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Welcome to Dorley Hall by Alyson Greaves
5.0

Welcome to Dorley Hall reminds me of a serialized story plucked from the archives of BigCloset or Fictionmania, run through a contemporary lens, and redeveloped with a professional author/editor to find the layers beneath the story. Alyson Greaves successfully captures the nostalgia of those vintage forced feminization stories perfectly, but does so with something meaningful and surprisingly deep.

On the surface, this is the story of Dorley Hall, a seemingly innocuous residence for female students, but one with a dark secret. Aunt Bea and her girls are in the business of selecting problematic young men, the kind who have demonstrated the worst traits of toxic masculinity (including violence against women), to be corrected and redeemed. They do this by keeping them captive, breaking them mentally and emotionally, and forcibly feminizing them with hormones and surgery. It’s a story with the potential for a lot of darkness, but the way in which Greaves frames it . . . transforms it.

For one, she explores this experience through a young man who allows himself to be taken under false pretenses because he wants to be there, seeing it as an express, no-cost path to transition. Two, she balances the story between the captors and the captives, showing us more of the women who have ‘happily’ graduated the program than the men who ‘resent ‘deserve’ to be there. It creates an “end justifies the means” kind of mindfuck, especially when we see how the women sympathize with their captives, despite the men’s horrendous behavior, and even feel guilt over some of their darker experiences.

On that note, I just have to say a few words about the women of Dorley Hall. Christine, Paige, Pippa, Abby, Vicky, Indira, and the rest are all well-developed, entirely likable characters with personalities, backstories, and (yes) baggage. The relationships between them, whether as friends, lovers, sponsors, or sisters, are powerful things, and the more you come to understand about them, the more you appreciate this artificial sense of community that they’ve nurtured into something more. You could remove the men from the story completely, and just read this as a what-comes-after sort of story, and still be entirely enthralled.

That, however, would be to miss the fact that, beneath the surface, there’s more going on than you might initially recognize. This is a story about gender, gender roles, and gender relationships. It’s a story about how society discriminates against transwomen and how it seeks to limit their access to gender-affirming treatment. It’s also a story about the pressure to pass and what’s commonly referred to as passing privilege, with the graduates of Dorley Hall literally ‘made’ to pass, but still suffering some of the same insecurities and anxieties of traditional transwomen.

While some readers could be forgiven for not recognizing all the layers, the themes, and the meanings, tempted to disregard it as an uncomfortable story of abuse and manipulation, key twists and revelations in the closing chapters force it all into perspective – and I’d argue that putting the women front-and-center in the narrative, making so much of this about the graduates, emphasizes the philosophical issues even more.

In so many ways, Welcome to Dorley Hall feels like a reclaiming of the gender exploration themes that underpin so much TG fiction, dressing them up and allowing them to pass for mainstream readers. It’s a great read, and I’d even argue an important read, but with 2 books to come, the story’s not yet over – much to my delight.


https://sallybend.wordpress.com/2025/01/19/however-you-got-here-welcome-to-dorley-hall-by-alyson-greaves/