NOTE: This was originally posted to cohost on this date, in order to leave it available as my cohost is now private, posting this here

So this will get a bit long and I’m going to double content warn this because the stuff it deals with is heavy, and it’s liable to get a bit long. Some of you might have noticed I got a bit obsessed with The Sisters of Dorley, by @badambulist, and I’ve been picking my brain as I read and reread it… there’s a lot more here than meets the eye, and I don’t know how much of it is intentional but given the depth I am seeing I must assume at least some of it is, and I would like to write about that. However, a simple text reading of The Sisters of Dorley series is filled with things that need major content warnings, not all of which I have included as I do not discuss all of those things here. Alyson takes that seriously on her work as well, so I will put a break here to give another opportunity to back out.

Ok. So. A brief introduction to the simple text reading of it. The Sisters of Dorley are a group of women who live at Dorley Hall at the fictional Royal College of Saint Almsworth in England. They kidnap violently virulently toxically masculine young men who are a danger to others, especially women. These are people who for whatever reason have been getting away with whatever they do for various reasons, power, money, because they are a cis het white guy in a society that favors them, and have been escalating.

And then. And then they force feminize them to make them in to good girls who regret and would not repeat their former actions. They give them hormone replacement therapy without consent. They perform orchiectamies and possibly FFS ultimately without consent. This is a deeply disturbing concept and would (I strongly suspect, and would not attempt to prove otherwise) create broken shells of humans in reality. I initially wanted to stop as it sank in, because I wanted these people arrested, locked up, made to pay for their horrendous violations of bodily autonomy. Why would I like these characters or read this, it was too much initially.

But for some reason I kept reading, maybe it’s my history with the genre (more on that later), maybe it was because I respect and trust the friend who recommended it to me. Whatever reason, I got hooked.

The story starts by following a young, deeply closeted but self aware trans girl, (spoiler: Stephanie). It starts seven years back in the past from the main time period, showing her best friend leaving her behind and then ostensibly leaving everyone behind, considered dead. A bit over a year later she runs in to a young woman named Melissa. A young woman who looks too close to her lost best friend, who to the world prior to disappearing seemed to be a boy. And as Melissa leaves, she calls her Stef, which Steph hadn’t told her, sealing in our young closeted trans girls head that her friend was alive, also trans and had transitioned.

So she researched. Finding info on disappearing young men connected to the college her friend went to at the time of her disappearance, finding pictures and their notes and stories, working her butt off to get in to that college. Finding that yes, there seemed to be some girls who floated around the campus that looked potentially like they might formerly have been some of the missing young men, and all of them live at Dorley Hall. She’s convinced that someone at Dorley is helping trans women who came from unsupportive families transition.

Her life has been hard, at home, here at college, she’s struggling financially. Hurting, dysphoric, falling apart. She’s slowly losing grip because she can’t find that final piece. If they were looking for disadvantaged trans girls to help them, they hadn't found her. Then she runs in to Christine at a party. Christine mentions she lives at Dorley, and Steph implies she knows a really weird thing about Dorley Hall. Christine panics, and arranged for her to become one of the kidnapped boys in the basement. To be force feminized. Whoops.

This story is 440k words long at the moment and will only get longer so I’ll try to summarize some of the rest… Dorley Hall has been in operation for at least 35 years, and very likely many years if not decades more. But it wasn’t always a place that insisted it was reforming people, it used to be just about making playthings for wealthy people with a nasty fetish. It was brutal. Sadistic. Cruel. Untold numbers were killed, it wasn’t about making men in to women, it was just torture.

But sometimes, they made one by accident, and one of those at least, managed to escape. 15 years prior to the main plot, she returned and organized a coup d’état and ousted ‘Grandmother’ and her sadistic cronies. Under Aunt Bea, nearly every single person involved in running this place, is a product of either the old or the new regime. The new regime styles itself as reform, and rehab, and relies on their numerous examples of success, young, normal, put together women living their lives, being happy, having friends and relationships and knowing how to respect the boundaries of all but those in their basement.

Christine tries to get Steph out when she realizes her mistake, that she didn't know that much. She admits the truth to Steph during the first chapters, but ultimately Steph comes out to her, explains how she can’t afford to transition and is too much of a coward to try even if she could and she wants to stay as she thinks this is her only chance. Life in the basement is understandably difficult for Steph, even with her being self aware. Her sponsor, Pippa, doesn’t know she knows whats happening, or that she's trans and lays in to her, thinking her one of the rest of the asshole young men they pick up. And let’s be clear, nearly everyone of the current regime’s people we know anything about their backstory, they were dangerous little assholes. Physically violent. Massive bigots. Guys who airdrop dick picks and manipulate women for money. Not nice people (tm). But surely they can't deserve this, there must be some other way, right?

