In July 2022, I lay in bed recovering from gender-affirming bottom surgery.1 Outside of two modest earlobe piercings, I’d never permanently changed my body before; to finally feel in control of my own body was elating and powerful.
I’d started social transition by then. I hadn’t changed my name yet, but I used they/them pronouns, dressed differently, and already (kindly) declined to be tagged in “Happy International Women’s Day” social media posts. But this was different.
I’d done what doctors had denied me for fifteen years. I’d said fuck you to the US Supreme Court and yeeted my fallopian tubes into the sun a month after they took away country-wide abortion rights.2 I was already OBGYN geriatric at thirty-eight, but I would never get pregnant, my biggest source of distressing gender dysphoria.3
To aid my recovery, my partner gifted me a pile of Monster Romances after I couldn’t shut up about C. M. Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm. There, human Violet falls in love with one of her minotaur clients, Rourke, whom she consensually “milks” for a living. She works for a pharmaceutical company using minotaur sperm in dick pills because she, like many of us, needs to pay student loans and rent. The minotaurs are also paid for their contribution based on weight.
A key differentiator between Romantasy or Paranormal Romance and Monster Romance is that the monsters never become human through transformation. The Beast stays the Beast, even when Beauty falls in love with him. Rourke has a bovine snout, hide, horns, a tail, hooves for feet, and an extra-large and differently shaped penis.4 A drawing of Rourke concludes the original edition, and many reviewers found his cow face shocking and ugly. Were they imagining a human man?
Many Monster Romances are indie self-published, often ebook first and released on Kindle Unlimited. Morning Glory Milking Farm went Romance book viral, and some readers were scandalized, despite the content warnings and marketing descriptions.
The widespread conversations kicked off a wave of Monster Romances. How can Violet love and desire such a monster? I was empowered. In my recovery, I’d unlocked a monster in myself and a new understanding of romantic and sexual attraction beyond cishet normative standards.
The historical casting of transness as monstrous
Founding figure of transgender studies and leading scholar of transgender history, Dr. Susan Stryker, spoke in 1993 about how Frankenstein’s Monster resonated with her experience as a trans woman in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” She calls back to the history of trans people being derided and vilified as monsters5 for simply living our truth and the rage caused by society’s insistence on putting us back in a box.
“Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist.” (page 242–243)
The monster body, like the trans body, is considered outside nature, and it has been used as a warning, as a pitiful, dangerous, and unnatural creature that society must reject or destroy to restore (conservative status quo) order.
All trans people get embodiment pushback. In her essay “The Third Sex,” author Talia Bhatt explains, “We thus serve as objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals, either a hypersexualized fantasy with no autonomy or agency of its own, or a monstrous creature whom it is permissible to abhor, violate, and brutalize. […] Our existence is itself an abomination to a heterosexual, male-supremacist regime, one that must be stamped out and denied at every turn.”
To break binary gender is to break what many believe is nature, but is actually patriarchy’s oppressive social hierarchical order. Nature and monstrous embodiment come in infinite diversity in infinite combinations (thanks, Star Trek).
Trans and queer embodiment in Monster Romances
A Monster Romance typically features explicit sex where our protagonists must literally bare all as they share their hearts. While Monster Romance, like other Romances, overwhelmingly feature cishet couples, they contend with non-human bodies, thus take on characteristics of queer sex and sexual negotiation around trans bodies, regardless of authorial intention.
Embodiment—feeling with my body instead of just my mind—is something I struggle with. Bodily autonomy cannot be achieved without embodiment, and for a romantic allosexual, that includes my internal sense of attractiveness and relaying this correct self-perception to others. I was never a beautiful woman because I simply was never a woman, the same way Rourke was never a human man, no matter the cis-centric gaze upon my body or in the reader. I use social cues, hormones, and my voice to declare my gender as a non-binary trans man.
Living as myself in full embodiment often means visibility, which adds vulnerability as I interact with a transphobic world. Time infamously declared “the transgender tipping point” in 2014 with Laverne Cox as cover model. This widespread, public visibility moves us from having to introduce cis people to the concept of trans people. However, it doesn’t gain us power or equity in society and allows for deeper personal and political vulnerabilities paving the way for a transphobic backlash and the rise in anti-trans legislation.
Many Monster Romances play with these same conundrums of monster visibility, power, equity, and backlash in contemporary society.6 The monstrous reality causes an unraveling of nature’s “before monsters” status quo. Whether consciously or unconsciously, many authors pull on threads of what minoritized human communities have lived through or tried for survival, for better or worse.7
In Nascosta’s world, the monsters build “safe” towns and live in integrated cities, while Violet’s family stays in a human-segregated suburb. Kate Prior’s Claws & Cubicles series is set post-apocalypse, and a lich serves as Evil Inc’s CEO and falls for his executive admin. In the Leviathan Fitness series, Ashley Bennett takes one human family on a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner journey as the daughter marries a wolven, the monster-fearing son a kraken, and the widowed mother a silver-furred minotaur. In Lyonne Riley’s Stories from New Eden series, humans hide from monsters or marry them for protection, and in Lillian Lark’s Monstrous Matches, monsters stay hidden from humans.
