EMCSH: Detransition, Daddy

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving mind control and violations of consent as well as misogyny and transphobia.

Smut makes up a lot of my light reading habit in the way that fan fiction does for many others. I’ve ready a lot of the stuff and fairly often I stick with a story not because it’s particularly hot, but because it’s interesting for other reasons. That’s largely what this series of posts is about, after all.

Detransition, Daddy by Glowing Red Femme ventures a bit too much into sadism and rough sex for me to enjoy it very much erotically, but it’s an excellent horror romance; not just a story that combines the two, but where the romance and horror are intertwined.¹ It’s based in a setting created by author Limerick where a virus has that alters women and makes them utterly submissive to men has become endemic across the world. This is it’s own small genre, having significant overlap with something like Nice to Men, also by Limerick, which I have talked about before. But Glowing Red Femme takes the setting and, like Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt, takes a world inflicted by a sex-discriminating plague and uses it to tell a story about a trans woman.²

The protagonist, Klara, is a lesbian who’s into sadism who, six years into the end of the world, starts to be changed by the virus after restarting some light testosterone treatment, which she has a deficiency in as a trans woman who has undergone bottom surgery. The virus affects her in an unusual way, though: Making her hyper-dominant rather than hyper-submissive, and also causing her to develop a secondary persona named Daddy (she/her), who channels her most sadistic impulses towards women, who, thanks to the virus, are more than happy to do whatever she wants, being the only woman who reads as dominant to those infected.

Klara is in love with and has spent the last six years taking care of Bonnie, a virus researcher who has been locked in a sealed bunker working remotely with a ever-shrinking team trying to find some sort of cure or treatment for the virus, whose last bit of funding has just been withdrawn. No one with any kind of authority wants to even pretend to care about trying to get women back their autonomy any more.

With hope of any further research destroyed (Bonnie does not have her own lab in the bunker and materials required for research would not survive sterilisation), and Bonnie learning that Klara is able to command enslaved women, she decides to break quarantine rather than living alone in a bunker for the rest of her life while being a burden tying down Klara, and let Klara claim her before a random man can. Klara, becoming increasingly pushed to enact sadistic desires on women and increasingly obsessed with Bonnie, is horrified by this and what she and the virus will inevitably do to destroy the woman she loves, while Bonnie, under the effects of the virus, is increasingly unable to value herself as a woman or understand why that should matter at all, becoming the devil on Klara’s shoulder egging on Klara’s worst impulses and encouraging her own destruction.

I really do love the passages where Bonnie enthusiastically analyses and describes the changes to her own cognition as the virus starts to take over.

Klara lifted her face off Bonnie's chest. "Bonnie, I'm scared I'm going to mindfuck you until you can't speak English."

Bonnie nodded slowly. "And that's bad because…?"

Klara looked so worried for some reason. "Are you messing with me?"

"No?" Bonnie frowned apologetically. "I don't need to ask for anything, and I only want what you want. I can get the gist from body language, I think. And after getting a little dumber yesterday- Klara I wish you could feel it, it's like my heart came." She smiled as sweetly as she could, which was very, very sweetly. "I'd love to be as dumb as you want to make me."

"Jesus fucking christ." Klara studied her face with open confusion. "It's only been a week…"

"It's cool, right?" Bonnie felt like she could look at Klara for a million years and still find new parts of her beauty - eyes like a glacier. "I've noticed whole avenues of creativity shut down. I can say "I can imagine disobeying you," but I experience it like verbal aphantasia. The words are there, I understand them, but saying them aloud is just making sounds." Bonnie wiggled in place and looked away bashfully. "After that 'good girl' yesterday - hah, even remembering it - I love you more than I did. I loved you more than I'd ever loved anything, and now I love you SO much more than that." There were tears on Bonnie's cheeks. Neat. "If you want to make me actually brainless, like, I can picture that more clearly than my mother's face. I only want to make you happy."

She is very introspective as well as a biologist who is intensely interested in the subject matter, and, due to the virus itself, physiologically unable to be upset about what’s happening to her or see it as undesirable. The voice of the narration sticks to that chipper tone as she describes herself becoming less of a person. It’s wonderful mix of horrifying, fascinating, endearing and amusing.

And Bonnie is, untethered by any moral concerns other than making Klara and Daddy happy, capable of some incredibly fucked up things in the name of making that happen, even if those things make Klara sick to her stomach in the short term. The story is actually still ongoing, so I don’t know where exactly it is going to end, but I am looking forward to reading more when Archive of Our Own is back up again.