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UAE Moments
17 hours ago
- Entertainment
- UAE Moments
Read Your Daily Chinese Horoscope July 28th, 2025⭐
Chinese zodiac, or shengxiao (/shnng-sshyao/ 'born resembling'), unlike the general zodiac, is represented by 12 zodiac animals. In order, they are the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Pig. OX DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Coworkers and loved ones alike could be a source of frustration today. Set aside arguments about who is right or wrong and focus on more important things like helping those in need. SHEEP DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Contemplating your ambitions and goals would do you good today. Dream big and come up with a game plan while also recognizing the amount of hard work you'll have to do. RAT DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Despite many changes in store for you, your success will be readily apparent. Clarity will come when you dare to venture outside of your usual comfort zone . SNAKE DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Reflect on the difference between doing well and doing good. The potential benefit that results from helping others outweighs the mere personal gain of working toward your own ends. DRAGON DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Before vegging out in front of the TV, consider a more rewarding indulgence. Working out or creating art with one of your many talents will be more enjoyable in the long run. TIGER DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Find new purpose in your life by picking up a previously overlooked opportunity or discovering new meaning hidden in your routine. Remain dynamic and ready for anything. RABBIT DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Don't take it to heart when people tell you what you can and can't do. You know yourself best and are well aware of your resources, shortcomings, and idiosyncrasies. HORSE DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 You have more luck today than usual, so use it to your advantage while you can. It would be a perfect day to stretch your imagination. Take the initiative and make bold decisions! MONKEY DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Realize that now is the time to start fresh! Harness your mental and physical resolve to create a clean slate for yourself. You know what works and what doesn't, so get moving. JULY 28, 2025 Don't hesitate today. Others may be timidly waiting for others to act, but dare to stand out from the crowd and take bold strides. Focus on cultivating your leadership potential. More: How The Fall Equinox Will Impact Your Zodiac Sign DOG DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Being prepared calls for a backup plan or escape route. Dream and scheme, creating as many backdoors and fallbacks as possible. You'll find opportunity where once there was none. PIG DAILY CHINESE HOROSCOPES JULY 28, 2025 Put in a solid effort today. Putting your best foot forward has just as much to do with being polite, courteous, kind, honest, responsible, and respectful at all times as it does with hard work.
Hindustan Times
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Torrey Peters: 'Everybody, cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender'
Some stories in Stag Dance were previously self-published before your debut novel Detransition, Baby was published. Tell us about your publishing journey. Two of the stories in Stag Dance were originally self-published. From 2013 to 2017, I was part of a writing scene in Brooklyn that produced several writers who were influential to me, including Sybil Lam and Imogen Binnie. There was another group of writers — trans women writing for other trans women. You could write at a full sprint, without explaining yourself. At that time, people were saying that trans lives were so unique and new that you needed to invent a whole new genre to explain what it means to be trans. I don't think it's that special to be trans. I thought that you could write about trans lives in any genre, so I wrote these two novellas. The first one was Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones — a speculative fiction, which to me is really about the trans community. The second was The Masker, which is about how sexuality gets weaponised against trans women. These two became cult novellas in Brooklyn. They were not travelling all over the world but were being passed hand to hand. I had given it away for free on the internet, asking people to pay what they like. Slowly, they got more and more popular. Some editors came to me and said, 'Do you have a novel?' And I happened to have Detransition, Baby. While I thought initially that I was writing just for transwomen, the themes I was dealing with were bigger — the idea of family, femininity, and aspirational motherhood. Upon its publication, it travelled widely. I thought it'd go only this far but it kept on travelling further until it was translated into 13 languages. In a lot of ways, I felt very free writing that book because there were jokes in it that I thought maybe eight people would get. They were written for my friends. I think enjoyable literature has that sort of intimacy of people writing for somebody that they know; there's a care to it. But after Detransition, Baby, I had a lot of trouble writing because of the expectations. At the time, I was building a sauna in the woods and began thinking about loggers. When I started writing, I thought of this sort of turn-of-the-century lumberjack slang. The thing is that nobody was expecting that; nobody wanted it. As a result, I felt very free again in the same way I did while writing Detransition, Baby. I had The Chaser, plus those first two novellas, and I thought they could kind of go together, so let's put them together as a book, and that's Stag Dance. In my view, Stag Dance is also a pushback against the way queer and trans lives are represented in fiction. Particularly in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones where the dystopia doesn't run along some feuding between superpowers but gender. Then, there's