It’s funny how cis people see the trans experience as a horror story, a tale of body-horror sci-fi right alongside Frankenstein. Not much has changed in nigh on a century since Dr. David H. Keller wrote “The Feminine Metamorphosis,” except that in 1929 the idea of a physical sex change was mostly a thought experiment, a curious monster no more real than vampires or werewolves. Science fiction always tells us the values of the time when it was written, what we imagined as progress, and what we feared as dystopia. If something is going wrong in our current time, what worse thing might be just around the corner? In this case, feminism will lead to transgenderism, and this threatens the entire human race.
The fact of the matter was that the men of the United States who owned the greatest part of the wealth of the nation were afraid. […] What they were afraid of was the possibility of feminine control […]
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 248
We open with Miss Martha Belzer being passed up for a well-deserved promotion in favor of a man who ends up foisting all of his work on her anyway. It’s company policy to never promote women, because they would lose the respect of the rest of their industry. Martha is described as brilliant, competent, and capable. The story acknowledges that women are intentionally kept down for the sake of men’s egos and fears, and that women are entitled to their indignation. They deserve to be equals in society.
The story goes on for several pages about the talent and capability of women in America, about the petty terror of the insecure men in power. Keller writes extensively about the extra hoops women must jump through to gain even a fraction of the success of their male peers. The smartest, most talented, hardest-working woman at a company will still make half the salary of a man who can’t count to ten. The surest way to independent wealth for a woman was to be the sole heir of a rich man, which is how Patricia Powers becomes a billionaire in the story. Most other women can expect, at most, a low five-figure salary.
At first glance, the story seems very progressive and feminist. This is 1929, less than a decade since white women gained the ability to vote, and slightly longer since WWI ended, when millions of women were ousted from their wartime jobs to go back to being housewives. The continued existence of women in the workforce was a hotly contested issue of the time, and Keller seems aware of the injustice of holding women back.
Just kidding, though. These women will absolutely be punished. And, to my surprise, I found myself agreeing that they deserved it. This is a story of two groups of horrible people fighting each other, and no matter which side wins, women and trans people and people of color lose.
The tale continues with a Secret Service detective named Taine being sent to China to investigate a hospital run entirely by white American women. Chinese men are being paid $100 to undergo mysterious surgeries, and the United States needs to know why. So Taine, a white man, disguises himself as a Chinese sex worker, and is able to get a job in this hospital. It’s exactly as offensive as you think, with nonstop racial slurs and stereotypes thrown around as Taine spies on their secret operations.
He learns they’re performing “gonadectomies,” removing the testes of unsuspecting poor men. Why they’re doing it, Taine cannot surmise. This discovery is reported and received with a shrug, and nothing comes of it for years. There is no sympathy or justice for these men, whose perspective could be a true horror story.
The main conflict of the story arises when a new group of effeminate young men start taking over Wall Street, upsetting the old guard:
It was not the fact that their rule was being contested by a new group that bothered them. […] It was the personality of their opponents that raised their ire and constant resentment.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 254
These new fellas are all very intelligent and hard workers, with impeccable hygiene and colorful suits. They’re uninterested in golf, preferring to keep to themselves at their private bridge club, and this fact is mentioned so many times, it’s comical. How dare a successful person be uninterested in golf! Well, one of the golf-players is so upset by these upstarts that he whines to the Secret Service about it, offering a million dollars to fix it.
“It seems that you are afraid of something and yet cannot give me any definitive idea of what it is,” the chief replies. “We cannot raid the biggest private club in New York just because some of you gentlemen are sore because you’re not invited to join.” (ibid. 255)
Still, Taine takes the gig. Worming his way into the bridge club via multiple disguises and secret identities, Taine finds himself in a meeting with the top dogs in this conspiracy as they reveal their big, evil plan. All of these “men” are actually women, who had used their Chinese testicle harvest to create a sex change serum. Five thousand of the world’s most brilliant women, funded by the richest woman in the world, had become men so they could infiltrate male society. But they’re not stopping there. Their ultimate goal is to eradicate all men and create a female-only society. Perhaps men can be used as servants in the meantime.
For the men of 1929, this is their imagined dystopia, a world in which they are replaced, eradicated. Women take over, and men are irrelevant. This is terrifying to them, a monster that must be conquered. In the imaginations of bigots, there always has to be someone on top, and someone being crushed. They can’t imagine equality. The only alternative to patriarchy in their eyes is matriarchy, and if someone has to be in charge, of course it can’t be women.
In this story, the true hero is racism. Yeah. It turns out, all Chinese men carry “a disease” (most likely an allusion to Syphilis) that doesn’t affect them much, but it will drive white people fully insane. The smartest women in the world, having injected themselves with this infected biological material, will all lose their minds within a few years:
You took five thousand of our best women, girls who would have made loving wives and wonderful mothers […] and, through your insane desire to rule, you have changed them into five thousand insane women.
David H. Keller, “The Feminine Metamorphosis” in Science Wonder Stories (Aug 1929) 274
Give them some arsenic and toss them in the looney bin. The conflict will resolve itself, returning everything to the pre-war status quo. This is science fiction that wants to return to the past.
I can easily see this same story written today with the women as heroes, without the ending where they all succumb to a brain-eating disease. When I first began reading, I could imagine remaking this as a campy, girl-power musical, perhaps starring a whole bunch of drag performers. Female supremacy can feel like feminism at first glance. These women were discriminated against under patriarchy, especially in 1929. The people in power were all men, specifically rich, white men, and they didn’t deserve to have all that power at everyone else’s expense. It’s tempting to imagine being on the other side of the power dynamic. It’s tempting to forget that in every scenario in which one group has absolute power, absolute corruption goes hand in hand. Power requires oppression, and women are not immune from perpetuating it.
