Lord knows I appreciate a title that has a little pizzazz and controversy, but it stops short when I and my demographic are referred to as “monsters”. Specifically, Invisible Monsters. The title was used by hard boiled author Chuck Palahniuk, a darling of the Maxim crowd with a nearly unpronounceable last name. Seriously, can someone tell me how to say that? The Wikipedia pronunciation guide spells it out in Cyrillic, something I also don’t know how to pronounce correctly. Not that I’m much better in English. Seriously, if you ever have the misfortune to hear me speak, I guarantee you come away confirming my suspected idiocy.

Invisible Monsters, without giving too much away because some of you may rush out to download it to your Kindle, is the tale of 2 social outcasts. One is the narrator who was shot in the face and had her jaw blown off. Her companion is an alleged transsexual, who unlike any trans woman I have ever met, decided to go with the very drag queen moniker of Brandy Alexander. Then again, Pala… Palahuk… whatever, has a habit of naming characters after liquor, so maybe it’s just that. Oh, it gets worse. Much worse. I’m reasonably sure if the fundamentalist right or RadFem debased themselves to read this, they would nod their heads and say, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Now is the part where I’m going to give some stuff away, but not the big shocker of a twist ending. If you want to stop reading and go devour the novel before coming back, I totally won’t hold it against you. Seriously, I won’t even know. My contract with the NSA just went sour. The evolution of a young runaway into (not kidding here) The Queen Supreme, is worthy of any given troll on a website comments section. By the way, is it too much to ask to have trolls here at Michellelianna? Instead I get all these lovely, well thought out and reasoned comments that never seem to inspire a rage and bile chunked vomit of responses. I digress.

Brandy’s story begins with a young gay male who is sexually molested by both his father and a policeman. I can’t believe he didn’t manage to work a priest in there, but this was drafted before that whole ball of evil came to world consciousness. After running away, he is eventually taken in by 3 drag queens who adopted the performing name, The Rhea Sisters. I remember one of them going by ‘Dia’ and another by ‘Gona’. Get it? Ugh. Under their care, young Brandy is convinced to transition with the sister’s paying for all the operations and somehow circumventing WPATH all together. Now here is the real kicker. Brandy went along with this even though she doesn’t consider herself transgender! She’s simply looking for a new identity because she doesn’t care for the old one. Holy shit.

To put all the pieces together, transsexuals are the result of child sex abuse and homosexuality, who have been influenced and cajoled to transition by other trans as a means to adopt a new identity. Is it possible that Chuck Palooka.. [whatever!] and Shelia Jeffrey’s are really one in the same? I understand he’s a writer who likes to push the edges, which is fine, but his portrayal is akin to me writing a book about cabal of Jewish elders in cahoots to poison wells, steal Christian children for their blood and openly gloat how they managed to off Jesus as they polish their horns. I believe strongly in free speech, but some things are just not cool. Sure, it was the first thing he wrote and the public was still very much in the dark, but he just released a remix of the work without any tweaking in this area.

Should we rise in protest? Write angry letters to the publisher or even the author? Um, no. Our time is much better served educating the public on what the truth really is rather than nitpicking with someone who is only going to claim artistic license or character-specific, non-global circumstances. I just thought you all should know in case you were browsing for literature under the keyword ‘transgender’ and in for a nasty surprise. One of his other works, Rant, I found to be both very clever and entertaining, so go figure.