L. C. Dialogos
Terrifying Gender Affirmations
Transgressive Fiction · Speculative Queer Noir
Autumn 2026
Transgressive Fiction · Speculative Queer Noir · Psychological Body Horror
A coffee table read. That's the only table you may read this book on.
Moments during and after transition, when the world started seeing what the author always knew. Often affirming. Often terrifying. Sometimes both at once.
A biker at a gas station. A head nod that stops. A surgeon at the edge of a gurney asking when we're going to stop all this stuff.
Illustrated by the author. Companion to Pretty Boy: this book is the incidents, that one is the argument.
“The affirmation arrived. It was not what I expected. It was not what anyone had prepared me for. It was, in the most precise sense of the word, terrifying.”
— Terrifying Gender Affirmations
Transgressive queer fiction — and the system that decides who gets to be real
Terrifying Gender Affirmations is not a celebration. It is a document. A record of what happens when a body moves through the world in a way that the world's administrative systems were not designed to accommodate — and what those systems do in response.
The healthcare gatekeeping in this book is not metaphorical. It is architectural. It is built into the forms, the referral chains, the waiting rooms, the language of clinical necessity. The transgression is not the author's. The transgression is the system's — and this book names it as such, without softening.
This is transgressive fiction in the original sense: it crosses lines. Not for shock. Because the lines themselves are the subject.
Speculative body horror LGBTQ — the visceral logic of institutional alienation
There is a specific horror in being told that your body requires authorization. That the modification you need — the one that would make the body legible to you, finally, after decades of somatic alienation — must first be approved by a committee that has never met you, using criteria written by people who have never experienced what you are describing.
Terrifying Gender Affirmations renders this horror in the register it deserves: not clinical, not polite, not grateful. The body horror here is not fantastical. It is the horror of a body that has been made into a bureaucratic problem. The horror of a self that the institution cannot process without first dismantling it.
The illustrations do not soften this. They are drawn from the inside of the experience — which means they are strange, and precise, and occasionally unbearable in the way that only accurate things can be.
Somatic alienation, bodily autonomy, and the extreme cost of being seen
The affirmations in this book are real. They happened. A stranger read the author correctly and the world shifted. A surgeon said something that should not have been said and the world shifted again, in the other direction. Both are in here. Neither is resolved.
What the book is actually about is the cost of visibility. The specific exhaustion of a body that has spent decades being misread, and then begins to be read correctly, and discovers that being read correctly is its own kind of exposure. That reclaiming bodily autonomy does not end the surveillance — it changes its character.
This is the subversion of the affirming narrative: not that transition is bad, but that the story we tell about it — the clean arc, the before-and-after, the arrival — is a fiction that serves the people watching, not the person living it. Terrifying Gender Affirmations refuses that fiction. It offers the actual thing instead.
Companion volume
Pretty Boy →Raw manuscript updates and preview chapters
Terrifying Gender Affirmations is forthcoming Autumn 2026. Join the email list for raw manuscript updates, preview chapters, and dispatches on transgressive queer fiction, speculative body horror, and the literature of institutional alienation.
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