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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 Age
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Torrey Peters went off-grid and came back speaking lumberjack
To most, they're pancakes – but to Torrey Peters, they're monkey blankets. Eggs are cackleberries, chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite, and women are skooches and strumpets. Peters immersed herself so deeply in woodcutter slang while writing her remarkable new novella Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, that after a day of writing, she'd amuse (and/or annoy) her family and friends by slipping into her lumberjack voice. And she doesn't just talk the talk. Peters can walk the walk, or in this case, fell the trees. The story was inspired by the time she spent living in her off-grid, 12-by-12, log cabin in rugged Vermont, in the New England region. There's no running water, just a stream for bathing. There's an outdoor kitchen and outhouse; a wood stove heats a sauna. 'I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do,' Peters says, now safely ensconced in her Brooklyn apartment, flashing mint green nails as she talks. 'It's a real 1880s lifestyle out there, which means that I'll go there for a week at a time, but I think some part of my mind would break if I were there super long.' As she worked, Peters wondered about the people who lived such hard and isolated lives, and the experience of the self while alone in the woods, with only the trees to affirm, challenge or question you. 'I'm from the Midwest, and I was raised a boy. If you told my 17-year-old self that when you turn 40, you're going to be in the woods with a chainsaw struggling to build something but feeling grimly pleased with your proficiency, I would have been like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense',' Peters says. 'I never would have thought I'd have transitioned, but I would have been like, that's a masculine model of being. Well, what does it mean that I did transition and I ended up exactly where my 17-year-old self expected?' She had no answer, but those questions laid the first axe-blow for a novel set in a logging camp. During her research, Peters discovered a historical tradition in American frontier camps where dances were held, and some loggers would attend as women. To signify their role, they would attach an inverted brown triangle of fabric over their crotch – a practice that becomes a central motif in Stag Dance. The story follows Babe Bunyan, a large, rugged lumberjack who decides to attend the camp's stag dance as a woman, placing him in a rivalry with the younger, more feminine Lisen. Set against the grit and grime of an illegal logging camp, the story evokes the poetic sensibilities of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville. Loading The lumberjack vernacular — for which Peters drew on a dictionary of logger slang — allowed her to approach questions of trans identity through the 'side door'. Phrases like gender dysphoria, she says, have had the life sucked out of them through academic, medical, and online discourse. A lumberjack, however, would never have used that phrase in the first place. This forced Peters to think, and write, about how gender dysphoria feels rather than relying on familiar terms. For Babe, it's summed up in the description: 'No mirror has ever befriended me.' 'I had to reinvent a lot of the trans language that, to me, feels ossified,' Peters says. 'It ended up being quite magical for me that I had this new language to find out these things. They became defamilarised and new for me.' Stag Dance gives its name to Peter's new collection of four stories, each of which deliciously twists familiar genres into unexpected shapes; full of surprises without sacrificing any emotional intensity. The collection also includes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a post-apocalyptic tale where a pandemic renders humans unable to produce sex hormones; the boarding school romance The Chaser; and The Masker, a body horror story set at a cross-dressing convention. Only a few characters are explicitly trans, with Peters more interested in breaking down the binary between trans and cis people, revealing the categories as porous and complex. Peters says the gap between how a person feels in themselves or wants to be seen, and how the world sees them, isn't an experience unique to trans people. 'For me, coming at it with emotions was the point. Coming at it without identity, without heuristics, or this is how we break it down, is how I am interested in writing these days,' Peters says. 'It's not that I am demanding empathy for trans people. It's actually more than I'm demanding that readers have empathy for themselves, and I think in having empathy for themselves – 'Oh yes, I've felt that way before' – they can maybe then start to make maps of what other people are doing, they can make intellectual maps based on those emotions.' Stag Dance is the final story in Torrey Peters' collection and the only one written after her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, became a bestseller in 2021. That novel – a comedy of manners about a trio who plan to raise a baby together – was described by one critic as 'the first great trans realist novel.' Its longlisting for the Women's Prize for Fiction made Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. However, the nomination drew scrutiny, including an open letter condemning Torrey's eligibility by a group called the Wild Woman Writing Club. Peters wrote at the time that she had received an 'outpouring of hate' and expressed hope that the next trans woman to be on the list could at least enjoy the experience more. Peters knows some readers will be disappointed she didn't write another 'trans Sex in the City' in the style of Detransition, Baby – and she started work on a financial thriller set in contemporary Brooklyn. But the weight of the expectation felt restrictive, she found liberation a world away from the contemporary in the minds and language of lumberjacks. 