Oh, hi! Um… this is awkward, so sorry to ask this, but… are you… cisgender? Don’t worry, I’m cool, I’m cool. I just saw you from across the internet and wondered, “Hey, is there a cis person here?” and I had to come over and talk to you because like, I’m such a huge ally! Really, I love you people and I think you’re so cool. I gotta ask, though – you really identify as your gender assigned at birth? Like you don’t regret it or wish you’d just been born trans, like the rest of us? You’re just happy with… that whole… situation? Downstairs? Wait. Sorry if this is asking too much, I know we just met, and I’m not exactly letting you get a word in, but… you aren’t going to get surgery on your genitals? You’re sticking with those? Because that’s so cool, I just don’t really get it, you know? Anyway, the one thing we can definitely agree on – I’m sure you’re a reasonable cis person and not one of those weirdo activists – is that Hormone Replacement Therapy should be mandatory for children, and cisgender kids shouldn’t be allowed to participate in sports. We agree on that, right? Where are you going?

---

Oops, sorry, hello for real this time. This is Emoria! I wrote a book called Aftertaste, and it seems like you might be reading it. Neat! I love that you are. Thanks!

Wait, you’re cis? That means you have money. Give it to me, I’m poor and trans and rent is due. Patreon or Ko-fi or Venmo or Paypal, thank you!

As I allude to in my introduction, however, this book isn’t really for cisgender people. I wrote it with trans people in mind – and even more specifically, it’s a lot of my personal experience as a trans woman not fully understanding her feelings or emotions.

As such, I think a lot of the book that will be fairly intuitive for trans readers might be confusing for cisgender readers.

Lets start with the big one – yuri. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s just a Japanese word that roughly translates as “girls love”, and quite simply is any media depicting two or more women in intimate relationships. You know, to put it simply, lesbian fiction. That’s it!

Yuri has become a very popular shorthand for any and all lesbian fiction for those of us terminally online, and as such, it’s split into a bunch of genres. One of the most common ones is toxic yuri, in which one or more of the lesbians involved are duplicitous, manipulative, or flat-out evil.

Is Aftertaste: A Toxic Yuri actually a toxic yuri? Well, I’ll let you decide that.

Now, the elephant in the room here is that yuri is not a beverage, right? In my book, characters are serving and drinking yuri like it’s wine. That is not a typical association with yuri – it is purely an invention for the book. Think of it as an alcohol stand in, or, more accurately, a hallucinogen. Drink my version of yuri, and you’ll hallucinate a lesbian fantasy in your head. Got it? Okay. That’s yuri.

Okay but what the fuck is Simon on about in chapter one? Forced-feminization yuri? That sounds… iffy.

You’re right! It is iffy. Let me explain again.

Forced-feminization, or force-femme, is a fiction genre that has been popular for decades in online spaces. In it, a “boy” is captured, spelled, enthralled, or whatevered into a girl.

What makes it “force”-femme is the boy never has any say in the situation. It happens to them, and then they either accept it or they don’t. A “Good End” or a “Bad End,” if you will. This genre of fiction is usually, but not always, smut. And there’s nothing wrong with smut, to be perfectly clear! I’m sure some people bought Aftertaste assuming it was smut, and more power to them.

So, who reads this kind of fiction? Who is “force-femme” for? Why read story after story after story about men who have no choice but to be forced to be women?

The people who read them most are trans women who haven’t realized they are trans women yet.

See, for a lot of us…

A lot of us trans women…

We didn’t know we were trans.

Some people always, always knew.

And some of us never had the words, didn’t understand what was wrong, didn’t know why we didn’t fit in the world.

But here’s this genre of fiction where all the uncertainty gets taken away, all this doubt, and you just have to be a woman, because you were forced to be a woman. Boom. Problem solved. No messy coming out, no navigating how heinous our medical systems are, no dealing with discrimination, no “but what if I’m not actually trans,” just *POOF* and CONGRATULATIONS! GIRL NOW!

It’s very seductive, getting the hard part taken away.

Because the alternative seems really, really scary.

Transitioning fucking hurts.

But something else hurts worse, and that’s not transitioning.

Okay. Imagine this for a moment. Say you turn twelve. And suddenly, every week, you get injected with a hormone that makes your brain despise itself. You hate where your hair grows. How your voice sounds. How your body changes. All of it feels wrong and gross and none of it feels like you.

This sensation? Of feeling like you’re in the wrong body, or that you aren’t the right person, or you aren’t who people say you are? That’s called dysphoria. And more than toxic yuri, more than force-femme, Aftertaste is about dysphoria.

Dysphoria hits everyone differently. It didn’t hit me exactly like how it hits Simon, but there’s a ton of overlap between the descriptions in the book and my personal experiences with it.

If you would like to know, for me, dysphoria manifested in depression, a sensation of distance/alienation from both myself and those around me, and, beginning when I hit puberty, daily suicidal ideation up until the day I started HRT.

And then I injected estrogen once, and the daily thoughts of wanting to kill myself went away.

Heavy, I know, but that’s what being trans and doing nothing about it feels like. It feels like death. It feels like death would be better than life. It sucks. It fucking sucks.

But the alternative? Starting hormones, claiming your true identity, beginning to live as the gender you were always supposed to live as?

It feels like breathing for the first time.

It feels like touching the world, when before it was intangible.

For me, it changed the life I was living into a life that was mine.

So. I ask for you to extend that empathy to the main character of my book. Simon doesn’t really know any better. All Simon knows is what Simon’s brain is telling Simon… and well?

Dysphoria’s a lying bitch.

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the book.

---