also a vocabulary that forces rethinking the assumed progress transfeminism has made. It also has fun, politicising via trivialising. For me, the setup of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones has two jokes in it. The first is post-apocalyptic fiction, in which something momentous happens — a nuclear explosion, a comet hitting the earth, or something unavoidable. But here, two ex-girlfriends invent a contagion that prevents your body from producing hormones, forcing people to take hormones the same way that trans people do. The idea was to say that what you do with your body is a choice. Your gender is not some innate, static thing. But that's why people just freak out when they learn how much of it is constructed; that threatens them. The second joke is the idea that if you take hormones, you're choosing your gender. But we're already choosing our gender every day. We just pretend that we're not doing it. When you wake up and decide if I'm going to have my hair this way, shave, put on makeup, or have my lips filled, you're choosing your gender. You're choosing how the world sees you in the clothes you want to wear, the way you talk, etc. The thing is that everybody, whether cis or trans, goes around choosing their gender. It's funny that people say to trans people that they're choosing their gender because they take hormones. I n the same story, Infect Your…, Lexi also says that, in the future, everyone will be trans, which reminded me of this popular slogan: The future is nonbinary. It's as if the present isn't — or can't be. The funny thing about a lot of such slogans is that they feel very dated. To say the future is female — or whatever — feels very 2017. Because in some ways, especially in the States, as the political situation has gotten more right-wing, intolerant, and repressive, you realise that a slogan isn't enough. The very idea of saying the future is nonbinary is not only nonsensical because the present is nonbinary, the present is female, the present is all of these things but also because the work is now. You can't defer it. It makes sense to have what Lexi says in the book because the story was written in 2016 when such slogans were around. I think it's interesting now to see that I was a little bit doubtful of some of that stuff back in 2016. Weirdly, I think I'm less cynical now in 2025, where I'm sort of like, I don't care what beliefs or slogans you've got. So long as you're doing something now, I'm fine with it. You turn the sisterhood solidarity equation on its head in The Masker by having the readers confront the idea that it's all about the choices one happens to make when overcome by desire. What did you intend to do with it? The setup for that story was that there's a person who's confused about their gender, and has gotten into online fetish, and in real life happens to be at a convention in Las Vegas. The protagonist Chris is confronted with two sorts of models — the first is a transwoman who has had surgery, who's very into her respectability as a woman. That she's a proper woman. The other is that of a fetishist, who wears a full-body silicone woman suit and is a doctor, who has a job and wife and kids in Los Angeles. He comes once or twice a year to Las Vegas to live his sexual fantasies. It's this dichotomy that interested me. On one hand, if you want to be a transwoman and be respectable, you're expected to erase your sexuality because you're dangerous to women in changing rooms, bathrooms, etc. On the other hand, if you're hypersexual, you're a complete fetishist, a pervert, not a woman at all. The story is deliberately meant to be uncomfortable and icky. As you say, what the character does is a series of betrayals, which are supposed to make you feel bad. For me, that's important if the reader feels bad because I'm asking, 'Why does it feel bad?' It is why I ended the book with this story because I wanted to sort of punch a reader in the stomach and leave. Not in a mean way, but in a way to make them think that if they felt bad then maybe something different needs to be done. In The Masker, the mention of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) makes it feel like a critique of consumerist culture, particularly, the visual medium's betrayal of trans people. But there's also a mention alongside of Pretty Woman (1990), a movie signalling an aspirational life. Why did you employ these cultural references? I think the book of mine that's most in conversation with popular culture was Detransition, Baby. The first few pages note how so much of trans identity is made about transition. But, what do you do when you're five, 10, or 15 years on the other side of transition? As I wasn't part of a generation that had a transwomen older than her, I was looking for models of being a woman in my thirties, so I saw a lot of television. The book names it the Sex in the City problem. You can get a husband and be a Charlotte. You can get a career and be a Samantha. You can have a baby and be a Miranda. You can be an artist and be a Carrie. And these were ciswomen ideals, by the way. So, even if you're a ciswoman, you're trapped. Imagine, as a transwoman, all you can do is aspire to be trapped in that way. The visual media ends up explaining so much of the feeling that I felt as a transwoman. I was a child when Silence… got released. The character in question, Buffalo Bill, whether cis or trans, has no femininity of his own. The only thing he can do is steal femininity. Literally, by killing and skinning ciswomen. Seeing that as a young child was upsetting because I knew I had some sort of femininity inside of myself but, if I looked at the media, it said I didn't. While Sex in the City, in some ways helped me understand myself, Silence… impeded my progress. The stereotype that femininity is inherent, biologically owned or entitled makes you internalise it. So, when the character sees the masker, he verbalises the internalised transphobia by saying that the masker is some Silence of the Lambs shit. A lot of my understanding of myself comes in a sort of detritus and flotsam of visual media, that not only did I see, but it also