'It's not just unexpected for other people. It's very unexpected for myself. But I think that's like a really good place to write from, when you're surprising yourself,' Peters says. 'Nobody was waiting for this. Nobody was like, 'What we want is a lumberjack novel.' In a lot of ways, that freed me to do whatever I wanted. ' Trans people have increasingly found themselves at the centre of public debate and policymaking in the United States with the Trump administration targeting trans people with executive orders. Loading These include an order that the United States will recognise only a person's sex assigned at birth, and new restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts, targeting efforts to promote diversity and so-called 'gender ideology'. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Peters described how under the Trump administration, her passport would be changed from 'F' to 'M' and the consequences that would have when she travelled to Colombia, where she owns an apartment. These policies, Peters says, are designed to intimidate and silence. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the hostility, but over time, she has become more resolute. 'I'm meant to be scared. I'm meant to say home. I am meant not to go anywhere, and the M is meant to stop me from doing that sort of stuff,' Peters says. 'And in response to that, I have to be like f---k that. I'm going to go to many more places. I'm going to Australia. I'm going to talk about this. I'm not going to be intimidated and more over, I am going to divest from the idea that these people have the authority, and that what they say in any way should be taken seriously.'
Sydney Morning Herald
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Torrey Peters went off-grid and came back speaking lumberjack
To most, they're pancakes – but to Torrey Peters, they're monkey blankets. Eggs are cackleberries, chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite, and women are skooches and strumpets. Peters immersed herself so deeply in woodcutter slang while writing her remarkable new novella Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, that after a day of writing, she'd amuse (and/or annoy) her family and friends by slipping into her lumberjack voice. And she doesn't just talk the talk. Peters can walk the walk, or in this case, fell the trees. The story was inspired by the time she spent living in her off-grid, 12-by-12, log cabin in rugged Vermont, in the New England region. There's no running water, just a stream for bathing. There's an outdoor kitchen and outhouse; a wood stove heats a sauna. 'I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do,' Peters says, now safely ensconced in her Brooklyn apartment, flashing mint green nails as she talks. 'It's a real 1880s lifestyle out there, which means that I'll go there for a week at a time, but I think some part of my mind would break if I were there super long.' As she worked, Peters wondered about the people who lived such hard and isolated lives, and the experience of the self while alone in the woods, with only the trees to affirm, challenge or question you. 'I'm from the Midwest, and I was raised a boy. If you told my 17-year-old self that when you turn 40, you're going to be in the woods with a chainsaw struggling to build something but feeling grimly pleased with your proficiency, I would have been like, 'Oh, yeah, that makes sense',' Peters says. 'I never would have thought I'd have transitioned, but I would have been like, that's a masculine model of being. Well, what does it mean that I did transition and I ended up exactly where my 17-year-old self expected?' She had no answer, but those questions laid the first axe-blow for a novel set in a logging camp. During her research, Peters discovered a historical tradition in American frontier camps where dances were held, and some loggers would attend as women. To signify their role, they would attach an inverted brown triangle of fabric over their crotch – a practice that becomes a central motif in Stag Dance. The story follows Babe Bunyan, a large, rugged lumberjack who decides to attend the camp's stag dance as a woman, placing him in a rivalry with the younger, more feminine Lisen. Set against the grit and grime of an illegal logging camp, the story evokes the poetic sensibilities of authors like Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville. Loading The lumberjack vernacular — for which Peters drew on a dictionary of logger slang — allowed her to approach questions of trans identity through the 'side door'. Phrases like gender dysphoria, she says, have had the life sucked out of them through academic, medical, and online discourse. A lumberjack, however, would never have used that phrase in the first place. This forced Peters to think, and write, about how gender dysphoria feels rather than relying on familiar terms. For Babe, it's summed up in the description: 'No mirror has ever befriended me.' 