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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
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
It List spring reading guide: Fantastic books and where to read them
Welcome to the It List Spring Guide, where we share our picks for the best in entertainment. Catch the weekly It List here for the latest releases that we can't wait to watch, stream, listen to, read and binge. Though reading more is a popular New Year's resolution, there's something about springtime that inspires people to pick up more hobbies. For me, that's always meant reading. I read a lot all year round, but cool spring weather (and upbeat spring attitudes) bring all sorts of new opportunities to curate the exact vibe that elevates the mood of whatever you're reading. Advertisement I combed through the buzzy new releases of March, April and May to recommend your next read, along with my plans to get that reading done. Fiction Emily Henry. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images) Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters What to know: Torrey Peters dominated book discourse in 2021 with Detransition, Baby, and now she's finally back with a novel about a group of restless lumberjacks who plan an unusual dance. That and the three other stories included in this book take on the complexities of gender. Release date: March 11 Genre: Literary fiction Page count: 304 Where I'll be reading it: At a picnic with an extravagant bowl of fresh fruit. The Perfect Divorce by Jeneva Rose What to know: When I need a twisty tale about powerful women to get me out of a reading slump, I turn to Jeneva Rose. This one's a follow-up to her smash hit The Perfect Marriage and follows the same protagonist — a lawyer who's now navigating a breakup and an unsolved murder. Release date: April 15 Genre: Thriller Page count: 288 Where I'll be reading it: All around my house, listening via audiobook while spring cleaning. Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry What to know: Two very different writers compete to pen the biography of a former tabloid princess and fall in love along the way in the latest book from the queen of earnest love stories, Emily Henry. Release date: April 22 Genre: Romance Page count: 432 Where I'll be reading it: On the beach in a sweater. The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong What to know: Ocean Vuong is responsible for some of the most gorgeous strings of words ever put to page, so I have high hopes for his forthcoming novel, which follows a teenager who becomes the caretaker of an older woman. Release date: May 13 Genre: Literary fiction Page count: 416 Where I'll be reading it: At a cafe with an iced coffee. Never Flinch by Stephen King What to know: Stephen King has never failed to scare the daylights out of me in the past, so I expect his new novel will deliver too. This one's about a detective working to stop a serial killer before they murder 13 innocent people and one guilty person. Release date: May 27 Genre: Horror Page count: 448 Where I'll be reading it: Somewhere well-lit. Nonfiction Tina Knowles. (Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images) The Art of the SNL Portrait by Mary Ellen Matthews What to know: You know those whimsical portraits that Saturday Night Live hosts and musical guests always get? Mary Ellen Matthews is the photographer responsible for them, and she's graciously turned some of the best into a book complete with delicious gossip and backstories. Release date: March 4 Genre: Photography Page count: 272 Where I'll be reading it: At my coffee table, where the gorgeous book now lives. I'll be flipping through it slowly and gleefully over the course of the next three months. Authority by Andrea Long Chu What to know: Pulitzer winner Andrea Long Chu writes some of the most perceptive criticism about books, TV and video games. This collection is a must-read for people who take their pop culture seriously. Release date: April 8 Genre: Essays Page count: 288 Where I'll be reading it: At my desk with a pen in hand, ready to underline at least half the book. Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles What to know: Tina Knowles is best known for bringing Beyoncé and Solange into the world, but she's had a fascinating journey of her own. Release date: April 22 Genre: Memoir Page count: 432 Where I'll be reading it: On my couch with a Beyoncé album on the record player. Uptown Girl by Christie Brinkley
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stag Dance by Torrey Peters review – genre games and gender mischief
When Detransition, Baby hit the shelves in 2021, its success took readers on both sides of the Atlantic by surprise. Longlisted for the Women's prize and selected as one of the New York Times 100 best books of the 21st century, Torrey Peters's debut novel was among the titles that defined the literary landscape of the Covid-19 pandemic. Finding herself in the crosshairs of a mounting culture war, Peters became one of the world's best known trans writers, seemingly overnight. Of course, this isn't the full picture. Before her international breakthrough, Peters had self-published two novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, shifting enough copies for mainstream publishers to take an interest. Both appear in Stag Dance, along with two pieces written either side of Detransition, Baby: the title story and The Chaser. They make up an ambitious compendium of a decade in writing. 'In the future, everyone will be trans': Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a plague-ravaged dystopia where humans can no longer make their own sex hormones. Society falls apart as various factions seek to synthesise and control the flow of replacement hormones taken from pigs. It's a wild and gruesome story, packed with action but economically detailed. The Chaser is a preppy campus romance of sorts, articulating the suffocating desires felt by a Quaker boarding school student for his girlish roommate: it subtly upsets many of our ideas around love and sexual awakening. The Masker tiptoes into murky waters where fetish, queer sexuality and transgender identity mingle, exposing some extremely queasy power dynamics. And the titular Stag Dance, set in a 19th-century illegal logging camp, follows the men as they prepare for their winter festivities. Due to the lack of women, some must volunteer to attend en femme, a strangely kinky tradition that naturally generates unexpected possibilities. It is by turns thrilling and wickedly funny, weaving together bloodthirsty monsters and insatiably horny lumberjacks. A million miles from the tedious pioneer tales of James Fenimore Cooper, it's still a surprise after Detransition, Baby's cosmopolitan comedy of manners. The book as a whole brings to mind Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire in the way it uses genre conventions to address bigger themes. Just as Enríquez's spooky tales channel the horror of Argentina's military dictatorship, Peters inhabits her own disparate genres – dystopia, romance, horror, historical – to weave a transhistorical web of gender non-conforming characters. There is nothing ragtag about this collection, despite its long span of writing and diversity of genre, because Peters is such a capable and considerate writer, skipping between modes with apparent effortlessness. The pieces are meticulously crafted; especially Stag Dance, with its deft pacing and almost operatic denouement. Moreover, it is clear she is having a great deal of fun: even when exploring serious issues around gender and sexuality, the writing is mischievous rather than sanctimonious. Peters seems to delight in complicating liberal identity politics, refusing ever to sanitise her work or narrow her focus, and glorying in some truly rollicking prose. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is published by Serpent's Tail (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
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
The Independent
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
‘Detransition Baby' author Torrey Peters: ‘Being trans is a particular constellation of feelings that we all have'
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'. A phrase like 'gender dysphoria', I hear it, and it's like a granite rock. There's no way to enter any emotion into that phrase 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. Torrey Peters on her work's relatability to cisgender people 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.'
