Before long, it’s apparent all men and trans women on Earth have vanished without trace, leaving government departments at a standstill and planes falling out of skies. It begins with Jane Pearson awaking in a tent to find her husband and five-year-old son missing. But the really weird thing is that The Men actually bends over backwards to signal its awareness of the many identity issues Twitter likes to get so het up over. This typically convoluted example of America’s increasingly mad culture wars is grist to the mill for those horrified by the virus of ideological conformity infecting the US literary scene.
It’s not quite so simple anymore: in daring to imagine a future suddenly empty of anyone with a Y chromosome, Sandra Newman’s new speculative novel, The Men, has already led to a Twitter spat, and it’s not even published yet.Īfter trans activists attacked the novel’s gender essentialist premise – which sees Y-chromosomed trans women spirited away with the men – the American essayist Lauren Hough tweeted her support for the book, leading to her removal from the Lambda Awards, which had shortlisted her lesbian memoir. When Philip Wylie wrote his 1951 novel The Disappearance, in which the entire female species vanishes on a Tuesday afternoon, the dystopian vision of a world containing only one gender probably felt to him a beautifully simple idea.
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