The Seething Cauldron

Transracialism, white male shame, and new transgressive novels (Part Two)

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(Part One of this piece is here)

Towards the end of 2025, I had two conversations that stuck with me. The first was with a young lesbian woman, who told me she felt uncomfortable with the militant gender activism that had somehow become associated with her sexuality. Since we were speaking frankly, I told her of something that was making me equally uncomfortable: As someone who’d worked in hip-hop and loved black culture, I’d always been sensitive to the complexities (to put it mildly) at play in the background. But now, in the wake of years of progressive messaging, I often felt actively uncomfortable, as though there was something shameful in my whiteness. (Some people seem to think that’s the whole point, but as Jay-Z once said: don’t argue with fools.)

The second conversation was with a gentle, cerebral Jewish man a little older than me, who also works in the music industry. In short, about as non-racist a person as you could expect to meet. ‘Whenever I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror,’ he told me one day, ‘it’s like there’s something wrong with me, like I have the wrong kind of face.’

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In the main, it wasn’t black people creating this situation¹. This became clear on reading a viral essay by Jacob Savage from late last year, which documented the recent disappearance of the straight white male in several arenas of American life: the media, academia, Hollywood, and ‘everywhere else.’ The essay was forensic in its detail, and concluded that ‘the weight of society’s disfavor can be disorienting… (and) has engendered a skepticism toward the entire liberal project that won’t soon disappear.’

As women rightly point out, the boardrooms and the ownership class are still largely white and male. But those people have done all they can to insulate themselves from the ideas they propagate. I have experienced this myself, and witnessed white, male business owners declare that no straight, white male will be considered for a job.

This dynamic is neatly encapsulated by a quote in Savage’s essay from an 84-year-old historian, John Gaddis: ‘The Yale history department at the time I arrived in 1997 was overwhelmingly white and male. Some remedial action was long overdue.’ I agree, but one helpful action Gaddis could take would be retiring. Why must the ‘action’ well-established people espouse always be at someone else’s cost, and borne by those who can least afford it?

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As with boomers and the JFK assassination, perhaps late-stage Gen-Xers always remember first hearing examples of egregious woke overreach. I was driving along the 5 freeway, somewhere near Atwater Village, when I first heard about Rachel Dolezal. For those unfamiliar, Dolezal appeared to the world as a mixed-race woman and activist, and rose to the top of the Spokane chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.) Then, in 2015, she was abruptly outed as a white woman.

Condemnation was swift and brutal, and in those early years of progressive witch-hunting, she was eviscerated in the media. That day on the 5, I was listening to a local NPR station, which covered her story unsympathetically – the network’s Denene Millner called Dolezal a ‘white lady with fussy hair and a bad tan.’²

I seem to remember a pair of commentators being interviewed, who expressed the usual mixture of victimhood and righteous fury. Dolezal’s complex background – in her teens, her parents had adopted three African-American children and one Haitian child – and apparently ardent commitment to furthering black rights were not treated as mitigating factors. The idea that this transracialism was in any way comparable to transgenderism was given short shrift, largely on the basis that the idea was offensive.

Sitting in the car seat in the LA traffic, this was one of the first experiences I had of a potent, stomach-acid-churning disgust at someone being publicly shamed by a mob.

No convincing rebuttal was offered for the comparison between transracialism and transgenderism. When one is, it’s fair to say that the logic can become tortured. Most arguments tend to shift the debate from ontology to politics. They explain why race transition is socially offensive, but not why it is philosophically incoherent while gender transition is not. The argument often rests on ancestry as immutable membership, but sex too is biologically immutable – which reintroduces the same tension.

For the most part, society chooses to ignore these contradictions. But if we stare them in the face, they seem to suggest it is less afraid of offending women than it is members of non-white races.³ In the UK, this is evident in women-only spaces and sports being opened to biological males for a decade or so. At the same time, there have been high-profile examples of the authorities appearing ultra-sensitive to racial matters.

