Blurb:
| Her doctor is giving her the body of his dreams... and her nightmares. Isa is a micro-celebrity who rarely shows her face, and can’t wait to have it expertly ripped off and rearranged to look more feminine. When a successful fundraiser makes her gender affirming surgery possible, she’s overjoyed—until she has to give up all her money to save her dying father. Crushed by gender dysphoria and the pressure of disappointing her fans who paid for a new face, she answers a sketchy ad seeking transgender women for a free, experimental feminization treatment. The grotesquely flawless Dr. Skurm has gruesome methods, but he gets unbelievable results, and Isa is finally feeling comfortable in her skin. She even gains the courage to ask out her crush: an alluring and disfigured alchemy-obsessed artist named Rayna. But Isa’s body won’t stop changing, and she’s going from super model to super mutant. She has to discover the secret behind her metamorphosis—before the changes are irreversible, and she’s an unwanted freak forever. Transmuted is an outrageous and unapologetically queer body horror tale that will leave you gasping, giggling, and gagging for more. |
Harm excels at taking the everyday horror of living trapped
in a body you don’t recognize as your own, dials it up to a hundred, then soaks
it in blood, sex, and mad science.
Isa is a trans woman who struggles both with her weight and gender
dysphoria. Her hormone replacement therapy (HRT) helps, but what she’d
really love is to get facial
feminization surgery (FFS) and it appears that her wish will soon become a
reality. By raising money through her Twitch channel and charity streams, Isa
has finally saved up enough to have the procedure. Everything is looking up.
That is until her sister calls and all but demands the money for their shitty
dad’s cancer treatment. Frankly I think the cancer is Karma for constantly misgendering
his daughter and being all-around shitty to her, but despite my yelling at the
pages to “not give that bastard a cent” Isa didn’t take my advice and caves
under the guilt and familial pressure. Now that all the money everyone helped
her raise is gone, Isa is just distraught and desperate enough to respond to a
sketchy internet ad promising free and miraculous feminization treatments for
trans women. As you can probably guess, this is not the wisest of decisions. as
most things that sound too good to be true usually are. What follows is a
bizarre and twisted journey of body horror and alchemy as Isa’s body transforms
in ways she never expected.
If you’re someone who’s bugged by discussions of gender
dysphoria and find the concept of passing problematic, you probably won’t enjoy
this book. This is not a body positive story where the protagonist discovers
her true beauty and learns to love herself. This is a book that explores what
it’s like to feel disconnected from your body, like it’s some alien thing
instead of part of you, and takes it to its extreme. Which honestly? I’m fine
with. Body positivity is fucking hard guys. I totally support it and I’m
happy for people who have learned to love their body and how they look, but for
me that goal feels unattainable and it’s just too much pressure. I’m more a fan
of body neutrality, which means you don’t have to love, or even like your
appearance to feel good about yourself and appreciate what your body can do. We
don’t live in a bubble and there’s constant pressure to appear thin, White, and
cis to be considered attractive and accepted by society. Even if you understand
intellectually that it’s transphobic to expect trans women to appear feminine
and pass as cis and that beauty standards for women are inherently racist,
sexist, and fatphobic it still wears on your self-esteem. I appreciate how Transmuted
doesn’t pull any punches when examining gender dysphoria. Isa’s hatred of her
appearance is painfully familiar and honest, as is her desperation to “fix” her
face so she can stand to look in the mirror. It also reminds me of how one
trans person, Luna, described
her feelings of dysphoria “Gender dysphoria is something that is painful.
It hurts. It's... looking in the mirror and thinking, "Holy heck. Who is
that person? Who am I looking at? Is that- Is that someone that's come into my
house?" And then realizing, no, that's just- that's just me in the
mirror.”
 |
| It's impossible to "think positive" all the time and that's okay. Negative emotions and feelings are valid. |
Despite how horribly wrong things go for Isa, this is not a
warning about seeking gender affirming surgery or a lesson about being happy
with what you have. It’s a horror story about unethical medical practitioners
who prey on trans people, like surgeons who completely
botch the surgery on their trans patients (trigger warning, graphic
description of medical procedures at link), and illicit
online pharmacies. Note that very few trans people regret getting gender
confirmation surgery —only
around 2%, compared to the 65% of people who regret getting cosmetic surgery
— and most surgeries in the US are preformed by skilled surgeons who specialize
in trans medicine. But there aren’t many of them, and the waiting list for
their services can often be up to two hundred patients at a time. It’s
incredibly difficult for trans people to access healthcare. According to LGBTQ
taskforce nearly one-in-five trans people reported being denied needed
health care outright because of their gender identity, 28% of trans and gender
non-conforming people avoid seeking healthcare due to discrimination, and over
50% had to teach their providers about trans care. On top of the difficulty of
trying to access healthcare, many trans people can’t afford it: 20%
of trans people are uninsured and they’re nearly twice as likely to be living in
poverty than the rest of the population.
Isa’s situation is exaggerated for the purpose of making the
story more horrifying, but her struggle to find healthcare isn’t. Both Isa and
her best friend are part of the 10%
of trans people forced to turn to the grey market for their HRT, so it’s
clear that accessing trans-friendly healthcare is already a challenge for them.
This is the scariest part of Transmuted to me, not the mad doctor and
his twisted experiments or the bizarre mutations Isa goes through, but the
knowledge that the remedy to her mental anguish is so simple, yet impossible to
obtain like Tantalus reaching for the fruit tree in Tartarus, and the horror of
knowing thousands of real trans people are in her situation every day.