Sean Hastings, the protagonist of Jaw Filler, is a detective who deals with bizarre, inter-trans community drama and missing persons cases. In his attempt to find Character, who has dropped off the face of the earth, he finds himself in the First Trans Commune in Sim World, a digital cult where trans influencer Kevin leads the community in Releasing, the practice of letting trauma go.
As the digital world bleeds into reality, a rich tapestry of chaotic trans characters wage war against their trauma, their exes, and themselves. But looming even larger is VSI, a shady Big Tech company certain that Releasing can be turned into something more.
Jaw Filler is a portrait of a world perilously close to our own, where lives are lived online, people are turned into commodities, and the perfect product can solve your problems. But no matter how much they want to, these characters can’t leave reality behind.
In the wake of the book’s London launch, and in anticipation of a US release through Asterism, authors Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray talk to Dazed about writing their first novel, trans genre fiction, the link between optimisation culture and genetics, and Justin Bieber.
How did this book come about, and what was the genesis of your collaboration?
Maz Murray: Me and Charlie met through Twitter – RIP – in, like, 2019, and we were chatting about things that come up on Twitter that annoy you. Trans assimilation seemed a concern at that time. And Charlie suggested we write something together and put it out on his Tinyletter or whatever it was.
We wanted to do something genre-y and plotty, because most trans literature then was memoir, and we wanted to see something really ridiculous instead. We thought having this kind of detective format would also be fun to play with in terms of masculinity.
Charlie Markbreiter: This is not a trans novel; this is a detective novel. To be clear, I have nothing against life writing.
Some of my best friends are life writers.
Charlie: Same! I don’t dislike auto-fiction. I dislike that all trans writing, regardless of genre, is interpreted as auto-fiction.
Maz: So from early on, we used those pulpy affects: the detective stuff, the mystery. Every chapter has a cliffhanger. We wanted it to feel like one of those old serialised, in-a-newspaper stories.
There are references in the novel to things that are quite contemporary, like the anti-trans laws and the shifting landscape of social media. How did the book evolve through the writing process?
Charlie Markbreiter: Like Maz was saying, we began writing this book in 2020 or 2021, then stopped for a bit until [publishing press] Montez approached us in 2023.
And at that point, the political landscape was so different: because the threat was no longer ‘you can be incorporated, but conditionally’. It was ‘we actually don’t want most of you here’. So in 2021, there was more focus on assimilation and infighting, which were, in part, ways of navigating that conditional assimilation. But if you can be rejected outright for being trans – which is more likely, as anti-trans legislation in the US increasingly occurs at the federal and not just state level – then it doesn’t matter how cool or chill you are: you’re still out.
But this wasn’t just about trans people: the other big related shift we were noticing, in the 2010s, was the underpinning of influencer logic but also that everything was optimisation, since it was now easier than ever before to data-mine your and everyone’s body. Like, if you just download this app and add protein powder to your smoothie, you can girlboss and you will make seven figures, and if you don’t, it’s your fault.
Maz once described our book as a portrait of the Biden era, which I thought was so smart. Because 2010s optimisation wasn’t actually fully replaced by 2020s eugenics; they just synthesized into an even more personal and impersonal horror.
If you can be rejected outright for being trans – which is more likely, as anti-trans legislation in the US increasingly occurs at the federal level – then it doesn’t matter how cool or chill you are: you’re still out
There’s a really interesting tension between physical and digital community, where what looks on the surface like a utopia is revealed to be more sinister. I’m curious about how that plays out and if there are any ways of defining trans community that the book is responding to.
Maz: The virtual world in the book is mostly through the eyes of Character, who’s using it as a therapy tool. And you know, no spoilers, but he ends up pretty isolated. He traps himself inside his childhood and relives in it a new way where he almost doesn’t have to be trans. And I find it interesting because there’s a later period where Character interacts with more people. And I was almost imagining it as, like, his projections of people he’s seen in real life who are maybe sexier and cooler than him and he feels very attacked.