This also explains why feminism has morphed over recent years, and had to fight old enemies in new guises. In the same year as Dolezal was outed, Germaine Greer’s public standing was effectively destroyed by her questioning whether a man could claim to be a woman while lacking genuine experience of womanhood. It seemed an alarming signal that few public figures leapt to her defence. Greer had been a feminist in Australia in the 1970s, when it was difficult and dangerous to be one, and a lot of the battles we take for granted now had yet to be won – not least by women like her.

Writers such as Abigail Shrier have covered the potential link between social pressures and the surge in gender transition among teenage girls. Among these prompts, might the relentless messaging about patriarchy, toxic masculinity and rape culture have encouraged some young women to think that it might be better to be male? The idea of a woman feeling negative towards the potential of her sex is horrifying. But after all, if you’re young and inexperienced, and you’re told life is bad for women and easier for men, might you not want to become one?

If so, it follows that something similar might happen with race.

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Beneath the frost of recent orthodoxies, the seething cauldron of our collective id has been bubbling away regardless. When official narratives contain glaring contradictions that polite society won’t discuss⁴, novels like Dryback will begin to do so. Juan Ecchi’s narrator mentions the most infamous race transitioner briefly, when he says that Kelly has ‘done a Dolezal.’ Its depiction of a young woman driven to race transition by cruel social fads is exactly what a novel does best. No amount of nonfictional explication can match the emotional effect of a novel to ram something home. Dryback is more Houellebecqian than Orwellian – high praise, as far as I’m concerned – but it brings to mind 1984. We can all understand the horror of authoritarianism on an intellectual level, but when Winston and Julia’s love is broken like the butterfly on the wheel, we loathe it with the full force we should.

I came across Dryback via Rob Doyle’s excellent Substack post about a new wave – or perhaps ripple – of transgressive novels he termed, excitingly, ‘underground sex maniac literature.’ As well as Dryback, these were Running the Light by Sam Tallent, Worst Boyfriend Ever by Sensitive Young Man, and The Pussy, by Delicious Tacos. I’ve now (almost) read all four, and Dryback was my favourite. Running the Light is also excellent, though a more traditional novel in some ways. Its debauched protagonist isn’t a million miles away from one of Philip Roth’s – Mickey Sabbath comes to mind, from the toweringly brilliant Sabbath’s Theatre. Worst Boyfriend Ever was short, shocking and completely addictive. Let’s just say that it throws the idea of a likeable protagonist out of the window and across the freeway, and felt like watching a real-life car crash, or encountering a Gen-Z Patrick Bateman.

I’m midway through The Pussy, Delicious Tacos’ collection of stories. Apparently, he’s a sort of godfather to writers like Sensitive Young Man and Juan Ecchi. The writing is patchy, and by turns outrageous, deeply transgressive and (occasionally) oddly beautiful, but I’m enjoying it. Like Worst Boyfriend Ever, it’s capable of shocking even me – as life affirming as a slap in the face.

It’s become a well-worn trope that men aren’t reading novels. It strikes me that many more would if books like these were given coverage on the review pages of newspapers and magazines. But perhaps that’s the eternally thwarted hope of the chronically underground, like me.

Either way, it’s a very good thing these books are being published. They attack orthodoxies like acid, and they show the last, demented decade will all be turned into glorious, funny, filthy art – the best outcome we could have hoped for.

1. This was vividly illustrated in a recent interview with Adam Szetela, author of That Book is Dangerous! He described interviewing a woman of colour in the publishing business, whom he paraphrased as saying that she, as someone ‘who ostensibly this whole movement was supposed to “centre,” am not going to use my real name in this interview, because I’m worried about my colleagues – most of whom are white – calling me a terf or what have you.’

2. Interestingly, the concept of body shaming doesn’t seem to apply when coming from progressives. In 2017, Guardian humourist Marina Hyde described the DUP leader of the time, Arlene Foster, as ‘having the sort of face that might accompany a news story about a raid on a farm which contains the quote: “I’ve got nothing to say - all the men were given meals and caravan shelter in return for their work”.’

3. As so often, this unpalatable fact is expressed beautifully in a novel. In Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude, the narrator, befriending a young black kid at school, asks: ‘What age is a black boy when he learns he’s scary?’

4. Someone I admire in the publishing world told me that releasing an expertly researched book about a vexed contemporary issue had seen his company treated as though it had ‘farted in the lift.’