entered me. Now it comes out in my writing; it is the references, the language, and the sharpness, the sort of lacerating things that are inside of me that then come out in the writing. In The Chaser, the narrator builds a wall to immunise himself from being attracted to Robbie, who does the unthinkable, smashing all expectations one has of a submissive person. There's a suppression of desire at play here, visibilising a simmering of violence. Was that the intent? Yes, that's true. I wasn't interested in writing from Robbie's perspective — the typical way such stories are told where you say here's a nice person. It's difficult to say whether Robbie is trans, gay, or feminine. That was purposely done because I wanted to make the story stay in the realm of emotions and not invite a political analysis by naming who Robbie is. The other thing is that the sort of emotional building blocks that people normally attribute to trans people are equally attributable to others, too. Say the distance between how you see yourself and how you want the world to see you. The narrator is a cis male, handsome athlete yet the thing he struggles with is the difference between what he knows he is and feels and what he wishes the world saw he was. He's dealing with an inability to express his desire in a way that could lead to love. That he shuts down the possibility of love and makes it just purely sexual or about power — that's shame. So, that's what I was trying to do: things that are supposed to be trans things or trans experiences are things or experiences even the most centred person in a society like a cisgender, white, handsome athlete must also deal with. The only difference is that the latter doesn't want to name what's happening or what they're feeling. And what's scary for others is that trans people have language and names for these feelings that cis people go through. What's scary is also how people refuse to engage with developing vocabularies, which is why some reviewers have called your works 'messy'. There's a book by Joanna Russ about women's literature. She said that literature goes through three stages. The first is that you as a minority say to the dominant culture, 'Don't worry, we're just like you. You don't have to be afraid of us.' Then, there's a second phase when the minority says, 'Actually, we're nothing like you. We reject you. We're quite different. We define ourselves against you.' There's a third phase in which the minority says, 'Actually, we don't have anything to do with you one way or another. We don't define ourselves against or with you. We're our own thing.' These three stages can be seen in Black, gay, or trans literature. There's a fourth stage, which I think Russ doesn't talk about, which interests me. In this phase, the dominant culture picks up the language and lenses developed by the minority culture and applies to itself. At least in the States, you can see how white scholars are talking about race using what was developed by scholars of colour. Whiteness is learning about itself from people of colour. You know, the word heterosexuality came after the word homosexuality when straight people felt the need to have their own word to explain themselves. That's why the incredible freakout around trans people because our ideas are applicable broadly, and when people find them challenging, it only communicates the power of these ideas. Your inclusion in the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2021 attracted a demeaning letter, which was signed by a few dead people, too. The funding you received from the Edinburgh Literature Festival was challenged, too. Then, President Trump's executive orders target trans lives. If that wasn't enough, we've literary stars like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and JK Rowling brandishing their ignorance and conservative views. In this context, could you help share how populism affects a writer? I think what I went through with the Women's Prize is indicative of the risks of populism. Obviously, it was painful for me to receive that letter, which looked amateurish and stupid. It got picked up by major newspapers, and I wondered why they were doing that when it was written by idiots. Well, they were reporting it because it would get engagement. But the thing is, this kind of populism is not easily controlled and it's double-edged. When the Women's Prize thing happened, my book was not a best seller in the UK. It had been nominated for the prize but wasn't that reviewed or known. Then, this letter came out and all of these famous writers started talking about my book. They started defending me, discussing it, making it a point. I have a lot of faith in readers because readers read this, heard about this thing and they were like, 'What is up with this?' Rather than just accept the stupid populist thing, they went out and bought the book. So, the week after that letter, my book went from low on some best seller lists to number five on The Times best seller list in the UK. It had never been on the list before that. Please name some people who have inspired you to create what you do? Nevada by Imogen Binnie helped me write the way I was writing. The writing by transwomen for transwomen is a universal thing rather than a niche thing. That book did that to me. But then, what inspired me in the last decade was Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, translated by Ann Goldstein. This realisation that, as a trans woman, I can talk back to the major literature of the era. That, in turn, allowed me to sort of do something that I think is quite audacious. Like, in the novella Stag Dance, written in workers' slang, the actual stag dance is a very specific American writing. Whether it be Moby Dick, written in a whaler talk, whether it be Mark Twain writing about the river stuff, or Cormac McCarthy doing sort of border wars. It was like what if I, as a transwoman, thought that my writing was as important as American, as at the centre as any of this stuff. And maybe I will be so audacious as to talk back to Herman Melville or Cormac McCarthy, even if I come from a small self-publishing press in Brooklyn.
