Reviews tagging 'Transphobia'

Her Last Move by John Marrs

1 review

nightofdesirableobjects's review

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Marrs is not a great writer, but he does produce the odd good “airport” thriller. I was sort of getting in to this, despite the clunkiness of the writing, but then came along a big dollop of transphobia. So yeh, I’m out.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but: this trope of “trans women are just men who are pretending just to fly under the radar and hurt women/people” is so old and so done. It is also harmful. If trans women were having a great time of things, then sure this plotline would be ndb, just a fun twist. But trans women are having a crap and dangerous time precisely because storylines like this are used again and again: portraying them as deliberate deceivers. For most cis people this is the only exposure to trans they get, so this is all they will learn.

Oh and throwing in a Gay character (and not going more than a few lines without mentioning he is gay, wtf is that about?) does not make up for it.

To be fair to Marrs, up to that point the trans character mentioned had been handled fine. (Heavy handed, but fine.) Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it probably was an accident which happened out of ignorance. Sadly it was completely unnecessary to the plot and took me out of the book too much.

Until that point I was mostly annoyed with the initial portrayal of Becca who went completely nuts over a colleague she just literally met and thought about him every other page, despite apparently  being a “competent” detective on a high profile serial killer case. Umm why wasn’t she doing her damn job? Thank god that colleague turned out to be gay because I’d had just about enough of that.

/rant

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