Building A Girl
This email reviews Alyson Greaves's "Welcome to Dorley Hall," a bold deconstruction of gender transition narratives.
Welcome to Dorley Hall - Alyson Greaves (Neem Tree Press, 2024)
In her 1949 book Simone de Beauvoir wrote "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," and gave gender theorists a bone they’ve been chewing on ever since. Is gender preformative? Is it something innate? Is that why some trans women seem to take to femininity like a duck to water, while others have to learn it through trial and error?
But what if one takes it literally?
I can’t find the exact quote, but years ago I remember Porpentine Charity Heartscape writing that the appeal of force-femme fiction is that it’s essentially someone holding your hand through transition. Someone, almost always a stand-in for the reader, gets to see themselves transition through someone else’s mechanisms. They do all the hard work, you just have to sit there and let them work on you. Like a lot of what I call Eggy Fiction, it’s not a genre with a lot of glamour - but then, neither are the stories where a fairy switches your gender, or an Isekai where you wake up as a Goblin Princess, or whatever. But there is a formula and rules to follow, and in that sense they aren’t too dissimilar from other genres like Police Procedurals. And that’s fine, they have a purpose or two, and they basically only try to fill those.
I haven’t really read anything in this style in probably over a decade now: actually transitioning more or less scratched that itch and once you’ve actually feminized yourself, these kinds of stories lose their appeal. But I did way back in the day and they definitely played a role in helping me figure myself out. So then - I wasn’t exactly a newbie going into Alyson Greaves’s novel Welcome to Dorley Hall.
It follows a young person named Stefan who runs across a woman that looks strikingly similar to the older brother of a friend, years after they’d vanished. He puts a few clues together and with some gumption and selfishness, assumes that they all have ties to a student hall at the edge of Royal College of Saint Almsworth - Dorley Hall. He contrives to get himself there and get what he thinks happens there to happen to him, too.
Without getting too far into the weeds and spoilers, Greaves’s novel is a good and compelling deconstruction of the force-femme genre - it deserves a spot alongside Watchmen and Nevada in the way it subterfuges and questions the genre it inhabits. It echoes Porpentine’s line but with the delicious twist of not just a helping hand but a second one holding a taser. These are young people - men doesn’t seem quite like the right word, but more on that later - being shepherded into womanhood, sometimes by force and sometimes willingly.
And yet Greaves is doing more than just that. She is interrogating the genre by making readers face some of the unspoken parts of a sudden, unwanted change like this. She asks us how we feel about them and shows us how they feel in turn: before, during, and after. These are people with a lot of baggage and more than a little trauma. When Stefan asks Christine Hale, a woman living in Dorley, if she’s trans it makes Christine recoil:
“My gender isn’t the issue here,” she says, holding herself still, willing herself not to react, even as her belly fills with bile, even as the old wounds open all over her, even as memories she despises overwhelm her.
The confession and the location mingle. Suddenly she’s two years younger and screaming at Indira from the other side of a glass cell door, screaming and crying and ashamed of both. She can’t stop it coming out: ‘But if you call me a man again, I’ll walk away from this cell and leave you to rot!’”_
As readers we recoil from this because we know the tropes and we know the rules of the form so well: we expect Christine to admit that she’s trans and didn’t know it, but that she’s happy now. But Christine doesn’t see it that way. She thinks about the boy she was, the boy she hated being, and remembers that she still carries that around inside her. She’s happy because she was given a second chance, but there’s still resentment and trauma from the way it happened. She is carrying around these bags and Greaves wants us to see them and to ask ourselves: were these people forcefully made into women or did the chisel just reveal the woman inside the marble block?
When we think about how it must feel - really feel, not the kind of rote feeling one normally supplies themselves to the genre - to have your self stripped away chemically, surgically, and emotionally, we find Christine looking back at us struggling with language and emotions she’s barely able to handle. And through her we see ourselves, looking at the conceits and expectations of the genre and asking if we ever thought about it, too. I certainly think Greaves has.
This would be academic if the story wasn’t good, but to Greaves credit, she’s written a compelling and fast-moving plot. She lets us into a few levels of Dorley at once, and occasionally skips around in time and fills in necessary gaps. We meet Christine and see her slowly growing into herself, see the headmaster-like Aunt Bea slowly win readers over with a mixture of charm and smarts. And the boys! Aaron, a serial flasher and minor sex pest, quickly charmed me when he opened up to Stefan. It left me not just caring about some of these young people, but also knowing that my heart will get broken by them in future volumes.
I have a few gripes, but nothing especially serious: maybe the women lean a little too hard on a kind of Gen Z femininity that I can’t relate to, and you’d think one of them might be a little more into Carly Rae Jepsen than Taylor Swift. But these are easily brushed away because I found myself so quickly invested in this novel. I haven’t been as hooked by something in a long time. I hope you will be, too.