Because Tal Madesta’s End of Monsters should (urgently) be read

With The end of the monstersthe journalist and activist Tal Madesta inaugurates the editorial project of La Déferlante and continues the written assignment “of a trans trajectory” started on the pages of the magazine in 2022. With her clear and powerful pen, Madesta tells herself, far from the standard story of the cisseist collective imagination.

The nine chapters of this short and fragmented narrative address the transition, not as a marked route from point A to point Bbut how an intimate experience, unique and singular, with multiple facets – where one forgets, doubts, invents. An intimate experience, but also and above all a political one, the very possibility of making a medical and/or administrative transition conditioned by the institutions: “there are more symbolic or immaterial places, which nevertheless have an overwhelming impact on our lives, such as the Hemicycle”.

The reality of being trans today in France

Without ever falling into the trap of having to justify either her existence or her humanity, Madesta shows the reality of being trans today in France : There violence of institutions that humiliate and dehumanize ; There repression that awaits those who deviate from gender norms: rejected by their families, persecuted, harassed, assaulted in the public space. There are days when Tal and Farrah, his mistress “who understands everything, since he experiences the same thing”, they prefer to remain locked up in their own “fortified chambers”last bulwark against a world that exhausts and grinds.

So you have to arm yourself, fight. Loving too, a theme dear to the author, who had explored non-normative love in his first book (Desire at all costsBinge Audio Editions, 2022) and which one emphasize here “the value of simple love” : that of a grandmother who will invariably support him, that of friends who will be there for every injection – he who is so afraid of needles.

The trans condition is embodied first in the material realities of the people concerned

It’s inside the reversal of the stigma, announced from the first pages, what is the political force of history. Refusing to play the monster role assigned to him from all sides, Madesta shows who the real monsters are : “Those who despise us, humiliate us, strike us down […] those who refuse us the dignity that we carry anchored to the body”. Not bothering to theorize abstractly, it reminds us the trans condition is first embodied in the material realities of the people concernedwho aspire to nothing but “to peace, dignity, tranquillity, sleep, love, justice”.

Tal Madesta offers us here a counter-narrative full of anger and tenderness that trans literature has been missing.

To be read urgently.

The end of the monsters, the story of a trans trajectoryEditions La Déferlante, 106 pages, 15 euros.