To Own the Libs - Zoe Storm (Antithesis Press, 2025)

I remember hearing once about a documentary some far right wing site was making. It was about how men were pretending to be trans women to dominate women's sports at the collegiate level. But the thing was they kept looking and looking and – it just wasn’t there. It didn’t happen. So they went back to the drawing board, had to make it fictional, and decided to lean into being cruel and vicious.

It came to mind when I started reading Zoe Storm’s new novel To Own the Libs. It follows Lily through a year of school and her atypical transition from an angry, right-wing guy: after an argument in a classroom, she decides to show how easy trans people have it by faking a transition.

Lily’s a student at a small, rural college called Bradford McKiney. After a particularly heated classroom argument with a young feminist named Anna over self-identification and watching her roommate Joe make a drunken ass of himself over a nonbinary person,  Lily hatches an idea: a final project showing how easy it would be to fake being trans. Writes Storm:

_{“It wasn’t fair. Someone could just say they were a woman, and everyone was supposed to believe it? Just like that?} 

_{It wasn’t fair. You couldn’t just become a woman. You couldn’t just be a woman. That wasn’t how it worked.} 

_{Men were men, and women were women. There was no way to change that simple fact, no matter how desperately someone wished for it. No matter how bad they felt about themselves.”}

As the line goes, denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. She hatches her plan by coming out to Anna at a campus event and goes with her and her theyfriend Elanor to a GSA meeting, where she meets Nora and Jillian, a couple who dramatically break up almost immediately over Jillian’s transphobia; Lily quickly replaces her in this circle of friends. This quartet forms the core of the novel, three people Lily learns from and warms to, slowly revealing herself as a sensitive, caring young woman.

In Storm’s hands, Lily comes off as dense yet charming, someone who was knee-deep in repression and right-wing media, but is curious and open to learning. Throughout the book, we see Lily growing as she expands her horizons and learns her preconceived notions were rooted in misinformation through how both her and her friends move through life. Moments like the way she smiles when she hears her name, the way she admits to her mistakes and learns from them, to the way you see her caring for her friends - and not-friends like her boorish roommate. 

Written in a plain, unadorned style, To Own the Libs is a brisk and quick read. As Lily gets deeper into her transition, Storm slowly introduces concepts: getting clocked in public, having to bootleg hormones, and ultimately a hate crime. She eases readers along as Lily learns by doing and has her preconceived biases popped like bubbles, one after another.

It’s this approach that makes To Own the Libs an ideal introduction to trans lit: where someone like Torrey Peters or Jeanne Thornton leans into their characters being messy and flawed, Storm keeps Lily grounded as someone slowly growing and coming out of her shell. For readers of about the same age, she’s easy to relate to and see yourself in. It’s not being marketed as a YA book, but readers late in high school or early in college will find a lot here to get absorbed in.

It’s also a romance that’s wickedly funny. Lily is dense and oblivious to her body, routinely writing off things like how good she feels seeing herself in a dress or how social transition has silenced her anxieties, as nothing to think about. When she gets a kiss her mind short-circuts and she speaks in a keysmash; when her girlfriend calls her princess she blushes. She’s so obviously coming alive as she transitions and thinks about how sad it will be to go back to being a boy; something that’s obvious to any reader seems to elude her for months in-novel.

And yet Lily is never set up as an easy target. She’s comic in the ways she misses the flashing signs around her, but it’s never played in a mocking or sardonic tone; Lily is an exaggerated version of the repper cliche, someone who represses being trans so hard that it barely registers to them anymore.

I mentioned earlier that To Own the Libs is an ideal introduction to trans lit. It’s because this book is generally light in tone and written in an approachable way, but also it’s one that doesn’t shy away from bad things: Lily deals with assaults both verbal and physical here. But it’s never too heavy or dark, and life moves on for Lily and her friends. Contrasted with books like Casey Plett’s Little Fish or Torrey Peters’s novella The Masker, Storm’s characters largely avoid the long dark night of the soul or struggle with deep internal conflicts.

It makes To Own the Libs an ideal entry point, a book that’s great for someone who doesn’t really read much and is curious about trans-authored books, or for someone who is more into a cute romantic comedy. It’s a book that does get into big emotions at times, but mostly is content to make you laugh and feel happy for a goober who, despite all their mental gymnastics, does finally figure their shit out. Here’s hoping it finds an audience.