Duel With the Devil, Chapter 20 of The Greatest Liar

Duel With The Devil


This is a work of fiction. All characters (including the narrator), celebrities, places, residences, neighborhoods, restaurants, legal agreements and proceedings, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, celebrities, places, residences, neighborhoods, restaurants, legal agreements and proceedings, events and incidents is purely coincidental.



Or, as one of the characters might post on social media, "It never happened” because she’s “not my type” and she’s “false and extortionist.”

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Sales of my novel, The Greatest Liar, Trans Erotica With A Purpose (TGL), had been tepid, despite the generally positive reader comments on the publishing website of an e-commerce firm named for a large South American River. The meager royalties didn’t bother me: I have more assets than I ever dreamed of owning, and my professional career is thriving.

But it troubled me that the public didn’t discover TGL’s themes of transsexuals’ troubles in transition, their fraught relationships with friends and family, the relentless threats and assaults of transphobes on their safety and security, the indignity of social and institutional discrimination, and the fragility of their lives even after they transcend these obstacles.

From my privileged Swiss home, I observed with increasing anxiety how every step that trans-rights took forward was repelled with a brutal backlash. From Russia to Africa to the Red States of America, reactionary politicians, feeding upon, and feeding the transphobia endemic in their societies, issued bathroom bans, decreed sports discrimination, mandated educational censorship, and deprived young transsexuals of medical treatment. Official opprobrium emboldened haters, and the morgues filled from an ever increasing holocaust of transsexual murders, setting horrifying new records every year.

Even J.K. Rowling, the literary idol of my youth, and the inspiration for countless transitions by questioning kids who believed that the magic of HRT could remake their bodies, and lives, turned against the trans world, revealing herself to be just another intolerant Muggle.