Monster Girls: A Transfeminine Perspective on Horror

The transgender experience is ripe for horror. The horror of being gaslit and labeled mentally ill, of begging a judge for the “F” on your driver's license. The horror of feeling your own body betraying you, the sensation of neurons mismatching tissue. The horror of being labeled a monster, a threat, of living in constant danger while being called a predator. These internal experiences cannot be directly explained but can be expressed in horror metaphors and allegories, the only way we can communicate the depth of pain and fear that comes with being trans.

The horror of the transfeminine experience is having your simplest pleasures–a Hello Kitty Sticker on your phone and a sundress in your closet–labeled a pathology. Cassandra, the cursed prophetess, is a figure many trans women can relate to. Our experience of gender is a truth that is denied by everyone around us. We look to our own histories and see the signs: the sensations of wrongness with no vocabulary, the moments of stealing girlhood back, and the way we learned to be ourselves was inconvenient and dangerous. Yet we hear ‘there were no signs’ and are undercut by the people closest to us. How can we be trans when we didn't demand dolls and assert we were girls at age three? How can we be women when the mirror and our birth certificates disagree?

It is not just the horror of being disbelieved; it is the horror of those who hear and try to ‘bring you back to reality.’ Nancy in Nightmare on Elm Street represents another woman dismissed as hysterical. She asks for help because Freddy is killing her friends and tormenting her. Her reward? Trips to the doctor and bars on her window. But this horror extends past fiction. It is the lobotomies of queer people in the 20th century, performed under the guise of help. It is Gender Identity Disorder in the DSM-IV. It is the ongoing practice of conversion and ‘reparative' therapy, something that remains legal across much of the United States. It is also the quiet moments of wanting to listen to a boy band or watch a ‘show for girls’ you were denied, only to feel shame. From the earliest age, we learned it was dangerous to be ourselves, that we would be punished, and that shame and policing ourselves would keep us safe.

When we reclaim womanhood? When we wash up half-drowned, crying and realizing that we've been slowly dying our whole lives? We're not valid until we’re recognized by the state and medical establishment. Changing the M on a license to an F requires a court order amending a birth certificate, which requires a doctor's note stating you've undergone medical transition, if changing the gender marker is possible at all. When was the last time the gender marker on your license came up? Has it ever been relevant once? And undergoing medical transition? Receiving gender affirming surgeries requires letters from psychologists. It doesn't matter if one has been on HRT for years, changed every legal document, and undergone other surgeries, the need for life-saving care is not covered without letters less than a year old. A cis woman needing estrogen for menopause gets it without a second thought.

The horror of the transfeminine experience is a body that betrays. In The Skin I Live In, Vicente is subjected to nonconsensual medical transition. Robert takes his facial hair, his voice, and his manhood and inverts them. Far from being a simple external change, this is an erasure of identity. We were forced into masculine forms, our breasts and long hair taken. How is one supposed to know who they are when they don't recognize the face in the mirror? How are they supposed to be comfortable and be themselves when their voice is not theirs? When there are no shoes in their size and every pair of panties and leggings exposes something that shouldn't be there?

I experience this as a mismatch on a neurological level. I can feel smaller hands within my hands, shoulders within my shoulders, and the correct reproductive organs. The map my brain has is misaligned to the tissue and it’s agony. It is my body screaming that it knows something is wrong. Estrogen and surgery help. They carve the proper face. Our breasts grow. That horrible parasitic growth between our legs is molded into the shape it was meant to have. Estrogen and surgery cannot reduce my height, give me small hands, or allow me to carry life inside me. ATCG are the letters of our sentence and testosterone is a poison that inflicts irreparable damage. Puberty is our full moon, the moment our bodies grow into something unrecognizable.

This creates another horror, dependence on medications that can be taken away. It is not uncommon for transfeminine people to ‘DIY’; I've done it myself. When the alternative is more  facial hair, more deepening of the voice, or (after bottom surgery) the true medical necessity of hormone replacement, sending a money order to a Pacific Micronation to get estrogen doesn't seem as scary. But what happens when we are incarcerated? When we end up in a Baptist or Catholic hospital? When others get to overrule the American Medical Association on what constitutes medically necessary care. What about children who have not yet undergone puberty and are about to be forced to experience irreversible disfigurement? It’s simple, really:

Cut us off and we all perish.

The horror of the transfeminine experience is living in a society that brands us monsters and needs us destroyed to justify its narratives. Our existence undermines the bio-essentialist understanding of gender, therefore the transfeminine body is shackled in narratives. It is evidence that one can never be a woman. It is a deception, grotesque, and monstrous. It is held to shifting standards intended to always find it lacking. It is a category on Pornhub to be fetishized and exploited, often by the same people who want to legislate it out of existence. It is a justification for murder in the case of the ‘trans panic’ defense. These narratives are the real world; Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, and Sleepaway Camp are just symptoms of them.

These narratives play out in gender policing from childhood. To consistently shave a cis girl's hair to a quarter inch would be labeled abuse in an instant, to do the same to a boy is just strict parenting. It is the idea that any interest a person assigned male at birth has in feminine things is sexual, that sinister and predatory thoughts were the only reason I watched Powerpuff Girls and had stuffed animals as a 16 year old. It is in the sexist idea that men are inherently dangerous and cannot control themselves and that this applies to anyone AMAB. As in The Crucible, the minds of the judge and jury are made up before one ever has a chance to explain.

Judges do make decisions. They decide it is legal to forcibly detransition prisoners. Lawmakers decide it is legal to discriminate against us. We are barred from military service. Our basic needs, to toilet, are turned into a battlefield, leaving us unsafe and making us feel like animals. Through all of this, as we struggle to live, to feel safe and loved, to have the same rights as everyone, society whispers in our ears, ‘this is your fault, you will not conform, you are a threat, you will predate, it is only a matter of time until you hurt someone.’ And after a while? It's hard not to internalize all these lies, finding them engraved into your bones just as testosterone sculpted flesh.

I once heard a professor make a distinction between horror and realism; I disagree. I grew up having my girlhood, my very name, stolen. I wasn't even given the words to understand what was happening. My body underwent irreversible changes that will affect me for the rest of my life. I will live with the chronic pain of gender dysphoria until I die. And on top of all of this? I live within a society that wants to murder me through economic violence and deprivation of medical care. I live in a society that is upset that I want to be more than a silenced sex worker. This is the waking nightmare of every day of my existence. That is why horror is the only language I know of that can truly explore the transfeminine experience.

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About the Author

Imogen is a research scientist specializing in organic geochemistry. She lives in Kentucky with her girlfriend and calico cat. Her hobbies include exploring caves, playing bass guitar, and collecting Monster High dolls. She fell in love with horror fiction at a young age through Goosebumps and Edgar Allen Poe and writes it to help both herself and others. More of her interests, work, and a slew of very cute cat pics can be found on her website at https://babywormcore.baby/.