The boys are unpleasant to be around, she gets attacked once. One of the old regime's people gets involved due to staffing shortages and sexually assaults Steph and the boys. Ultimately, Stephanie gets found out, she slips up and mentions Melissa in a conversation. Who she shouldn't know the new name of. She’s allowed to stay but only if she helps them in their goal of feminizing the other boys, under initial threat of being ‘washed out’, what they do to the boys who resist too hard. It has been repeatedly said by non POV at the time characters these people are not dead, just that the place they go is even less pleasant than the cells under Dorley, and there is some evidence later on in recent chapters that this may in fact be the case, but we do not really know.

So. That all sounds thoroughly awful, right, bodily autonomy must be respected? But what if we scratch a bit deeper. I said I would talk a bit about my history with the genre…

The first time I read a forced femme story was probably sometime in the late-ish 90’s at a time I was decidedly too young to be reading them. I’ve read ‘girls school that is actually all boys turned in to girls’ stories before, I’ve read ‘kidnapped and forced to be a girl’ stories before. I’ve read stories with aunts and stepmoms and grandmothers as the antagonists. The stories back then were usually sadistic and cruel and beyond fetishy, the victims often twisted in to crude caricatures of women for humiliation. It was what I stumbled on as a way to ‘cope’ with my feelings of wanting to be a girl. If someone forced me, it wouldn’t be my fault, there wouldn’t need to be any shame about it. Instead I just developed shame about wanting no shame for it. I am a bundle of guilt and shame a lot, hesitant to claim what is within my rights to claim, to be trans, to be a woman.

As time went on, the genre softened somewhat, it went from sadistic assholes to having some people in it that just really thought it was for the best and were just trying to ‘help’ their victims. Supposedly. They were still cruel in their own way, they still crossed lines and hurt people, but it was ok because sometimes at the end, our hapless young man was actually happier as a woman, if maybe a bit… off personality wise…

And now we come to the current era… where we are seeing actually trans supportive fiction, including yes, some fiction that’s about force femme, people volunteering to identify as Dolls, or whatever else.

And here in Dorley, we see, the old guard, cruel sadistic, the new guard, trying to be about rehab, but still doing often terrible things. And then we have Steph, walking in and just straight up volunteering.

So that’s one interpretation I chewed on. Here’s another.

Transition itself has gone through many eras. There was a time when transition was highly difficult, and often quite cruel. You had to have lived experience before anything, you had to jump through hoops, all the while being bombarded by people who could deny you it at any turn, who taunted you for being a man in a dress, a fetish, a pervert. Humiliating and horrifying, and if you did manage to get to where you were done, you almost certainly had a number of surgeries whether you wanted them or not, to hide, to be stealth, to be safe. It left a LOT of dead bodies in its wake.

The gatekeeping got a bit less over time, and some providers came in who weren’t as cruel in some places, but many places still require forced sterilization in order to fully transition and get your legal paper work done. To perform femininity well enough to the satisfaction to those holding the gate keys.

And then of course we come to the modern era, informed consent and self ID, trans people getting to decide what’s best for them and their bodies, don’t want the surgery? Don’t get it.

The story has POV characters for each of these eras, and much like in real life, they interact, and the older ones have stuck around to help build a better version for the future. To support the next generation and be proud and happy for them blossoming with less and less restrictions than the previous generations had. I cheer as I see trans youth getting to transition younger and easier in some places, to get those things out of life I couldn’t have, even if I had known and all the rest of the world was same back then. I want to scream and holler and fight tooth and nail for them, and I had easier than my antecedents, I did informed consent, 2 short info sessions, one blood draw, and I had my meds, all I had to do to start towards GCS with my provider was say ‘I want this’. Meanwhile I’m quite aware it didn’t used to be that way, I’ve known plenty who went through the older hoops that are just as excited for me and the younger kids as I am.

I was feeling really good about both of these as interpretations and discussed them with @beccadax, who presented me with a third possible interpretation after reading a wall of text I wrote about the amount of shame and guilt I felt for having been so in to this genre back then, and with her permission I will share that as well

I think there might also be a layer where the story is about trans readers of forcefem fiction.

Like, Stephanie is presented as a typical trans woman who finds herself in a forcefem torture basement and volunteers to stay through her transition. She doesn’t like the torture basement, but she can get what she needs there, and she’s bonded with some of the people she met there and wants to help them on their journeys. I think maybe that’s commenting on trans people who read forcefem fiction—saying that, yes, a normal trans woman dealing with normal trans shit might “volunteer for the basement”, and not because the events in the stories are somehow appealing.

Similarly, I think you can see the Dorley girls as stand-ins for readers who were harmed by forcefem fiction. Both feel like having “discovered themselves in the torture basement” makes their identities less valid, but from the outside it’s just so obvious they’re trans. The book is steadfastly insisting that even if all those readers’ fears and insecurities were true, they would still be completely valid trans women.