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Torrey Peters on life after writing a hit novel: ‘It had a very chilling effect on my writing'
Author Torrey Peters' mind has imagined everything from a future virus that turns everyone trans to a crossdressing fetishist in a poreless silicone suit, but the premise of her new novel, Stag Dance, sounded too bizarre even for her. 'If I hadn't read it in a book I wouldn't have believed it,' she told me during a lengthy conversation about her life and work. 'It's so over the top. It's literally an upside down triangle. That's a little too on the nose.' The triangle Peters refers to is one that is made out of fabric, and that loggers in the early part of the last century used to affix to their crotches in order to denote that they had changed their sex to female for the purposes of dances held deep in the wilderness. This is a fact that Peters uncovered while reading original texts about logging culture while developing the unique lexicon that she employs to write the titular novel. One of these 'stag dances' forms the basis of Peters' story, a remarkable feat of high modernism that channels the ethos of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian into the story of a lumberjack experiencing a remarkable gender transition. It is a surprising creative risk from an author who has become one of the most recognized and celebrated transgender writers largely off a single work, her debut novel, Detransition, Baby. Whereas that book was a glorious comic novel in the tradition of writers such as Zadie Smith and Jen Beagin, the collection Stag Dance is a complete different beast – it combines the titular novel with two strange, early novellas, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and The Masker – along with the new novella The Chaser, a kind of campus romance at an all-boys boarding school. 'Stag Dance is the piece in which I write the most directly about transition,' she told me. 'I think transition is this very overdetermined thing to write about, and yet I wanted to write about it because it is a major thing in my own life. So I was like: 'Can I put it in a context, where what might count as transition is totally different?'' Indeed, one of the pleasures of Stag Dance is seeing familiar tropes from gender transition stories placed into a context in which they feel very fresh and vibrant, yet also strangely recognizable. Peters found taking this risk to be both creatively and personally liberating and acknowledged that the book will be a real curveball to fans of Detransition, Baby. 'I wrote Stag Dance after I had done a big tour over seven or eight countries. And it felt like most people who had read Detransition, Baby were like: 'Oh, this is somebody who just wants to kind of be a Sex and the City but trans sort of thing.' And there was definitely the idea that I could follow up Detransition, Baby with something very similar, but I was just sick of those domestic family issues, sick of my own third-person voice. I just wanted to challenge myself. I had moved to Vermont and was surprised to find myself isolated and living in the woods. I was asking myself: 'How did I end up this person? Did I even go through a gender transition?'' While living in Vermont and then in Colombia, Peters began to channel a voice that she found to be 'overly verbose' and descending from an Americana of 19th-century greats such as Herman Melville, as well as more recent referents including McCarthy. She found that focusing so deeply on voice while writing Stag Dance allowed her to take the focus off the diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which tends to haunt trans fiction and which she believes has come to unhelpfully overshadow conversations around trans lives. She explained: 'I don't use the words 'gender dysphoria' for myself,' finding it largely unhelpful because, 'the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is usually paired with this action point, like 'you have this diagnosis, then this is the right thing to do.'' Removing the diagnosis, as she does for her protagonist Babe (who exists long before the term 'gender dysphoria' existed), lets her view the character in a more total way. 'If you look at it more like, 'I'm unhappy, and I want to be happy,' suddenly the range of options is completely open to you.' Of the two early novellas collected in Stag Dance, Peters shared that The Masker was an extremely personal one for her. The story, which revolves around a transgender teen who hopes to find community at a lurid crossdresser conference in Las Vegas, channels forced-feminization narratives that were a large part of Peters' own coming-of-age as a trans woman. It includes a truly grotesque character called The Masker who goes around in a silicone suit reminiscent of a blowup doll sex toy, and the plot features frank acts of sexual coercion. These tropes and narratives can be seen as major influences in works including Detransition, Baby and Stag Dance, but Peters nowhere approaches them as directly, or more controversially, as in The Masker. It is a novella that will push many readers – whether cis or trans – yet for both Peters and her readers it has been a transformational work. 