Envy plays an important role in Torrey Peters’ new novel, Stag Dance, so it’s fitting that I am immediately plunged into jealousy when we talk on Zoom. She is calling in from tropical Santa Marta, Colombia, where she is currently in the process of securing a permanent residency, with the view to splitting her time between there and New York. “It has everything I want – I’m happy here,” she says. I am in London, where due to some freak meteorological event the sun has not appeared for over a fortnight. Bathed in light, she looks tan, healthy and happy, and I can practically feel a refreshing ocean breeze drifting in through the window behind her. Like The Babe, Stag Dance’s lumberjack protagonist, I am confronted with a profound gulf between the life I want (living somewhere with nice weather, perhaps being one of the most celebrated writers of my generation) and the life I have (being stuck in Britain.) Peters is so affable, though, that it’s hard to resent her.
Peters had been writing and self-publishing for years before the release of her debut full-length novel, Detransition, Baby (2021), which became a landmark event in trans literature. A critical and commercial success, it was one of the first times that a major ‘big five’ publisher had released a novel by a trans author, and Peters became the first trans woman ever to be nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (a moment which anti-trans activists reacted to with characteristic grace and restraint, launching an online petition which was “signed” by long-dead authors like Emily Dickinson and Daphne de Maurier.) Amazon snapped up the rights to adapt it into a TV series, but unfortunately, Peters tells me, it cancelled the show two weeks before it was due to begin production – right at the time it was splurging hundreds of millions of dollars on a Lord of the Rings prequel that no-one seemed to like. I am outraged to hear this, but Peters is sanguine. “I was disappointed, but to be honest I like writing prose so much better, so I also had a period of relief and happiness about it,” she says.
Detransition, Baby – a novel about a trans woman, a cis woman, and detransitioner now living as a man who have to decide whether or not to raise a child together – was received by most critics as straight-up literary realism, but like most of her writing it began as an exercise in genre: she was trying to write a soap opera. The novellas collected in Stag Dance (all of which were previously self-published) and the titular new novel make this element of her work more apparent. The first, Infect all Your Friends and Loved Ones is a post-apocalyptic thriller set in a world where the human body is no longer able to generate its own sex hormones, and testosterone and estrogen have become scarce resources secured through armed conflict and genetically mutated pigs. The Chaser, a coming-of-age teen drama set at a boarding school, is about a secret relationship between a straight boy and his pretty, feminine roommate who “always wants to be the girl” – a character who is implied to be transfeminine but never explicitly identified as such. In The Masker, a horror-tinged psychological thriller set in Las Vegas, a young cross-dresser is confronted with a choice between the fantasy of forced feminisation at the hands of an older man or the harder and less glamorous reality of transitioning.
Stag Dance is historical fiction, a tall tale set during an illegal logging expedition in the Wild West at some point in the 18th century. The story is centred around a dance which the loggers can volunteer to attend as women, pinning a piece of brown fabric in the weeks ahead to let the other men know that they are interested in being courted. This was a real tradition, as Peters discovered during her research, just as lumberjacks would often travel to the nearest saloon to watch men performing on stage dressed as women. “There was a real strain of queerness in logger culture,” she says. “When you get a bunch of lonely guys in the woods all around each other, at some point there’s going to be sexuality.” It is a very funny novel, thanks in part to the narrative voice of its protagonist, the Babe, a strong, hulking lumberjack who longs to be ladylike and beautiful. He is sometimes ridiculous – pompous and splutteringly indignant – but he is wise, too, and I found him extremely sympathetic. “I think of him as a joke that I am dead serious about,” she says.
“I don’t think a lot of the experiences of transness are unique to being trans – there are all sorts of people looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘why does my body look this way?’” – Torrey Peters
More interesting than the binary between male and female, for Peters, is the binary between being cis and being trans: “At what point does someone do have to become trans? What sort of feelings do they need to have?” she says. All of the stories in Stag Dance deal with gender transgression in one way or another, but most of the characters don’t describe themselves as trans or even have the word at their disposal: as Peters puts, they just have “weird feelings” about how they want to present themselves and who they want to be. Stag Dance, a novel about gender dysphoria set long before the phrase was coined, shows that these emotions exist outside of any particular time, place or linguistic framework. There is something universal – or at least widely relatable – in feeling like there is a gap between who you are on the inside and who you are in the world, between how you want to be seen and how you are seen by other people (Jean Paul-Sartre, in his play No Exit, presented this gap as a vision of hell.) You don’t need to have experienced gender dysphoria specifically to understand how the Babe feels in Stag Dance, despairing as his efforts to be a different kind of person are thwarted by the always obtruding reality of his body. "I don’t think a lot of the experiences of transness are unique to being trans – there are all sorts of people looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘why does my body look this way?’” says Peters.
