs in Storytelling, Part One (1) An Introduction, and a Case Study of Antitransmasculinity

 Many months ago I finally decided to document, discuss, recommend and share media featuring transmasculine characters and/or discussions of transmasculinity. What you will read, is the culmination of that work…for now.

Of the 31 pieces of media we will discuss here, that to some extent feature transmasculinity:

21/31 feature a transmasculine lead character and/or centre transmasculine experiences (bearing in mind I have been specifically seeking out author diversity and media of this nature);

18/31 are created by people who are openly transmasculine;

22/31 have LESS than 100 ratings/reviews;

20/31 have LESS THAN 50;

It bears repeating: 65% of the pieces of media that I’ve found and consumed for this project, that in some way feature transmasculinity, have less than 50 reviews/ratings. Many of these have been available for a year, or longer.

Disclaimer: these stats were recorded at the time of my documentation (between early spring, and late fall of 2025), these numbers are obviously subject to change, and I hope after people read this, they do.

In my video: ( https://youtu.be/lYNM9RRsmec ) I opened with this discussion, the reason I am opening with it again with updated stats, having added more to my reading, is because the most popular examples of media featuring transmasculine people often show them being brutally raped and/or murdered. So when you’re wondering why there is so little transmasculine representation in your media, know that it exists, but due to the erasure the (most often) trans creator faces, their art isn’t reaching you.

I’m aiming to combat that with this project. In true countdown fashion, I will start with what I would LEAST recommend, and end with my personal favourites. Throughout this, I will be discussing the portrayals and underlaying, and often repeated, themes we see in these stories (fiction and nonfiction).

A note: while I do seek out creative work from other trans people, the analysis here will not focus or discuss the creators’ identities. I will put pronouns beside names, trans or cis, and will not focus on whether the writer/s are trans or whether the actor/s are, my focus and interest is on the writing itself and what these pieces of media communicate to their consumers about transmasculine people. In that vein, I myself am a trans man, I use he/him pronouns, and this will be a mix of media analysis, trans theory, and anecdotal discussions of my experiences. My intent is to analyse the way we are treated and discussed in media whilst also drawing interest towards media featuring us.

“Cry at night for what you can’t understand in yourself or others. Cry at night. Don’t you?” - Frankissstein, Jeanette Winterson (2019)

Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (she/her) is a case study in antitransmasculinity. This book is a contemporary take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that switches point-of-view between a fictionalised Mary Shelley and a modern transmasculine incarnation of her named Ry Shelley.

The book parallels Ry’s transness with the concept of transhumanism, and our modern Victor is obsessed with the idea of transferring the consciousness of the human mind out of the human body. Ry argues against him, valuing the flesh of the human form. In the fictionalised Mary Shelley’s storyline, we explore her grief from the death of her child, her relationship with her husband, Lord Byron, and Claire Clairmont. In reference to the themes of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron debate about the place of women and men, Byron is incredibly misogynistic, and at one point, is debating the possibility of creating life without women–which very clearly ties to the real Shelley’s literature.

Ry’s transness is metaphorically a bridge between masculinity and femininity, he exists as a hypothetical, almost an experiment, his Victor sleeps with him openly out of a fascination for his body being “female” but also “male”, so much so that in their final scene together in the book before Victor’s experiment causes him to disappear forever, he talks about Ry’s body, not him internally as a person in the slightest. The majority of reviews for this book use they/them pronouns for Ry, some use s/he, the book is not clear on his pronouns, only that he navigates the world presenting as a man. The other characters misgender him constantly, Victor insists that he’s not gay because Ry looks like “a boy who looks like a girl who looks like a boy”.

A core tenet of antitransmasculinity is viewing trans men not as men, but as in some technical sense “still a woman”, or inherently separate from cis men due to the experiences of misogyny. This characterization of womanhood by its oppressions feeds into perpetuating misogyny broadly, and as I’m sure it’s not shocking, I found that the way the book treats the women characters to be quite misogynistic, treating them as stupid or as racial caricatures in the case of the one Black woman in the cast. The misogynistic cis men are given more philosophical depth, written as the backbones of the story, while the women are narratively lesser and reduced to sexual beings or unintelligent beings, sometimes both. Ry is simultaneously in both roles.

There is a graphic rape scene in which Ry is assaulted in a bathroom by a drunk man. The drunk rapist shares the same fascination with his body as Victor does, the only difference is the crudeness of the language and the nonconsent. This scene or its repercussions are never brought up, it exists to show us what Ry must experience to be himself–treating rape as an inevitability of being a trans man and never challenging that.

Another core tenet of antitransmasculinity is treating the body of a trans man as somehow not really male, as mutilated, and as though his body should be for others and not himself. His body exists in this story as a metaphor for progress and bridging masculinity and femininity, but also as an object to enact violence on. He doesn’t get to be a man without experiencing the full “suffrage of women”, and in forwarding those experiences, he doesn’t get to be seen as or referred to as a man anyway.

The justification I have commonly seen in positive reviews for this is that he is nonbinary, except that being nonbinary does not take away from his transmasculinity, it doesn’t make him “basically still a woman”, and treating nonbinary transmasculinity as a form of womanhood is a manipulative attempt to pull transmasculine people away from transition for the sake of a sisterhood based on oppression. If this view of feminism, the view that I believe is weaved throughout Frankissstein, cannot conceptualise a world in which women are not oppressed under patriarchy–then it is not feminism.

You may ask: Solomon, why are we starting here?

We are starting here because Frankissstein has received very little mainstream criticism. Every review on Youtube I found described it as “complicated” and not necessarily as good representation, but interesting, none of them pointed out the fearmongering of HRT (at one point Ry describes how he has lowered his life span by taking testosterone because his body wasn’t “meant to produce it”), none of them describe how Victor spends the entire book objectifying his body–in much a similar way that the man who rapes him does. And the cherry on top is that we have a “critical essay” from Meg Horridge (they/them, but I am unsure) (posted in 2023) describing the book as such: “Trans people are also often reduced to their bodies, discussed only in terms of surgeries and hormones rather than as people living full lives. Winterson, instead of directing focus on a trans person’s body in a negative light, instead flips this trope on its head: Frankissstein can be read as a celebration of trans bodies, attempting to illuminate their beauty and imply an elevated level of gender euphoria experienced by trans people post-transition.” (https://pshares.org/blog/gender-euphoria-in-frankissstein/ )

The primary reason I am writing this and have done all this research is because I remember being 20 and coming out as a trans man, and I remember searching for what representation I could in media. I remember only being able to find two or three examples, one of which ended in rape and murder, the other in a somber detransition, and the other described as a “women's’ story” that focused more on the mother of the trans boy than the trans boy himself. Having popular media like this be the first thing young transmasculine people find, having it overshadow the often independently published media that does portray our experiences in a nuanced light and not as inspiration or torture porn for a cisgender audience–yes, it is a problem.

It can only go up from here, so I hope.