'I had to end this collection on The Masker, because it's actually the most pro-transition story I've ever written,' Peters said. 'It ends on this note of 'your life should not be conditioned by shame, and your choices should not be out of shame.' I think about that story when I think about people who have written to me and been like 'I'm transitioning because I read your work.' There's a whole contingent of readers who see themselves in that choice of choosing the thing to not unsettle their life.' For as much as The Masker is a brilliant piece about processing the stigmatization that comes with being transgender, it is also a piece that could very easily be picked apart for gotcha quotes by bad-faith readers. It deals quite frankly with subjects such as fetishization, the sexual experiences that can come with crossdressing, and how these things can come to play significant roles in the journeys of trans women. For her own part, Peters saw the story as working precisely because it pushes so many lines. 'What's the argument you're going to make about The Masker, that this guy is a perverted freak? He'd say so too. So, then, let's talk about it.' Peters is no stranger to blowback – four years ago, many prominent writers tried to declare that she was not a woman when Detransition, Baby was longlisted for the female-only the 2021 Women's prize for fiction. 'With Detransition, Baby, I was exposed to a much bigger audience than I had ever been. I thought I was going to have a TV show. And this had a very chilling effect on my writing. I was like, 'Well if I write some weird-ass shit, maybe I'll lose my TV show.' I'd already been publicly mocked when I was nominated for the Women's prize, and it was very bracing. So I asked myself: 'Am I going to live my life as a writer avoiding anybody who might say anything negative about me?'' In spite of those experiences – or perhaps because of them – Peters struck a deeply defiant tone over any potential blowback from the release of Stag Dance. 'Am I afraid that people are going to say I'm a pervert?' she asked rhetorically. 'I can write the most respectable and trans-affirming story out there, and people are still going to say that I'm a pervert.' Peters later referenced the fact that the Trump administration's firm bigotry against trans people would erase her no matter what kinds of stories she wrote. 'Trump just took over the Kennedy Center and the [National Endowment for the Arts] guidelines, erasing any work that has gender identity in it, which probably just means any work of art by or about trans people. So what does it matter whether I write a bad portrayal of a trans person or the most heroic portrayal of one? I'm still banned – I'm specifically banned.' She went on to compare The Masker to books such as Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, two books that also received blowback when released because of their frank treatment of controversial topics for the Black and Jewish communities, but that have since come to be seen as classics. 'When The Bluest Eye came out, people were like, 'This is a horrible betrayal of the Black community because Black men don't rape their daughters. Blue eyes aren't the prettiest eyes. This is just showing the worst ideas.' And I think that book is incredibly powerful, and it's a classic because what it shows is that these ideas aren't the ideas of the characters, this is a condition of ambient racism everywhere, and the fact that these characters are doing this and that is a reflection of it.' In this collection Peters also makes evident something that has been a part of her fiction all along: namely, that the line between trans and cis lives is porous, and often more unhelpful than not. During our interview she pointed out: 'When I actually start looking at these supposedly transfeminine experiences, line by line, there's nothing particularly transfeminine about them. I can find these same experiences for a cis woman.' Peters also brought the conversation back to one of her main goals with Stag Dance, which is to trouble the neat binary between trans and cis. For her, this is a matter of deep creative engagement, and it something she is dedicated to following in future work. 'Out of the four pieces in Stag Dance, only maybe four or five of the characters identify as trans. That's one of the things I'm trying to undermine, the way that identity can create boundaries. One of the things I'm trying to undermine is a cis-trans binary. The basic processes, I would argue, of being trans are not unique to being trans. Revealing the fact that we are all asking these questions and all answering these questions all of the time is the interesting thing for me.' Stag Dance is out now