'I had to reinvent a lot of the trans language that, to me, feels ossified,' Peters says. 'It ended up being quite magical for me that I had this new language to find out these things. They became defamilarised and new for me.' Stag Dance gives its name to Peter's new collection of four stories, each of which deliciously twists familiar genres into unexpected shapes; full of surprises without sacrificing any emotional intensity. The collection also includes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a post-apocalyptic tale where a pandemic renders humans unable to produce sex hormones; the boarding school romance The Chaser; and The Masker, a body horror story set at a cross-dressing convention. Only a few characters are explicitly trans, with Peters more interested in breaking down the binary between trans and cis people, revealing the categories as porous and complex. Peters says the gap between how a person feels in themselves or wants to be seen, and how the world sees them, isn't an experience unique to trans people. 'For me, coming at it with emotions was the point. Coming at it without identity, without heuristics, or this is how we break it down, is how I am interested in writing these days,' Peters says. 'It's not that I am demanding empathy for trans people. It's actually more than I'm demanding that readers have empathy for themselves, and I think in having empathy for themselves – 'Oh yes, I've felt that way before' – they can maybe then start to make maps of what other people are doing, they can make intellectual maps based on those emotions.' Stag Dance is the final story in Torrey Peters' collection and the only one written after her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, became a bestseller in 2021. That novel – a comedy of manners about a trio who plan to raise a baby together – was described by one critic as 'the first great trans realist novel.' Its longlisting for the Women's Prize for Fiction made Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. However, the nomination drew scrutiny, including an open letter condemning Torrey's eligibility by a group called the Wild Woman Writing Club. Peters wrote at the time that she had received an 'outpouring of hate' and expressed hope that the next trans woman to be on the list could at least enjoy the experience more. Peters knows some readers will be disappointed she didn't write another 'trans Sex in the City' in the style of Detransition, Baby – and she started work on a financial thriller set in contemporary Brooklyn. But the weight of the expectation felt restrictive, she found liberation a world away from the contemporary in the minds and language of lumberjacks. 'It's not just unexpected for other people. It's very unexpected for myself. But I think that's like a really good place to write from, when you're surprising yourself,' Peters says. 'Nobody was waiting for this. Nobody was like, 'What we want is a lumberjack novel.' In a lot of ways, that freed me to do whatever I wanted. ' Trans people have increasingly found themselves at the centre of public debate and policymaking in the United States with the Trump administration targeting trans people with executive orders. Loading These include an order that the United States will recognise only a person's sex assigned at birth, and new restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts, targeting efforts to promote diversity and so-called 'gender ideology'. In a recent essay for New York Magazine, Peters described how under the Trump administration, her passport would be changed from 'F' to 'M' and the consequences that would have when she travelled to Colombia, where she owns an apartment. These policies, Peters says, are designed to intimidate and silence. Initially, she felt overwhelmed by the hostility, but over time, she has become more resolute. 'I'm meant to be scared. I'm meant to say home. I am meant not to go anywhere, and the M is meant to stop me from doing that sort of stuff,' Peters says. 'And in response to that, I have to be like f---k that. I'm going to go to many more places. I'm going to Australia. I'm going to talk about this. I'm not going to be intimidated and more over, I am going to divest from the idea that these people have the authority, and that what they say in any way should be taken seriously.'
Gulf Today
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Author Torrey Peters wants to write trans stories for the rest of her career
After the success of her hit debut novel Detransition, Baby, author Torrey Peters was held hostage by the expectations of its readers. The book explored divorce and motherhood, offering a unique trans perspective that went beyond transness itself. It was my favourite novel on womanhood in years. Plenty of others felt the same way; the book was nominated for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the PEN/Hemingway Award the following year. But instead of choosing to appease her new fandom of female and queer readers with a tender story about, I don't know, sad women, she wrote Stag Dance, a strange first-person novella about a horny male lumberjack community with a penchant for rituals. 'I had an almost perverse instinct with that story that was: you know what nobody's looking for? A logger story set in the woods!' Peters, 43, laughs dryly. 