While one side argues for male supremacy and the other for female supremacy, both argue for white supremacy. People of color are disposable pawns, never in consideration for the crown, their bodies used and discarded, their humanity never acknowledged by the writer or his characters. The white cis women want what the white cis men have, power and control. They don’t care who they have to step on to obtain it. They aren’t worried that injustice exists, only that they got the short end of the stick. They aren’t punished for how they treated people of color, but for taking power from white men. No one is the hero here. Neither side makes a good point.
The magazine makes sure to mention that Keller is a doctor, and that “glands” are responsible for so many important physical and mental systems in our bodies. Yet there is no acknowledgment that filling a cis woman with masculinizing hormones and altering her secondary sex characteristics would bring emotional anguish akin to what trans women often go through, aka gender dysphoria. As any trans person can attest, a lot of doctors today don’t know a thing about how transitioning works, and this guy from 1929 is no exception. While this was written during the time when Magnus Hirschfeld (considered by many to be the “grandfather” of trans healthcare) was making early breakthroughs in the field, this was also a time when a lot of quack science was getting just as much attention in the news and fictional “gland stories.” Keller was most likely aware of recent advances (and regressions) in hormonal and surgical healthcare, but judging by this story, he took the quackery to heart.
It’s difficult to compare some of the transgender themes in the story to modern-day ideas because, well, this isn’t a story about transgender people. This is a metaphor about cis people, a thought experiment unrelated to the trans experience. These women-turned-men aren’t trans men. These women-in-male-bodies are closer to trans women, but still, it misses that mark. They don’t experience gender dysphoria before their transformation, nor do they have any discomfort in their new bodies. Transitioning is framed as a choice, and a fairly easy one at that. Of course women would choose to be men. That’s the only way to get ahead. It’s not about identity. It’s about subterfuge, trickery, a means to an end. Anyone who attempts to alter their place in society by altering their body is untrustworthy, a fake who could never be real. This is the gender equivalent of the racial dynamics in Eli Coulter’s “The Last Horror.”
To this day, trans men are often treated with sympathy and pity, as women who felt they had no other choice, wanting to escape the brutality of womanhood. Meanwhile, trans women are seen as men trying to escape their culpability in the evils of patriarchy. Both this antique story and modern TERFs claim that in a truly equal society, there would be no need to transition. In the past and the present, no one who believes in rigid separation of the sexes can conceive that those sexes could ever truly be equal. If they did, there would be no reason to fear trans people.
The “man-hating feminist” concept has been around for a long time, longer than this story. The stereotype has varying degrees of truth to it. A lot of women do hate men. On the surface, this seems justified. The patriarchy has done terrible things to women. But it isn’t a flat one-on-one binary of 100% evil men vs 100% good women. Responding to misogyny with misandry might feel like sticking it to the man, but it catches a lot of innocent people in the crossfire.
That said, the women in this story are not real man-hating feminists. The man-hating feminists in “The Feminine Metamorphosis” were written by a man. This is a man’s idea of what women must think about men, perhaps based on what he would do if thrust into the role of a woman. He would transition. He would regain his manhood by whatever means necessary.
This is actually a fairly unique story in that regard. So many cis people, when imagining the trans experience, imagine going from the body they currently have to the “opposite” one. They find it terrible, and thus trans people are bizarre. To truly begin to empathize with trans people, one must imagine already being in the “opposite” form, trying to get to the one you currently have. Keller has managed to do this. He is so far removed from the female perspective that even in fiction, he can only imagine wanting to be a man. Still, this is not a trans story. His empathy only took him halfway before taking a sharp detour into his own biases.
Despite this being an old story by a dead man who didn’t have much knowledge of trans people, the attitudes within it are still alive today. There are women who hate men to the point that they dream about them going extinct. There are women who don’t necessarily want to eradicate men, but keep men and women so far apart they become different species. Heck, people are still writing stories today about what would happen if all men disappeared. Trans people cannot fit into such worlds. It’s impossible to long for a world without men without longing for a world without trans people. Trans people of all genders are extra susceptible to both misogyny and misandry, often at the same time, depending on how their gender is perceived by others.
While it’s easy to frame this as a product of the times, a backlash against first-wave feminism, any modern trans person can tell you that a strong percentage of our population, Evangelicals and “radical feminists” alike, is highly invested in the good-vs-evil, man-vs-woman binary. A two-dimensional gender war is delicious to misogynists and transphobes alike. They both require a strict separation of two binary sexes, and the only debate is which one deserves to be in charge. One side is good. The other side is evil. Sinners vs saints. This simplicity appeals to simple people, both back then and now. If the other side is evil, that must make me good, that must make me incapable of evil. That leads to things like a hospital full of wealthy white women performing unethical surgeries on poor men of color and framing it as “girl power!” Nothing regarding gender or race is ever simple, and the true trickery, the actual subterfuge, comes from those invested in a strict binary.
“The Feminine Metamorphosis” can be read for free online at the Internet Archive.
Ro Salarian is a trans nonbinary writer and illustrator with over a dozen works published. Their work is focused on queer people with elements of pulp fiction, body horror, and eroticism. Their work can be found at rosalarian.com.
Copyright 2023 Ro Salarian.
Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein 
Great work, but I disagree that trans men receive sympathy and pity. This is not true from many trans men of color, especially black trans men who are met with hostility. When terfs talk about trans men they infantalize us in an attempt to detransition us, to make us so miserable that we commit suicide. To think terfs are sincere in their cooing at trans men is to buy into their rhetoric and ignore the way they label us gender traitors for daring to leave womanhood. It also ignores their sense of entitlement to our bodies in much the same way cisgender men feel entitled to the bodies of anyone they see as a woman.
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