Submerged Populations vs. Representation

Two short story collections by trans men were released in 2025, CRAWL by Max Delsohn and Realistic Fiction by Anton Solomonik. (A disclosure: Max Delsohn is a friend of mine.) Both collections are humorous, and both collections feature a lot of pink on their covers. I’m fond of these color schemes, as if together these covers wink at their contents’ ironic approach to representing masculinity. One might expect the covers to assert their authors’ identity more firmly, considering how rarely books are released by trans men. To my knowledge, no organization is publishing statistics on trans publications, but I would be surprised if more than a handful of literary fiction books by trans men are published each year; expand that to other genres and you might, optimistically, number more than a dozen. So as a trans man, I was quite excited to have two literary story collections in one year, and I’ve wanted to write about these two collections together. Although they’re different in style and tone, their commonalities signify a refreshing direction for transmasculine literature.