#cw coercive regendering
dorley new chapter thoughts
hmm. aaronstef good. because im still mostly straight and the dorley girls arent allowed to be butch anyway theres still a little part of me hoping cis!aaron/stef is endgame. i mean, this has been pretty damn fluffy so far, idk how shes gonna pull off the genuine transing of aaron, who we dont really hate, and was clearly pretty easy to reform. i think she might do it by just making them all basically cis-by-default rather than actually cis and therefore unusually okay with it, but it SHOULD be ridiculously horrific and traumatizing. speaking of stefships, is she supposed to be like…asexual? i feel like she hasnt internally expressed attraction to *anyone*, which is like, kind of weird
i feel like the intended emotion w/ the christian sections is like…being happy for her? but like. everyone there is terrible. i do not like them. idk, maybe the intended goal is to make it clear to us *why* nobody destroys dorley, its really really nice being post-dorley if youre the right kind of person. i really like that stef is, at least so far, totaly un brainwashed, like, her option is help dorley or *die* and she still feels like maybe she shouldnt help dorley. i cant tell how uncomfortable were supposed to be. every time they laugh or make a little joke about what theyre doing to the boys in the basement my skin crawls
ANYWAY the feminist framing of dorley is a really funny bit. like. surely all of the graduates are aware that dorley in no way advances the goals of feminism
oh also do we think declan really isnt dead? i was surprised and annoyed when we didnt see what happened to him last chapter. i guess it makes sense, its one of the only open questions the story still has, but like. i wanna know!
also ok, this is like, my own weird issues, but i find the constant talk about how conventionally beautiful and passing they are kind of annoying. idk, transness is like…okay, your statistically average trans girl looks different from your statistically average cis girl, and that doesnt have to be a bad thing, yknow? like whatever i dont wanna psychoanalyze the author or whatever but it FEELS like this fixation on amabs achieving normative cis beauty comes from a place of idk…not self hate exactly, but a lack of self love. especially cuz like, ive looked at a lot of FFS pics and the results…usually arent that drastic?
final note: i mean. everyone has their own experiences but t blockers generally dont make it so you cant get an erection at ALL, at least not ime. are we supposed to understand that its like. some other cocktail? is it a goserelin thing? i still very much get erections
“idk how shes gonna pull off the genuine transing of aaron, who we dont really hate”
See, this is why I think The Sisters of Dorley works better if you assume it takes place in the same world as Glow, Worm (the same author’s vampire story) and Dorley’s secret sauce is they’ve got a cooperative vampire who can literally smell the trans-adjacency on people and they use a weak version of vampire blood thrall to do the brainwashing. I’m totally transitioning (heh) my fanfic idea to being mostly about this premise and developing elaborate ideas for it, love the idea of really pulling on the trans/vampire parallel and the “being a vampire can be either an analogy for being a trans/queer/neurodivergent person or being a privileged person depending on how you approach it and you can mix both approaches in interesting ways in the same narrative” angle and the fucked up force-fem stuff/fucked up vampire cognitive binding thrall feudalism intersection. Am totally writing up a couple of absurdly long posts outlining vampire OCs for this.
Having vampire blood as their secret sauce might also explain the “they’re all ridiculously gorgeous/pass really well” thing. Like, if they use small doses of vampire blood to help them heal after the surgeries they might be able to get considerably more radical and aggressive with facial feminization, moving tissue around, etc. than ordinary surgeons can. And I’m definitely writing vampires as weirder and more low-key magical than the author does, so maybe there’s even some funky magic process where HRT + vampire blood + identity destabilization synergizes, like it’s subtly but powerfully enhancing what the HRT and surgeries are doing to the body just like the low-level blood thrall is subtly but powerfully enhancing what the cult brainwashing is doing to the mind.
“speaking of stefships, is she supposed to be like…asexual? i feel like she hasnt internally expressed attraction to *anyone*, which is like, kind of weird”
The way Stef coos over how pretty and cool and super-passing people like Christine are definitely reads like attraction to me.
The way I read it… We know that a major component of Stef’s dysphoria is feeling ugly, and also I think they have, like… internalized misandry. Probably ultimately downstream from the dysphoria. It would explain so much about who they instinctively sympathize with and want to have solidarity with! And I could totally see that as things that would synergize, like they don’t want to be the gross ugly bro who inflicts his gross lusts on women and they kind of alieve that being attracted to women at all makes them that guy. So I see Stef as a person who’s attracted to women but has a lot of inhibitions against articulating that attraction in terms of “I want to rail that person.” Like, I think they’re much more comfortable keeping it in terms that would read relatively safe and nonthreatening to a woman who’s uncomfortable with the idea of a (apparent) man feeling open lust toward her. I suspect they might become a lot more comfortable being openly sexual when they’re more-or-less physically post-everything and have an easier time seeing themselves as a woman at the alief level (though even then they’d probably spend years being kind of inhibited and reserved and lesbian sheep syndrome).