'Once I was like, 'I'm gonna do it in this weird slang and amuse myself with it', I felt really free of any expectations.' This mini-novel has now been published together with two other bold and inventive stories in one ruthlessly intimate collection about the unpredictable nature of transness, past, present and future. Today the author is on a video call from Brooklyn, her tawny blonde hair falling on her shoulders. She's wearing a cute baby pink top that colour-matches the cherry blossom canvas on the wall behind her, which is probably a coincidence, but nonetheless adds to my impression of her as being equally thoughtful off the page as she is on. Her answers are smart and instinctual, which could be intimidating, if she weren't warm and wryly funny in a way that feels conspiratorial, as though there are in-jokes to be had at the world's expense. Her world now is not the same one she inhabited when doing interviews to promote her debut. Back then, Peters found herself inside a whirlwind of attention and debate when she was nominated for the Women's Prize for Detransition, Baby, making her the first openly trans author nominated for the award. A bizarre open letter challenging her nomination was published and 'signed' by several dead women writers like Emily Dickinson and Daphne du Maurier. Female writers who didn't know Peters personally spoke out in her defence, which was something, she says, that reminded her of those Lord of the Rings scenes where orcs are closing in but then the Fellowship show up with their light and camaraderie. 'A week later, my book was number five on The Sunday Times bestseller list in the UK, not because of the Women's Prize, but because of what those writers did,' she remembers. 'It wasn't a fallout; it was a rise. And it was a rise not of me, but in terms of me seeing that people are willing to care about and fight for people that they don't even know. And that's wonderful.' In the years since, she's split her time between three locations, New York being one of them. The second home is Colombia, of which she's attempting to become a resident before she is issued a new passport, after Donald Trump's recent legislation requiring citizens to show the sex assigned at birth on people's passports. 'I just am feeling a solidarity with the Americas on a larger scale,' she writes to me later over email. 'There have been fascist and repressive regimes over and over in this hemisphere, and I think Latin American writers/artists/activists have developed many strategies in regard to these flare-ups, so where better to learn what to do next, and how to do it?' Her third home is an off-the-grid log cabin that she shares with her wife in Vermont. As Peters worked on Stag Dance, life imitated art imitated life. She was newly obsessed with saunas and had decided to build her own out there. She was cutting down firewood for warmth, and experiencing the cold and dirt inherent to that type of life. Oddly, it became a natural fit as Peters sought a new way to express herself in writing: this 'lumberjack consciousness' came to her, manifesting in the story through a Mark Twain meets True Grit cadence with a playful twist. She started to annoy her loved ones by speaking aloud in this voice; 'Once again the ox!' is one such exclamation in the story, when a character is lumped with carrying more supplies than are his share. 'I was thinking about symbols of transition, which I sometimes didn't have when I was in the woods. I was always taking oestrogen and stuff but every day I was wearing boots and was dirty and surrounded by drills,' Peters says. 'What does it mean to have a gender when you're alone in the woods? Who are you performing for? Of course, cutting down a tree is culturally gendered, except when you're alone in the woods there actually isn't culture.' In Stag Dance, the answer to transition involves not hormones but a crude piece of triangle fabric that lumberjacks place over their crotch. That's it, that is all that's needed, though the masculine protagonist – a shed of a man ironically nicknamed 'Babe' – finds it harder to pass among his peers than a more delicately featured logger. I'm surprised to learn from Peters that the triangle wasn't a fabrication, but historically accurate to the North American lumberjack experience ('So I'm not the vulgar one, you can tell your readers,' she says with a knowing smile). Extensive research went into this story, ranging from late 19th and early 20th-century dictionaries of logger slang to exploring the timelines of various technological inventions. While this was helpful to a point, it wasn't Peters's goal to be historically precise or to anchor the story in a specific time period, but rather to create an 'Americana tall tale in a mythic sense'. The other three stories in Stag Dance were written over the past 10 or so years and loosely explore trans identities through various historical lenses or oblique understandings of transness. In 'The Chaser', for instance, the reader is unsure whether the trans character is feminine or gay or whether they might transition in the future. All this ambiguity allowed Peters to move away from the blunt instruments of modern-day descriptors. 'A phrase like 'gender dysphoria', I hear it, and it's like a granite rock,' she remarks. 'There's no way to enter any emotion into that phrase, it's just so calcified as political medical nothingness for me.' A lack of clarity around different characters' identities is almost crucial to them feeling human, caught in the midst of transformation. As such, I didn't realise until halfway through the book that it's a collection of trans stories. When I tell Peters this, she explains, 'I don't even think that what trans means to me is the same as what it means to everybody else or to all trans people.' Most people in these stories, she says, are just people who have 'weird feelings'. 