It's fairly common for more or less thoughtful critiques of certain categories of transgender fiction to be published, for example, Dancing on Daddy's Shoes by Mark McDonald, in which the adverse consequences of mucking about with people's lives play a prominent part. The author here has also addressed the issue in another story, Satisfaction Guaranteed, in which a man is turned, willy-nilly, into a woman and only comes to terms with this assault when it's revealed that he would have died of skin cancer as a man. The fact that the transformation was an assault was clearly addressed, although the earlier story makes it more palatable by positing a sort of higher authority or hidden compassion to justify it.

In fact, there are entire subcategories of transgender fiction which freely express the most virulent misogyny and cruelty, attributing vile motivations and actions to women, mothers, in ways that beggar the imagination. An even larger category is the "Anything you can do, I can do better" story, in which the transgendered protagonist is magically more beautiful, talented, and "feminine" than the old-fashioned genetic models, a less obvious misogyny, but none-the-less eumphemised hate literature.

Although neither story is a typical "The Bitch Deserved It" or "Bitch Conspiracy" polemic, both women involved are incredibly cruel to their children, in Raven's story twisting the metaphorical knife by taunting the transformed son with the boyish pleasures she'll now be flaunting before him, and in Eric's story revealing both parents as villains of the highest order, who exploit their son in despicable ways, a thinly-veiled story of child sexual abuse and rape, "justified" by the folk belief amongst a certain class of lout that women secretly desire rape, and can't help enjoying sexual assault during the act, no matter how coercive the situation is, or how little autonomy or power to save herself the victim possesses.

In real life, it's mostly men who mostly abuse and murder women. We see, for example, in Darfur and the former Yugoslavia, that ethnic rape squads are composed entirely of men with guns, and their victims are women and girls.

In another story, Daughters of a Coral Dawn by Katherine V. Forrest, a lesbian love story and utopian novel written by a lesbian and for a primarily lesbian audience, the idea of women as perpetrators is so foreign that the only way the women can protect themselves from assault and rape is to set a booby-trap which the criminal male thugs spring upon themselves through theft and violence. Ms. Forrest is careful to show that one man, otherwise innocent, casts his lot with the rapists when given a choice, and in a related story has the final acts of justifiable murder performed by a sympathetic man. In real life, even lesbians aren't all that blood-thirsty, nor are all that many women comfortable with violence.

Cheers,

Puddin'