“A Plastic Medium” considers a trans masculine prosthetic, colloquially called a packer, as both a cultural product and a media object. A packer provides not only a modified way of being in the world, but a way of looking at the world, and is thus a spectatorial lens offering a particular, yet unanticipated audience position, a new trans gaze. Thinking of the packer as itself a lens, an analytic tool, expands what is considered transgender media. Because we remain largely absent in media, and go broadly unrecognized culturally, trans men can see ourselves clearly, but allegorically depicted in speculative fiction, a remarkably productive site to interrogate representation of embodied difference. The genre, since its Mary Shelley origins, frequently juxtaposes anatomy/technology which meta-textually undoes polarizing axiomatic boundaries separating body/prosthetic. Rather than attending to the “trans film” or “bio pic,” I believe trans-ness is most accurately illustrated by a range of fantastic characters called trans-humans, short for “transitional humans” (though the direct connection to transgender is unintended). The packer, made from synthetic rubber and plastic polymer, is accidentally mirrored and sometimes closely reproduced in spectacular stories of human transformation that centralize and illuminate bodily plasticity. Their correlating prosthetic special effects thereby invite the trans masculine imaginary. Taking an underexamined approach, my case studies are not intended to be, nor have they previously been interpreted as, trans. I locate bonds among prostheses, media, and trans masculinity and reveal striking gaps in the extant critical discourse on speculative fiction. Careful to avoid perpetuating the prosthetic’s metaphorical opportunism as described by disability theorists, I join other trans and disability scholars who revisit and reframe speculative texts, demanding a critical redesign of what and who gets to count as real and/or valuable. By looking through these lenses, we can confront and then rearticulate the larger attitude, commonly seen in trans narratives produced without us, that presents trans people as duplicitous, dangerous, and/or tragic. Undercutting the problematic public conception that trans people are fantasists, we are made real because we are “made up”: our desires fuel our imaginaries which then form our material bodies. Turning the trans-antagonistic attitude against itself, self-construction becomes a generative analytic through which to contemplate reshaping. It is not the doomed failure of a monster, a bad copy of a human, but the agency of a hero—a subject made from objects. This kind of hero, found repeatedly in speculation, is decidedly trans.