'To me, the basis of being trans is not feelings that are specific to trans people. I think it's a particular constellation of feelings that we all have,' she continues. 'The basic building blocks of being trans are not 'other' to other people: the desire to be recognised by the people that you love as you want to be recognised. The ability to speak what you want without shame. Making active decisions in your life to present and perform how you want to be seen. These are things that everybody does.' On an emotional level at least, Peters says, she doesn't think there's anything particularly unique about trans people's inner lives. What is inescapable about Stag Dance is that it's first and foremost a sexy book ('There's been a desire to neuter any kind of trans sexuality,' notes Peters, referring to fears around trans sexuality, still present in the hysterical debate around trans women and bathrooms). Still, I wasn't necessarily rooting for any of these characters during their sexual escapades. Just as in Detransition, Baby, these are flawed people, chaotic neutral on the moral alignment scale and more real for it. Unsurprisingly, Peters sees her characters as she sees herself and others in her life. 'There's a self that I want to be… as some ideal person who is actualised. Then there's all the actual particulars of my personality and my pettiness and my spite and all those things that get in the way of myself,' she says. 'The number of times that I've gotten in my own way because I've justified, or told myself a story, or lied to myself – that to me is the essence of living.' This relatability, of course, is part of what gave Detransition, Baby such widespread appeal. Whether it's the cattiness or jealousy of her protagonist in that debut, or the act of choosing a possible sexual partner over a likely new friend in 'The Masker', or a lumberjack making a vulnerable effort to look attractive and presentable and failing, these are resonant situations and feelings. Shame, the original emotion, is everywhere in Peters's writing. Much of our conversation is taken up by my suggestion that her legacy thus far is that she has made trans lives relatable to the average cisgender person, a sentiment echoed by writer Chris Kraus in the promotional material for Stag Dance. This prophecy feels even more likely when she tells me that she has no intention to stop exploring the trans female experience in fiction. Her second novel, which she is currently in the early stages of writing, will be about a separatist group of trans people who build a society from nothing. This has obviously been influenced by the right-wing swerve of US politics, something Peters is weighing up currently, as she attempts to write into an uncertain prospective era: 'Four years from now, things could be really dark, and I could write into that future. If I'm wrong, I seem hysterical. But if I try to write for a future that looks like right now, and it gets bad, then I seem like a sort of weird propagandist who isn't with the times.' I wonder if her work's relatability to cisgender people will start to grate if it becomes the repetitive feedback from readers and critics for the decades to come (particularly given the fact that in her twenties, she initially wrote fiction solely for a trans audience; now, she tells me, her aim has changed and she writes for anyone who she might have an affinity with). I can easily imagine us having the same conversation when her next novel comes out, and the next, I tell her. 'I don't think I'll ever get irritated with it because the goal is to synchronise emotions and to get these surprising alignments,' she replies, adding that fiction is the perfect place to do that. She has long realised that trying to appeal to cisgender people's intellect in a bid to create allyship doesn't work in the current climate; it's about hearts, not minds. 'That you think that could be my future is the happiest future you could have predicted for me.' The Independent
USA Today
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Trans Rights Readathon starts: 11 books to read, from romance to nonfiction
Trans Rights Readathon starts: 11 books to read, from romance to nonfiction Every day is one you can support and read trans authors, but readers have a special excuse to pick up new books this week. It's the third annual Trans Rights Readathon, a yearly call to action and reading challenge that ends on Trans Day of Visibility. This year, the challenge goes from March 21-31. The creators recommend booklovers participate by reading and reviewing works by trans, nonbinary, 2Spirit and gender nonconforming authors, as well as supporting the community by donating to local or national organizations. In 2023, the Trans Rights Readathon raised over $234,000 for trans-supporting organizations and recorded over 2,600 participants. 11 books to read for the Trans Rights Readathon If you're looking to add some titles to your TBR for this year's Trans Rights Readathon, we have suggestions for books written by trans and nonbinary authors. They range from romance to sci-fi, literary fiction to fantasy. Some are recent releases and others are oldies-but-goodies. 