For those who are unfamiliar, Ranked Competitive Breast Growth centres around a mysterious online competition in which cisgender men compete to see who can grow the largest breasts over the course of three years, with a grand prize of $1 million going to the winner. There’s only one rule that truly matters, you MUST be a cisgender man to compete, trans women are explicitly forbidden. Now, naturally, this may be raising some very reasonable questions for you. Why would any cisgender man willingly do this? Why would anyone, in fact? Who would organise such a thing? Surely the competition must be filled with trans women in denial? Or trans women in disguise? How could one reasonably determine the difference between a trans woman and a cisgender man taking estrogen? All very valid questions. But it’s not what RCBG or EJ are really about.

Well, there’s one question that’s quite easy to answer. Yes, there are, of course, many trans women in the competition. Although it’s up to you, dear reader, to work out who. The competition provides contestants with a veritable treasure trove of hormone replacement therapy in different formulations for competitors to decide their own dosing and regimen, and covers a number of further feminising care such as Laser Hair Removal, and some surgeries. But even so, the discord server on which the competitors submit their measurements and provide the admin with (tasteful) topless photographs as evidence is a hostile space. Having to continuously subject yourself to being misgendered whilst living under the eternal gaze of your fellow competitors who are always on the lookout for any slip up, any sign of femininity, any way in which you could be taken out of the running allowing those below you in the rankings to crawl their way up over a pile of transfeminized bodies must surely be hell.

So why are there so many trans women who read this story who think “damn, I wish this was real so I could do it”?

The Sisters of Dorley is a transfem lit web series written by Alyson Greaves, released on Archive of Our Own and later released as a series of published novels, it follows the story of Stephan, a closeted trans woman who unwittingly finds herself held in a secretive organisation that force feminises harmful men. Those that are inducted into the Dorley Hall forecefem basement, after a couple years, then become sponsors for new inductees, fully ingratiating them into the operation. The idea itself is ludicrous, I mean, even on a practical level who could manage the logistics of such a thing. How would you keep it secret for so long? Why would no one blow the whistle to the outside world the second they get their freedom? In many ways the story is incredibly dark, the ordeal the inductees have to go through is truly gruelling and it can be an uncomfortable read at many points through the story. And yet, one of the most common refrains of transfem readers is “the basement would fix me”.

So what does it say about the transgender community that we seem to so deeply crave the torment nexus from hit sci fi book Don’t Build the Torment Nexus?

Published at the end of 2021, still in the throes of the global COVID-19 pandemic, it was the perfect time for a story such as The Sisters of Dorley to release. The 2020 and 2021 lockdowns were a moment of awakening for many trans people. Stuck at home, not allowed to go outside, and no longer working in the office, it was a period of introspection for many. With no-one but yourself for company, and away from the watchful gaze of friends and work colleagues, no longer having to maintain the mask of acceptable gender performance, it was inevitable that those nagging thoughts at the back of peoples minds could no longer be ignored. Plus, there was another benefit of lockdown. For those that were terrified about the awkward early phase of transition, experimenting with gender expression and being authentically ourselves whilst the hormones have barely been able to take effect was for many the last obstacle needed.

And that’s what the basement offers. To the trans community, the prospect of being hidden away for three years while being given free hormones and surgery with a peer support group going through all the same things at the same time as you is an incredibly tempting prospect. No waitlists, no doctors interrogating you about your masturbation habits or whether you “take the woman’s role in the bedroom”, no public scrutiny, and for the sickos amongst us, the added benefit a group of 6ft tall women threatening you with a taser.

It’s hard to be transgender, incredibly hard, and it’s honestly almost impossible to come up with an idea that wouldn’t, in some way, be preferable to the real world we live in.

So what does the world of Estro Junkies and Ranked Competitive Breast Growth offer us that the world we live in can’t? Frankly, it’s the no questions asked access to treatment. While successive governments and campaign groups across the world work tirelessly to deny us our epistemic authority over our own identities and autonomy over own bodies, you mean to tell me that I can fill out a form and get a case of estrogen delivered right to my door? Hell yeah. Sign me up baby.

In the story, there are trans women who do just that. They sign up, get the package, and then leave immediately, choosing not to partake in the rest of the competition. This, the characters point out, is by design. Getting trans women to self select themselves out of the competition saves the rest of the competition from having to investigate them themselves. So what about the trans women who remain in the competition? Why would anyone willingly subject themselves to such a toxic space in which gender theory gets mangled beyond recognition, people are incredibly transmisogynistic towards theoretical trans women present, and anyone at any moment could launch a campaign against you detailing all your transgressions and providing dossiers of evidence against you the moment you start to become successful and start to climb the rankings? To which I say, how is that any different to trans spaces in real life. At least this way I could access laser hair removal, orchidectomies, and facial feminisation surgery.

Hell, the competition isn’t even that different to going to an all boys school as a teenager. Everyone is constantly sniffing out the most faggotizable member of their peers to establish dominance in a patriarchal hierarchy that punishes even the slightest deviance from hegemonic masculinity. The humiliation rituals, the bullying, the rumours about who caught who sucking who behind the bike shed. This is normal life to a closeted trans woman.

