Transland

By Mx. Sly

Published by Arsenal Pulp Press, 2023

320 pages, paperback

Transland is a fiery and revealing memoir that explores what happens when a non-binary person goes looking for self-worth and a sense of belonging in fetish subculture, only to find that fetish communities come with just as many problematic rules, expectations, and hierarchies as mainstream ones.

Moving from wide-eyed optimism that the fetish community is the promised land to realizing the ways fetish communities—even queer ones—reinforce the commodification of bodies, Mx. Sly examines how BDSM helped them understand and articulate their gender, how kink helped them turn shameful experiences into liberating ones, and how they became disillusioned with the BDSM scene—without rejecting the lessons fetish taught them. 

The stories in Transland explore PTSD, intergenerational trauma, memory, consent, gender transition and diversity, queer relationships and subculture, and a lot of bondage. An odyssey of kinky hookups (including a charismatic Toronto femdomme, an Aussie rope bondage expert, and the queer sex tourism neighborhood of Bangkok), gender euphoria, and testing the limits of sensual experience, this memoir is a candid exploration of fetish communities and practices and a wandering quest through sensuality toward personal strength and self-reliance. Sexy, gutting, graphic, and existential, Transland is about finding oneself through intense sensations, reaching a point where being hit has diminishing returns, and coming out wiser on the other side.