'Stag Dance' by Torrey Peters 'Stag Dance' is a collection of one novel and three stories from the bestselling author of 'Detransition, Baby.' In the titular novel, restless lumberjacks plan a dance under the condition that some of them will attend as women. In 'an astonishing vision of gender and transition,' the publisher writes, the axmen are caught up in a strange rivalry, jealousy and obsession. The other short stories feature a gender apocalypse, a secret romance between Quaker boarding school roommates and a party weekend on the Las Vegas strip that turns dark. 'Woodworking' by Emily St. James Released earlier this month, 'Woodworking' is about a 35-year-old recently divorced teacher who comes out as trans in small-town South Dakota. As she grapples with her transition, she finds an unlikely friend in 17-year-old Abigail, the only trans girl at Mitchell High School. Abigail reluctantly agrees to help Erica through her transition, remembering the loneliness she experienced when she was going through the same. 'Before We Were Trans' by Kit Heyam 'Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender' is the kind of nonfiction read that's so narrative it feels like fiction. Stories of gender nonconforming fashion, wartime stage performance and the untold identities of famous historical people portray the complexity of gender across time and throughout the world, pushing back against the notion that people fit neatly into the categories of male or female. 'Model Home' by Rivers Solomon 'Model Home' is billed as a 'new kind of haunted-house novel' interrogating the legacy of segregation and racism in suburban America. The story follows the three Maxwell siblings who grew up as the only Black family in a gated Dallas neighborhood, also tormented by strange and unexplainable demonic happenings in their house. When their parents' death forces the now-adult siblings to return, they begin to uncover the supernatural forces at play. 'Paper Doll' by Dylan Mulvaney The actress and content creator's debut memoir gives readers a more intimate glimpse behind her 'Days of Girlhood' social media series and transition. Mulvaney unpacks the transphobia, backlash, acceptance and, ultimately, joy in this reflection of her pre- and post-transition life. 'A Gentleman's Gentleman' by TJ Alexander Wish 'Bridgerton' was more queer? This newly released trans Regency-era romance is for you. 'A Gentleman's Gentleman' follows the eccentric recluse Lord Christopher Eden who receives abrupt word that, to keep his family fortune, he must take a wife by the end of the courting season. First on the list of his many problems? He isn't attracted to women. Second? He has to move to London. And then he meets James Harding, the distractingly handsome new valet, whose presence threatens to upend it all. 'Bellies' by Nicola Dinan 'Bellies' follows a young couple, Tom and Ming, as they move in and out of each other's lives in early adulthood. Tom has recently come out as gay and is quickly drawn to Ming, a magnetic playwright. But shortly after they move in together, Ming announces her intention to transition. It changes the dynamics of both their relationship and their broader friendship circle. Together and apart, Ming and Tom must navigate new questions around identity, gender, relationships, intimacy and heartbreak. 'Pet' by Akwaeke Emezi From the award-winning author of 'You Make a Fool of Death with Your Beauty,' Emezi's genre-expansive debut follows two best friends who grow up in a city that touts the fact that there are no monsters anymore. But when they meet Pet, a horned, clawed, multicolored creature, the friends must reckon with what they've been taught and how to protect each other in a society in denial. 'The Prospects' by KT Hoffman In this baseball romance, Gene is proud of the quiet, underdog career he's built as the first openly trans professional baseball player. But when his former teammate and current rival Luis is traded to the Beavers, it dampens the once-perfect outlook he had. They can't put their differences aside – on or off the field. After a curveball twist, the pair finds themselves spending more and more time together, realizing the tension between them might be something more than loathing. 'Light from Uncommon Stars' by Ryka Aoki Called 'dark but ultimately hopeful' by Publishers Weekly, this speculative story starts with a deal with the devil – Shizuka Satomi has promised to sell the souls of seven violin prodigies before she can escape damnation. And she's found her final candidate in the form of a talented young transgender runaway. But Shizuka's plans to lift the curse come to a screeching halt when she becomes infatuated with an interstellar refugee and retired starship captain that catches her attention. 'Felix Ever After' by Kacen Callender This YA romance novel centers on Felix Love who, despite the last name, has never been in love. He wonders if happily-ever-afters apply to him as he grapples with his identity as a Black, queer, transgender teen, all while an anonymous student begins sending him threatening and transphobic messages. But when a revenge plan goes awry, Felix finds himself in something of a love triangle that catapults him on a journey of self-discovery. Looking for your next great read? USA TODAY has you covered. Taste is subjective, and USA TODAY Books has plenty of genres to recommend. Check out the 15 new releases we're most excited about in 2025. Is dystopian your thing? Check out these books that are similar to 'The Hunger Games' and '1984.' Or if you want something with lower stakes and loveable characters, see if a "cozy mystery" or "cozy fantasy" book is for you. If you want the most popular titles, check out USA TODAY's Best-selling Booklist. Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
