AKShugzy

I recently heard the news that Adam by Ariel Schrag will be getting a movie. I read the book myself about a year and a half ago and I cannot stress enough just how problematic it is.

Adam is a book about a cis boy pretending to be a trans man in order to trick a lesbian into dating him.

Adam goes to New York to stay with his lesbian sister for the summer, and while he’s there he meets trans men who consider themselves lesbians. At a party he meets a lesbian he thinks is pretty and in order to get into a relationship with her he lies and tells her he’s a pre transition trans man. Let’s make a list of some of the highlights from the book, shall we?

At the very beginning of the book his sister and her girlfriend visit home and Adam and his friend spies on them having sex.

Almost all the trans men in the book identify as lesbians, implying that they are still women because they haven’t transitioned yet.

Adam, a cis straight boy, tells a lesbian that he is a trans man to trick her into dating him.

Incidentally Adam is 17 I believe, pretending to be 21. His girlfriend is in the 23 range, I don’t recall exactly.

There are explicit sex scenes, the first of which involved Adam using an ace bandage to hold his erection down and using a strapon to have sex with her.

In the second one he claims to be using a strapon but is, in reality, using his actual penis.

Which is fucking rape.

The book doesn’t try to justify this, it somehow manages to do something worse.

This second scene is one of the last in the book. After he pulls out he lays down next to her and confesses that he’s not trans. She responds “I know.”

She says after they first had sex she started fantasizing about him as a “real guy” (yes quote) and that the image stuck in her mind and she started subconsciously imagining him with a penis.

And it gets worse.

So he goes back to ohio and she sleeps with other girls (because for some reason she decides not to break up with this cis 17 year old who lied about his identity literally raped her) and one night he gets drunk and calls her a bitch and a fucking whore and whatever, and THAT’S apparently the point she thinks that maybe they should break up.

And one day they message eachother to catch up i think maybe he graduated at this point idk but hes planning on visiting his sister in new york and they wanna meet up and

She tells him about her new boyfriend.

Get ready for it

Cis. Man.

So. We have

An underage cishet boy lying about being an adult trans man in order to trick a lesbian into dating him!

A scene in which he actually rapes her!

The lesbian in question becomes attracted to cis men making Adam, essentially, conversion therapy!