INTRODUCTION

The first thing you need to know about this collection is, it’s fantastic. Every story is a finely-honed scalpel poised to carve new pathways of perception on the meat of your mind. The second thing you need to know: this book will get under your skin—pun absolutely intended. These stories hold little back. They dig deep into uncomfortable places and challenge readers to live there for a while.

That’s the point of body horror, right? Skin crawls, flesh tears, eyeballs pop, and teeth gnash from every available orifice. You know what you’re getting into the minute you seize the page.

But

Body horror hits differently when you are trans: your very flesh can become a prison; all the familiar horror tropes of monstrous transformation strike you viscerally where you live, and there is no escaping the marrow-deep dread. Your Body is not Your Body.

At puberty, flesh reshapes itself into something neither comfortable nor entirely recognizable. Every mirror’s a traitor and you feel alien in your own skin. And that’s not the end of it: family, doctors, perfect strangers may seek to control and define your body with or without your capitulation. You may be objectified, fetishized, medicalized, and politicized. Your Body is not Your Body.

In defiance of this bleak and often soul-crushing experience, Matt Blairstone & Alex Woodroe have curated a paean to body horror and, more saliently, to the people who most need its tropes to reclaim their own deeply personal experiences. All too often, trans and non-binary folk, queer, differently-bodied, and intersex folk (like myself)—if we are represented in horror at all—find ourselves cast as the monsters. We become the twisted freaks locked in some literal closet, cosmic horrors of incomprehensible form, the dreaded end shape of some unwanted curse bursting from inside the protagonist’s flesh. Again and again, we are othered; portrayed as broken, unwanted, impure, and wrong.

But that is not who we are—and we deserve to tell our stories.

Horror has long been recognized as a genre of catharsis. To exorcise our personal demons, we evoke them on screen and page. But it can also be a genre of empowerment. Rather than simply escape the horror of everyday existence, we harness our art to transmute it. We reframe our fears. We redefine what is monstrous. We seize control over narratives otherwise weaponized to hurt us or make us small.

There is an inherent transness in such transformation: we find the courage to reshape what we refuse to tolerate, even if that means we must bleed.

In Your Body is not Your Body, the editors provide us space to be raw and authentic, furious, traumatized, and triumphant. These collected tales—as varied in style and shape as the authors who’ve penned them—explore our personal discomfort while confronting the discomfort of those who have so often styled us as monstrous.

More than a few of the stories hold up a punishing mirror to those who would normally demonize us, revealing with wretched clarity their banal hate—such as Hailey Piper’s “Why We Keep Exploding.”

Because these tales can be harsh and messy, their topics delving deep into treacherous geographies landmined with trauma, clear content warnings are available at the end of the volume. This empowers readers to approach every story as they please, taking the dive or passing on the experience, depending on what feels comfortable for them in the moment.

You can always come back, should you want.

Some stories are sweet and wistful right up until they are not, like S.A. Chant’s android romance, “High Maintenance.” Others, like Viktor Athelson’s “Brother Maternitas,” thrust you directly into a space of deep body discomfort, where a man of god finds himself carrying an unexpected burden.

There is as much genre-blending as gender-bending in these pages, from brief and poignant fairytales like Ori Jay’s “Seaflowers” and Bri Crozier’s “The Pearl Diver” to Bitter Karella’s science fiction feverdream, “The Divine Carcass.” Others defy easy classification. One such standout is Rain Corbyn’s “Tonsilstonespunksplatter666!” which I can only describe as a neurodivergent gender-anarchic splatterpunk romp with a wickedly satisfying ending.

There are more, so many more, all enriched with lush and fervent illustrations scattered throughout. In all, Your Body is not Your Body is the kind of collection that will stick with you long after the final page has turned and you sit with unquiet specters in a room long gone dark.

Have fun exploring.

—M. Belanger

April, 2022