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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.