“i feel like the intended emotion w/ the christian sections is like…being happy for her? but like. everyone there is terrible. i do not like them.”
Validating to hear I’m not the only one who has something like this reaction.
Yeah, there’s a reason my interpretation of “why would vampires be helping these people?” is “Elle needs the unique hormonal and epigenetic profiles of post-transition trans women to stabilize her powerful but unstable bloodline and produce the cognitively bound vampire thrall army (more like platoon, but, y'know) she needs, but actual trans women aren’t good recruits cause transitioning selects for independent spirit and just full brute force personality reshaping with the thrall breaks things she’d prefer to keep, she values the Dorley experience as a sort of… pre-tenderizing before she goes at them with full-strength thrall, pre-installing features that will be useful to her like a tolerance for cognitive dissonance and moral injury and a capacity for an us-against-the-world ride-or-die relationship with a small cult-like social world and doing it in a slow and more socially integrated way that integrates these features more thoroughly into the original self, allowing her to resculpt them with less force and more control, as far as Elle is concerned Dorley exists so every couple of years Elle can take a particularly promising girl from it and subject her to vampirization and thrall-based cognitive binding, Dorley has a dark(er) companion institution full of Elle’s mind-slaved vampire thralls and both institutions have the same vibe of being a queasy ambiguous mix of a quirky queer women commune and a thing out of a horror story.”
“ANYWAY the feminist framing of dorley is a really funny bit. like. surely all of the graduates are aware that dorley in no way advances the goals of feminism”
It totally makes sense though! Womanhood as simultaneously an embodiment and a political, moral, and aesthetic project! Femininity as redemptive! Transitioning as an act of radical empathy with women and social, political, and emotional re-alignment toward solidarity with women; taking a shitty boy and making him drink his respect women juice by making him a girl! Feminization as a way to take a dangerous man and make him safe for women and other vulnerable people to be around! Probable incredibly fucked up shit at the intersection of “women are naturally nicer and kinder and more peaceful and less rapey” sexist gender essentialism and castration as a technique used by farmers to control aggression in animals and the basement as a carceralist reformatory! The thing I talked about here but instead of the TERF route of they go a trans-accepting radical feminist route where transition is the pathway into true deep sympathy and solidarity with the folk of women! I can totally imagine the kind of shitty feminists who’d think Dorley is a great idea!
“final note: i mean. everyone has their own experiences but t blockers generally dont make it so you cant get an erection at ALL, at least not ime. are we supposed to understand that its like. some other cocktail? is it a goserelin thing? i still very much get erections”
I mentioned this to @in-servo-necessitas in a reply, I felt like it was a much more viscerally effective way of show-not-telling how actually scary and violating being put through something like that might be than the informed attribute mentions of how traumatic the orchi is. Like, if that part of me just mysteriously stopped working that would be a really scary experience for me! And then when he gets some sexual function back it’s in a way that seems likely to be a very discomforting “WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING TO ME?!?” moment if you don’t know or endorse what’s happening to you, like your body has been radically rewired without your consent.
Definitely feels like one point where there’s potential for pulling on the vampire parallel, like I feel like if a vampire was being gradually transitioned (that’s the author’s humor, that’s what vampires call vampirization in their world!) without knowing what was happening to them they might have a similar experience with appetite, as in food. Like, they’d notice that food didn’t taste as good anymore and was somehow unsatisfying and they’d feel like they were starving to death and yet somehow food would increasingly be a thing they’d have to choke down without appetite, and it might be really scary, and then they’d taste some blood…
And I was just yesterday working on a longpost for a vampire OC whose backstory would totally lend itself to this experience. Like, I wanted to do something with the dysphoria tester vampire thrall and I was like “OK, she’s creepy and doesn’t talk much… what if she was originally a non-verbal autistic and her sire used thrall-based neural reshaping to make her able to understand human language and speak as part of cognitively binding her to him but words are still kind of a second language to her, she’s very thinking in pictures, and also she associates words with a traumatic process of nonconsensual radical neural reshaping so she kind of doesn’t like talking? Also since she has unusual abilities maybe another reason she comes off as kind of off is she’s been sold around from one vampire master/mistress to another a bunch of times and re-conditioned each time and her mind is kind of like the face of one of those people who’s had too much cosmetic surgery?” and then I started getting Emotions about her and coming up with a whole tragic backstory for her. And, like, she had an experience of having a gradual human-to-vampire transition while having no idea what was happening to her, so that would have been a perfect place to put in a detail like that, so I kind of wish I’d read this chapter before I wrote about that but I’m too lazy to go back and change it now.