And believe me, I have these fears in spades, one reason I have hesitated to see a therapist is if I’m being truthful about my past they might decide to use it to invalidate me. To shame me for my origins and coping. And I think that reading Dorely has ultimately been a good thing for me.

There’s more here, the graduates of the programme are given their freedom, a stipend, and the bonds they have formed keep them from informing anyone lest they hurt their new found friends and fellow kidnapped family. But they aren’t held to standards of femininity anymore, and several introduced have decided to identify as non binary and use different pronouns. They are required to stick to their ‘new personal histories’ (NPH) which are crafted to explain how they came in to existence and provide documentation, and those histories will either declare them a trans or cis woman, and this too reflects the dichotomy of out vs stealth. GCS does not appear to be required necessarily, although given the after care for GCS I don’t see how you could easily coerce that if they haven’t bought on by then.

The characters are well written, have distinct personalities, and have complicated feelings about their genders and transitions. So many of them in describing their feelings sound like they are more or less trans, even the ones who don’t officially identify that way. They are very… VERY… trans at times when describing their approach to gender, whether they officially identify as cis or trans in their NPH and whether they generally consider themselves cis or not, their fears about passing, how others see them, their feelings about their past selves. They are not Stepford Wives, cut from a mold, they all develop their own unique sense of style, passions, interests. One of the officially and out and proud trans women of the Sisters keeps having her boyfriends eggs crack until she’s introduced to a trans guy, which is just so hilariously on point.

Here's an interesting quote from one of the trans identifying girls talking about her transition with a well, more traditionally arrived at trans girl, who didn't go through the whole 'cheery concrete girlboss torture box' affair, and it is very interesting to me

And then you have me.” She nods at the closed fist. “I’ve been thinking of myself as having been something more like a seed. A girl in potentia, right? Now, an egg is fragile, yes? Vulnerable to moments of revelation, random events or people that will crack her shell and reveal the gooey girly mess inside, right?” Lorna, bemused, nods, and Jodie grins and drops her egg hand. “Well, a seed is tougher. And there’s not really any stuff inside, right? It can last years without breaking. Lifetimes, maybe. And it’s fine like that! It can happily be a seed until, eventually, it biodegrades. Circle of life! Even if you break it apart, crack it like you would an egg, there’s just bits inside. Crumbly little seedy bits. But.” She plunges her seed hand down into her lap, buries it between her calves. “If you plant the seed, if you water it, nurture it, love it, then maybe, after a while, you get a little plant. And if you keep watering the plant, if you care for it until it’s strong enough to stand up on its own, you get a flower, right? And maybe… maybe the flower is beautiful, and enjoys being beautiful, and likes the feel of the sun on her leaves… You get the idea?”

And from the same conversation a bit later about the nature and history of Dorley, an interesting phrasing:

“God,” Lorna says, “this place is so weird.”

“I know. We’re the mice who chased off the scientists, and now we control the maze. But the street mice say we’re kind of odd. Come on!” Jodie grabs at Lorna’s hand, pulling her up from the chair. “Let’s go back down to the kitchen; I want to tell Tabitha.”

The story in general has made me think about the ‘binary’ of trans and cis, but like so many binaries we cling to, it’s probably not that clear cut. There are many people out there who have strong attachments to their gender and are decidedly cis, and there are many trans people who are just as attached to theirs. But there are likely people who just… are, just rolling along, no dysphoria, no urge, never tried anything, but if given genuine opportunity (or forced) might find they could embrace a different one, one that might be better for them.

The Sisters also have a deeply twisted sense of humor, mostly portrayed through a series of custom novelty mugs (much like the series cover image on scribblehub, ‘Don’t Feminize Me Until I’ve Had My Coffee’). I have laughed and cried and had to unpack and deal with a lot of my own issues and hang ups as a result of reading this massive thing, and I think that’s been good. Things about how I hold myself back because I’m scared, of failure, or looking silly or whatever, learning to do makeup, learning to dress myself better, voice training, ffs. Do I need to do those things? No, I’m not Christine or one of the others having them forced on me by a program with requirements, except they are things if I’m being honest I want to do, and a part of me still feels like I would feel better if someone was making me. Maybe thats bad of me.

At a purely textual level, I do not know what will happen, and I still have a strong distaste for what they are doing, and think there are people who need some form of justice to come to them, but I care about a lot of the characters and do not wish to see them harmed by everything coming out. A complete exposure would be disastrous for not just the graduates who have harmed none, having never returned to participate in feminizing another group, it would splash damage trans people as well, in general, but specifically because of one of the women's mother being a major campaigner for trans rights. And there in is another parallel, I worry if I’m too honest about how I coped with being trans and in deep denial that someone will use that to attack me, but also other trans people.

Anyways, I have been officially Dorleypilled, for values of it that mean I love the story, if I still can find ethical qualms about things done in the purely textual interpretation, I love this story so much more than I ever could've expected.

(I'm even contemplating fan fiction depending on how it ends!)