As I embody myself, there is enormous patriarchal pressure to stay “Beauty” and never become “the Beast.” By transitioning, I am supposedly erasing my value, as property of cishet white men. Even at thirty-nine, my first HRT doctor’s most important pre-testosterone warnings were around my fertility8—even after multiple reminders that I had no tubes—and understanding “permanent” changes that coincidentally are “unattractive in women.”
In the embodiment themes, many Monster Romances focus on consent and play with breeding fetishes. Instead of eugenics-driven fertility fears, couples (or polycules) seem undeterred by perceived species mismatch. In Lark’s Found by the Lake Monster, Adrian must lay his egg inside of human Amy, who serves more as an incubator than a genetic parent. In Deceived by the Gargoyles, there is no doubt that Grace, a human witch, will get pregnant (when they’re ready) with her three cis male gargoyle partners’ babies. In Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians, the blue-skinned and tailed male Sakh even heal human women with previous fertility issues. In Katee Robert’s The Kraken’s Sacrifice, the kraken king Thane accidentally impregnates the human Catalina, and then Thane must procure an abortion for her. This scene highlights the couple’s miscommunication, despite their sexual desire for each other, and further illuminates the series’ greater consent theme.
As trans bodies are debated by some of the worst people, these Monster Romances do what pundits, politicians, billionaire posters, The New York Times, and the Supreme Court refuse to do—mind their own business on topics they know nothing about, allow for radical individual bodily autonomy, and uphold consent.
Too many people have asked what my cis partner thinks about my transition. That surely this (apparently) cishet man will reject me. While never interrogating why they want to dictate my attractiveness—I will not be sleeping with them—or never investigate their own cisgender alignment. Sexual attraction and romantic attraction are spectrums, and, turns out, my demisexual partner’s attraction may operate differently from cultural expectations.
In Bennett’s Tentacles & Triathlons, Reece fears monsters and initially rejects his sister’s relationship with a wolven. Then he takes up triathlon swimming training with Cyrus, a kraken. When the guys are in the pool together, the fluid motion of their bodies lets them develop a physicality with each other that breaks down Reece’s prejudices and allows them to understand each other on land too. As Cyrus’s tentacles become less of a mystery, this journey unlocks Reece’s emotions, including expressing a feminine side with lingerie, and in turn, Cyrus’s artistic creativity is unblocked and Reece serves as his painting muse.
While I fretted over starting HRT, I soon realized I could only know if it was for me if I tried it. Testosterone first unlocked positive emotional changes and then “Beastly” bodily changes for me.
In the trans masculine community, we joke about becoming werewolves: facial, chest, belly, legs, arms, back, shoulders, and butthole hair. (All depending on your werewolf genetics, of course.) My two cis brothers provide me with genetic body hair clues as they swim shirtless in our parents’ Arizona pool. Body hair shouts masculinity; the guys who’ve wolved the most are “sir’d” the most—even if they are nonbinary effeminate gentle queer bears. But in the US, the cishet gaze considers body hair gross. Not in Monster Romances, where fur, scales, setae (moth hair), and exoskeletons are part of the package. Who knows what the Lich Lord’s body looks like under his mysterious robes until he reveals his lion face, four racks of horns, and three cocks in Love, Laugh, Lich.
Many trans people are told by people who purport to love them that, by transitioning, they are destroying their chance to find romantic and sexual love.
To exist inside a Monster Romance as a main character, you must be loveable, but furthermore must exist in nature. Bovine Rourke found love. Violet questioned many things about their relationship, but never her fundamental attraction to Rourke.
The ultimate truth is that the trans body and the monster come from nature because nature is far more vast and varied than our human brains can currently comprehend.
This means that myself and every trans person can find love (if we desire it) while seeking bodily autonomy. In a world where our human rights are being debated and taken away, I’ve found solace in Monster Romances and embracing my changing nature.
1 Bottom surgeries are sometimes the removal of internal reproductive parts. Not exactly what rude cis people desire to know when they ask about “the surgery.”
2 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which took away the right to have an abortion in the United States. The decision was 6–3, and the majority were all judges appointed by Republican presidential administrations.
3 Gender dysphoria looks different in every trans person, and dysphoria is not a prerequisite to transness. I reject the notion that our gender must come from a place of suffering, whether our transgender egg crack or the anti-science, bio-essentialism lauded by transphobes. Many trans people have given birth and will give birth, and many find peace and happiness within their bodies and this choice. Choice, it turns out, is key.
4 Not too much though unless you want Amazon to delist your book.
5 There is an extremely long history of this, and I recommend the documentary Disclosure (2020) for many examples in film and TV.
6 Not to overlook “historically” set monster romances like Kimberly Lemming’s hilarious Mead Mishaps series and Lionel Hart’s The Orc Prince Trilogy.
7 A valid critique of Monster Romances is how some white authors fall back on racialized tropes, intentional or not.
8 Please do not use testosterone as birth control. You can get pregnant on it!
© 2025 Theo Kane