Even as an out trans person, life doesn’t get much better. Trans women can’t be trusted you see, laying claim to a biological reality we can never experience, holding up regressive gender stereotypes if we’re too feminine, making the rest of the community look bad if we don’t, and lord help us if we dare express sexuality or desire, exposing the world to our sick perversions such as, checks notes, wanting to be taken care of by someone else. Is that what we think women are? Submissive little girls who can’t look after themselves? We’re lucky the worst thing the community will do is completely ostracise us from the rest of our social support network pushing us into severe isolation with absolutely no-one left to turn to.

The term Hyperreality was coined by French Philosopher Jean Baudrillard to describe the condition in which the line between reality and simulations as depicted in things such as media becomes so blurred that it is no longer possible to distinguish between the two. Social media has only made this worse. Ideas about the world beyond our own subjective personal horizon are no longer only disseminated to us via television, movies, and news media. They are now distributed via global networks that connect the world together and mediated through a policing of which ideas are acceptable and which ones aren’t. This is doubly problematic for newly out queer people, who will be thrust into a world of settled and still debated discourses without the lexicon and shared historical knowledge of those who have been promoting these ideas for years.

Take for example, the idea that to medically transition into a woman is regressive because it conforms to the patriarchal gender binary. Imagine being a newly self realised trans woman, who has been denied access to this world by wider society who don’t want trans people to exist, who joins tumblr or goes to her first queer community in person meet-up to finally seek out people just like her after feeling so alone and this is the first idea they encounter. She doesn’t know any history or theory, how could they? She doesn’t know the lengths to which trans people have fought for our right to access health care, the hoops we’ve had to jump through to get a scrap of hormones, the legal battles fought for the right to be legally recognised as ourselves and the battles we still have to fight to continue to do so. And if this hypothetical totally made up definitely doesn’t exist trans woman dares to ask for clarification? Well then she’s a transmedicalist spouting TERF rhetoric. Doesn’t she know you don’t have to transition to be trans? The NERVE!

Multiply all this by a hundred or a thousand if you’re a trans woman of colour. Even amongst trans women who do share your ideals and support your right to be yourself, you’ll still be faced a dominantly white community that will view you with all the same suspicions and uncharitable misinterpretations of your words, even if you’re saying all the right things, because it’s you who’s saying it.

So is it any wonder that when presented with the RCBG discord server filled with discourse and mangled theory, prominent members declaring with their whole chest that they can take estrogen, get facial feminsation surgery, have their testicles removed, and even publicly dress and live as a trans woman going by a feminine name and she/her pronouns and still have their manhood remain completely intact that we don’t even blink? This is a tuesday for us.

In many ways, Estro Junkies is more realistic than real life. With multiple point of view characteers providing us with the internality of the charcters makes them much more human than a faceless username on a discord server or a twitter handle. We get a glimpse at why the spineless “anti-racist” white twink can’t be normal around his swarthy skinned hunky south asian flatmate. Why the south asian flatment has such a complex about the fruit basket of an apartment he finds himself living in. Why the thigh high socks and cat ear headband wearing anime girl is so desperate to ingratiate herself into online subcultures and behaves so strangely. Why the dissociated girl with only one real friend she “puts up with” flies so far off the handle when she suddenly finds herself as the centre of attention with objective comfirmation that she really is as hot as she thinks.

We can’t deny them their humanity. We can’t make up a version of them in their heads and decide what they really think. It’s in the text. It’s right there for us to take in and comprehend. Their shitty views and why they have them are all laid bare for us to examine and dissect. And the way others react and are hurt by them are unable to be ignored. And if we see something about ourselves in them? Perhaps a feeling about an idea or certain kinds of people that we’ve always wanted to say but didn’t feel we could because we no longer live in a world where we can be curious about our biases, you either share them and get punished (although lets be real, often you get rewarded by a bunch of other people who comment “YES, THANK YOU, FINALLY SOMEONE SAID IT” in which case you still don’t have to reflect it just gets confirmed) or keep it close to your chest? Well now you have some context to place those ideas in and think about them properly. The book doesn’t lecture you, or preach to you, it just raises some questions and ivites you to ask them to yourself, or hey, even discuss them amongst fellow readers.

But most importantly, this book is about our lives. These are our communities. These are our friends. These are our relationships. These are our first kisses. Our first lesbian relationships. Our first friend groups that accept us for who we are. It is written both with love and unwavering brutal honesty. It doesn’t hold our hand but it will be there for us. And if you’re cis and wondering what it’s really like to be a trans woman in the year of our lord 2026? Well this is the book for you. This is what it’s really like and not whatever sobslop or comedy musical Eddie Redmayne or Zoe Saldana are crying whilst receiving their academy award for this year.

Buy. This. Book.

You can buy Estro Junkies in e-book format on itch.io with kindle edition and paperback available on Amazon

The web serial Ranked Competitive Breast Growth can be found for free on Scribblehub