As one example, she has recently been reading Reddit forums dedicated to Ozempic and finding some parallels with the experience of transitioning: people posting before and after pictures, or expressing relief at looking in the mirror and finally seeing the person they have always felt themselves to be. “In a lot of ways it’s problematic to compare that to transness, and I’m not saying that the analogy is perfect, but I can recognise the emotions these people are going through, whether they want to reject Ozempic and the idea there is an ideal self inside of them waiting to be released or whether they’re unhappy with their body, for whatever reason, and looking to take medicine to change it. I’m into the way that emotions are insidious and can’t be contained: you end up finding empathy or seeing yourself in people who you would never expect to be like you.”
The porous border between transness and cisness is explored in The Masker. When the titular character arrives at an event wearing a silicone woman mask (his “eyeholes in a garish motionless face, the barest bump of a ski-jump nose and fat red lips perpetually parted on the cusp of a moan”), he is met with disgust by Sally, an older trans woman who views him as an interloper and a fetishist. “None of the trans people want the masker to be trans: everyone’s like, ‘We find you embarrassing and we don’t want this to be a legitimate avenue towards transness’. But the story asks: who gets to decide that? And how is it negotiated? If you say that the masker is not trans, you’re kind of drawing an arbitrary political line around respectability,” says Peters.
These are dicey questions to be asking at a time of intense transphobic backlash, when the idea that trans feminity is merely a form of sexual fetish is so popular among anti-trans campaigners. In fact, Stag Dance as a whole could hardly be described as “positive representation”. I won’t hear a word said against the Babe, but the trans-ish character in The Chaser is at times spiteful and conniving, and Lexi in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is a trans Bond villain, an ex-girlfriend so crazy she unleashes a plague which destroys the world. Considering the trans community is under attack, does Peters ever feel any pressure to depict it in a more flattering light? Less so, she says, now that there are so many more trans women being published, citing recent or upcoming titles by Shon Faye, Nicola Dinan, Harron Walker and Jamie Hood. But she also believes that the job of fiction is to confront difficult truths, rather than to provide a false sense of reassurance or to promote a politics of respectability. Many writers before her, as she points out, have faced accusations of letting the side down or giving credence to discriminatory talking points.
“The most obvious example would be Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which is a story about a Black girl who wishes she was white, and whose father has raped her and made her pregnant,” she says. “Is this representing Black people or Black families? Of course not. But it’s speaking to the climate of prejudice and how that can twist people. That book is a classic, precisely because it’s not trying to positively represent, because it’s not trying to convince people that everything is fine. It’s actually saying: no, this situation is bad and it has to change, because what it’s doing to the people in this book is intolerable.” She also mentions Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, a 1969 novel about a young Jewish man and, among other things, his increasingly baroque methods of masturbation. Both books provoked an outcry from the Black community and the Jewish community respectively at the time of their publication, just as some trans women hated The Masker when Peters first self-published it, insisting that the characters it depicted had nothing to do with them.
“To survive this repression, we’re going to have to rely on each other and we’re going to have to spend more time together, and this could create a flourishing of art and culture. I think hanging out is the best incubation for cultural creation”
But if The Masker is upsetting, that’s kind of the point: Peters wanted to show the consequences of foreclosing the possibility of transition. “When you are loaded with such shame and you are not allowed to experience your own reality, it’s going to erupt somewhere,” she says. “You can repress everything, be a good family man and make your wife proud, but it’s not going to go away. In fact, the more you repress it, the more it’s going to show up in an upsetting manner, and so you get the masker, you get the main character, who’s doing sissy fetish, and you get the character of Sally who’s working so hard towards respectability that she has become a scold, and kind of a grotesque. These are all characters who are repressing themselves for respectability in some aspect of their life, and that to me seems like it’s the truth, that seems like it’s real. It’s a process that comes out of oppression and shame.”
Following the re-election of Donald Trump, who marked his first few days back in office with a slew of anti-trans executive orders, that oppression is set to get even worse. I ask Peters what, if anything, makes her feel hopeful about the future. “It didn’t happen, but I wrote Detransition, Baby in the shadow of the possibility that trans people could have been assimilated or co-opted,” she says. “But now the situation is such that we’re going to have to do real things for each other, and I think that produces strength – not posting about each other, not buying consumer products, but meeting people, figuring out what they need, where the resources are and how to create networks to distribute them.” This kind of political organising, she suggests, also builds culture – she herself started writing in a scene which emerged out of ‘Camp Trans’ in the mid-00s, an annual demonstration staged outside the trans-exclusive Michigan Womyn’s Festival. “To survive this repression, we’re going to have to rely on each other and we’re going to have to spend more time together, and this could create a flourishing of art and culture. I think hanging out is the best incubation for cultural creation,” she says.
Peters tells me she has been trying to end her interviews by asking people about the activism which is happening where they live, rather than making prescriptions of her own. I mention ‘Trans Kids Deserve Better’, a trans youth-led protest group which has been fighting the UK’s increasingly tight restrictions on gender-affirming care (which Labour has now effectively banned for people under the age of 18) and last year released a plague of crickets during the conference of anti-trans group LGB Alliance. “That’s really fucking cool,” she says. “It would be great if we could end the interview just by saying: trans kids deserve better. And if you’re a trans kid, don’t despair: go hang out with other trans kids and unleash crickets and chaos upon the people who are oppressing you.”