TW: this book — and review — discuss transphobia, transmisogyny, and sexual assault.

Star ratings feel extremely limiting to me most of the time, but none more so than when I read a book where I didn’t like it very much, but it still changed something in me for the better. I have no idea how many stars I’d give A Dream Of A Woman — which is a short story collection, but where many of the short stories are intermingled with each other, a chapter for a chapter, to the point where you’re not sure if one’s over or just paused — but I do know I want to talk about it. So this isn’t so much a review in the traditional sense. For that reason, spoilers ahoy! This is not a spoiler-friendly review and will be spoiling some of the included stories. Not that this is a collection with “twist endings” per se. You’ll live.

Before anything else, I do want to say that I know very little — deliberately! — about Casey Plett. I know that she’s transfem, and I know that she’s Canadian; beyond that, I’ve made a point of not familiarizing myself with her beyond this collection until I get this written. Any assumptions I make about these stories, then, aren’t reflections on the author — they’re impressions from the writing itself, and how I as a reader interact with it. That feels obvious to type out, but with trans writing in particular, it’s inevitable that when we read work from our own community, we’re getting something different from it than cis readers.

That’s part of why I was so startled by my initial dislike/distate. The first story, “Hazel and Christopher”, is a sweet enough love story that takes a rather sour twist when Christopher (initially a cis man) comes out to Hazel (trans woman) as being trans herself. The sourness comes in because Hazel… does not take it well. She’s immediately stressing about having to help Christopher through her transition, about how much work it’ll be — and while the more I reflect on the story the more I don’t think this is intended as a necessarily sympathetic narrator, it’s… well, it’s so far from my own experience that I had to put the book down for a while. But like any good story, it got me thinking. Because while I can’t sympathize with breaking up with someone because they came out, because you wanted, specifically, a cis lover; I have been the “first trans partner” or the “first queer partner” for a lot of people, to the point of actively avoiding it. It’s not such a stretch of the imagination to understand where Hazel is coming from — it’s just something I do have to stop and actively wrap my head around as someone who would probably react joyfully regardless. (Hazel and I are also, it should be noted, dramatically different people. She reacts to polyamory with barely-veiled disgust earlier in the story and seems very attached to the idea of normalcy; but more on that later on.)

The other stories in the collection are a little less polar-oppositional to my life, but still feel a little like looking through carnival glass. David/Vera in the longest story (a novelette called ‘Obsolution’ that occurs in several parts in between other stories) is someone who I almost know. She puts off hormones for years because of gatekeeping and the idea that she isn’t “trans enough” or the “right kind of trans”. But even as she takes steps to assert some femininity, her name and her pronouns aren’t something she feels comfortable claiming until after going on hormones — whereas I grew up, half a generation or a generation behind, in a group where the name and pronouns were the first and most important part of claiming our gender. Other parts hit incredibly close to home — Tiana is so shocked at the speedy transition timeline of a younger trans girl that she’s almost resentful. It touches on something I’ve thought about a lot — how some of what we consider inherent or part of being trans is just shared trauma, trauma that younger trans people or trans people in different situations don’t have. I feel this way — complicated, sometimes resentful, mostly happy, often confused — about trans folks who got to go on puberty blockers. The concept — parents? who let you? transition? — baffles me.

At the same time, that distance is there between me and the women in this collection. It feels strange to call it ‘generational’; Vera’s story starts during the Obama election campaign. I was in middle school for that — Vera’s in college. But that ten year difference is massive. Even for me, my high school years were a time of immense upheaval for trans visibility, awareness and rights. In Grade 9 you could refer to the one out lesbian in the upper years without knowing her name and everyone would know who it was; by Grade 10 our GSA/Rainbow Alliance was spilling out of the classroom doors; by Grade 11 we were doing Day of Pink and TDOR as unofficial school spirit days; by Grade 12 one of my best friends had started going on hormones. And people ten years younger than me are just as mystified and curious!

The part of this collection — mostly of ‘Obsolution’ — that is hands down, one hundred percent, the most relatable and most brutally written, at least in terms of how I’m experiencing it — is how it deals with sexual assault and abuse. Already with ‘Hazel and Christopher’, as much as it sits oddly with me, Plett demonstrates that these are stories not about how people should react to or deal with things, but how they do. Between my own experiences and what I’ve helped other friends — particularly trans, particularly transfem — friends with, it’s haunting seeing a story really deal with the specter of the cis woman rapist. Iris, of course, would never consider herself a rapist. Vera certainly doesn’t want to. Even as she tries to bring it up, she forgives, she backtracks, she reestablishes contact — And of course, lots of people struggle to cut off their rapists. I certainly have. But so, so many depictions are of men.

Overall, this is an excellent collection. The writing, the characterization, everything, is extremely well done, and I’m interested in reading Plett’s other work. I have strange feelings about it as a slightly younger trans person, but none of that, I think, amounts to actual criticism in a negative sense — just that it inspired feelings I wasn’t expecting.

This is also my first book I’ve completed for the 2025 Trans Rights Readathon! For more information on Casey Plett, check her website out here.

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