With a few minutes left to go (but it's okay to hang around,) I'll post more of Tristan's introduction:
As befits an anthology about genderfucking, there are several pronoun variations you’ll come across in the text, including ze/hir/hir (which some readers will be familiar with) and hy/ hym/hys. Slowly, these new words are beginning to seep into our consciousness and people are using them more frequently in conversation and writing. Although this departure from she/ her/her and he/him/his may distract you at first, I challenge you not to get caught up in their newness and miss the depth of these stories in the process. The writers who chose to use these words have done so deliberately, because they best describe their characters. In the process, they push the language about gender- variant people to be more descriptive and less binary. And those who use he/she pronouns, do so in wonderful ways; there is something deliciously dissonant about reading about his clit, her dick, his tits and her scrotum. What all this reveals, of course, is just how limited our language is for describing people of other genders.
Our language is also severely limited when it comes to describing the bodies of transpeople, bodies that don’t conform to norms and may not look like other bodies. How do we eroticize these bodies, talk about them in dirty ways, worship and respect them? In several of the pieces, there is a tension between body image and the bodies we imagine. The spectrum of bodies we were born with, bodies we live in, bodies we want and bodies we create is present in some way in all of the stories. As characters work to quiet discomfort and shame and embrace acceptance, it’s clear that the body is a place of much more than simply pleasure. It can be a site of self-doubt, pain and memory, but it’s also one of craving, fantasy, transgression and, ultimately, freedom. In Julia Serano’s “Little Blue Thing,” when the narrator’s body betrays her, she finds a humorous way to overcome it. The couple in “Somebody’s Watching Me,” by Alicia E. Goranson, shape-shift into different bodies as they have sex. With a nod to both a narcis- sistic phase of gender transition and transdyke desire, the woman in Tobi Hill-Meyer’s “Self Reflection” has the opportunity to explore the body of her future self—and gladly takes it. The main character in “Face Pack,” by Penelope Mansfield, manages to turn a misogynist Japanese porn trope on its head—rolling a celebration of her smooth skin and an empowered filthy girl fantasy into one surprising scene. The Daddy in Toni Amato’s “That’s What Little Girls Are Made Of” rides a dangerous line, as he takes a sharp blade to a cunt that has seen a different kind of knife.
Be prepared for cock to have multiple delicious meanings in these stories. Get ready for what you might think is a pussy or a cock to be called something else entirely. Some cocks are strapped on then thrown off to the side, as happens in one guy’s beach adventure in “The Hitchhiker,” by Sinclair Sexsmith. Some stay put no matter what. Others are always there, but not always accessible, as in Dean Scarborough’s “Shoes Are Meant to Get You Somewhere,” where a submissive gets a taste of a new kind of cock. “He had never, ever heard that tone in Hayden’s voice before—sometimes the man had moaned and whispered dirty things to him before when Oscar had sucked Hayden’s cock, but never this cock, and his voice had never sounded like this before.”
Speaking of cocks, I worked diligently to represent a diversity of genders, sexual orientations, identities and bodies in the anthology. However, I want to acknowledge there is one group that feels the least represented: transwomen who’ve had bottom surgery. I can speculate about a number of reasons why this might be, but I want to challenge writers to tell the erotic stories of these women, and editors, including me, to seek them out and publish them.