Who among us?
Charlie: All of us…
Maz: It was fun to play with the marketing of the virtual world versus what Character chooses to do with it. And early on in the book when the Detective is looking for Character, he finds Kevin’s weird apartment with all these people in it, and some of them are, like, paid hangers-on. So it does give you an opportunity to have these silly, satirical, intra-community conversations.
And then the times in the book where there is a kind of trans community is the life that Mitchelle has built for herself in this made-up Middle America. We were thinking about trans people who don’t live in a major city, and the communities that creates. And a little bit from my experience, like when I was living back in Essex during COVID and the trans people that I knew there.
I’m really interested in the references in this book; things like Justin Bieber, and the Dazed/Out100 photoshoot…
Maz: We’re never gonna make it onto the list now…
Charlie: Can I ask, what’s your relationship to Justin Bieber? Are you British? I don’t wanna assume…
I have no strong feelings about his place in the culture.
Maz: I mean, credit to Charlie for a lot of the Bieber-isms. It was fun to give Kevin a male diva as a reference point. He’s someone who pops up a lot in trans memes.
Charlie: Bieber is fascinating to me, because he’s the ultimate manifester. He sincerely Beliebes that if he can imagine a more positive outcome, it will happen. And sometimes, that really does happen. And sometimes, of course, it can’t.
During the 2010s, trans people were [using the internet] to connect across geographical distance, learning about packing and tucking, whatever. But it was a fantasy to think that could compensate for what was happening in the actual world
One of the things I really like here is that nobody is set in stone; even post-transition nobody gets a neatly packaged solution to their problems.
Maz: Yeah, I think what was fun to play with in the book is all the characters who have Done The Thing, they’ve transitioned, but they’re still stuck in their minds, they still have to go on living. And they all kind of represent a different stereotype of a trans narrative: Mitchelle’s the very dramatic one, and I found Taylor’s transition interesting, where he doesn’t transition for the reasons someone else would. But that’s so trans to do that? Oh, I transitioned to be like my friend.
Charlie: During the 2010s, there was this narrative that the internet that had created transness, eliding eg the impact of some aspects of medical transition suddenly, accidentally being covered through the Affordable Care Act in 2010. And to some extent, yes, trans people were connecting across geographical distance, learning about packing and tucking, whatever.
But it was a fantasy to think that could compensate for what was happening in the actual world. Not just because transitioning virtually because you can’t transition in life – as happens in our book – doesn’t fully work, but because the technology required to build that internet was being used to build military tools and AI, the very technology used to destroy and extract from our offline realities along imperialist lines.
Has writing this book changed your relationship to the internet?
Maz: My answer is brief because I can really smugly say that I deleted my Twitter. Part of it was principle, part of it was that my joke tweets weren’t doing very well.
Charlie: We often talk about quitting the internet in really individualising ways. So it’s easy to be like, ‘oh, it’s just me. I just love the lights and the beautiful colors and the clicking sounds too much…’
But there’s also a real economic reason that you’re on your phone. Because even though you get to write for a magazine, they still expect you to promote your articles. So even if you were like, ‘I am so mentally healthy and I have total self control and I’m just gonna leave social media because it’s so easy’, there would be a professional cost by design.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
Maz: By the end, we show somewhat apolitical, non-committal characters who’ve got by in chaotic ways taking quite decisive action that has political impact. And I also think it’s subversive to have a happy ending.
Charlie: I hope people get whatever they need from it. If you get this book and never read it and it sits on your shelf as a beautiful object and people can be like, ‘I’m noting the intellectual status symbol’, that is great. If people read it and they’re just like, ‘wow, this made me feel less depressed today’, that’s also great. Like, I have loved writing since I was a child and I feel really blessed that I got to do something like this, and blessed that people want to engage at all.
Jaw Filler is out now.
