Latest news with #transliterature
ABC News
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
How author Torrey Peters made trans history with Detransition Baby
Four years ago, Torrey Peters made history with her debut novel Detransition, Baby when she became one of the first trans fiction writers to be published by a major US publishing house. The novel, a sharp comedy of manners set in the 2010s in Brooklyn's trans community, was a critical and commercial success — a bestseller and winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award, Amazon buying the TV rights, and a spot on The New York Times' best books of the 21st century list. Perhaps more importantly, it opened the gates. "Even though the political times were better [for trans people] when Detransition, Baby came out, I was one of one or two trans women with one of the big four presses that year," Peters tells ABC Arts. "This spring, I can think of 15 or 20 myself, and I'm sure there's more that I don't know." Nobody, including Peters, thought her follow-up would be historical fiction about 19th-century lumberjacks. Or that the characters would speak using near-indecipherable slang words like crackleberry (eggs) and Scandahoovian Dynamite (tobacco) — all taken from a real dictionary collated by the children of loggers. While the titular story of Stag Dance, Peters' follow-up collection, is a world away from 2010s Brooklyn, it was that distance that allowed her to approach questions of identity and gender anew. "Following Detransition, Baby, I felt like there was pressure on me to do something witty and sparkling," says Peters, who was in Australia earlier this year for the Sydney and Melbourne writers' festivals. "And I was like, 'Well, there probably is not a lot of expectations on me to do the logger thing, so I'm free to do it how I want.'" The story was inspired by her own retreat to a long-abandoned log cabin in Vermont, a fixer-upper bought as an escape after the success of Detransition, Baby transformed her into, arguably, the best-known trans writer — overnight to most, though Peters was established within the US's trans literary world via two self-published novellas, which reappear in Stag Dance. "Really, it's a shack — 12 feet by 12 feet, no running water, no electricity, an outhouse," Peters says. "It's very cold, muddy and dirty up there. And I loved it, in some ways. "The area was previously logged, and it's been about 100 years so the forest has grown up — but I thought about people who were living in that forest without even the mild amenities that I had." During her reading, Peters learned about stag dances, an 18th and 19th-century US tradition where outposts of isolated men would throw parties with a select few acting as women for the night, signified via a triangle cloth placed over their crotch. "It seemed like such a funny, potent symbol," she says. "'One of us is a woman, so we just cut some brown fabric and put it over our crotch' — the most on-the-nose, over-simplified thing that you can imagine. Stag Dance's protagonist is Babe Bunyon — a strong, burly beast of a man who surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering for an "ersatz twat". It's never quite explained why Babe wants to be a "skooch" (sexy lady) for the night. Instead, it's an "unwanted yearning" that arrives and never leaves, though Babe regularly describes his "uncommon size and strength" as a source of agony, lamenting his giant feet and strongman muscles. "He probably does not see himself very clearly," Peters says. "The ways he insults himself are quite extreme — he says things like, 'You could set a beer glass on my brow shelf,' which is a particular site of anxiety for trans women. So, suddenly, I started lending him my insecurities, things that I actually would never say to anybody." We, in the 21st century, might read Babe as a trans woman experiencing dysmorphia, but he lacks that language — a gift to Peters, who says that these terms, while useful to explain trans experience, are somewhat emotionally "ossified" from overuse. "With the brow, you're like, 'That's preposterous, you're dysmorphic,'" Peters says. "But he would never use a word like that. "And trying to have a logger say it without any of the modern language, I rediscovered things that I found pretty magical about the trans experience." Where writing academically about an experience can "deaden" it, she says, resisting that language frees up space to focus on the feelings associated with that experience, instead. At the same time, Peters notes that only a few figures across Stag Dance's four genre-spanning stories — including the apocalyptic Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, teen love story The Chaser, and sexual thriller The Masker — identify as trans. Babe and most of the other characters fall into what Peters calls the "weird gender feelings" category. More broadly, they all experience some disconnect between how they appear to the world and how they feel inside, something Peters says almost everyone can relate to. "It's highlighted in trans people, but that's more a result of our society," she says. "It exists in cis people [too]." Stag Dance arrives in a much different political climate in the US from Detransition, Baby. Some of the second Trump administration's first executive orders removed hard-earned trans support and rights, including the ability to have a different gender from that assigned at birth on a passport, as well as funds supporting trans youth or any program that "promotes gender ideology". When asked if she worries that the political climate will halt trans literature's mainstream success, Peters is adamant it won't. She points towards those 20 books she mentioned earlier, including works by Rose Dommu, Tommy Dorfman, Harron Walker and Emily St. James. "Although this era is bad, we have more of a voice than we've ever had before," she says. "And I think our stories are better, our art is better, our worldview is more joyous and compelling. I think we have a better time. I think we throw better parties and, if people get a chance to see that, I think they're gonna like what we're doing." Torrey Peters' Stag Dance is out now.
CBC
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Montreal writer Chris Bergeron highlights the power of transgender storytelling as revolutionary
Social Sharing Set in Montreal in 2050, Valid is an eight-hour monologue by Christelle, a trans woman who is forced to live as a man to stay alive. At 70-years-old, she's held captive by an AI and sets off on her own revolution — a revelation of her true self. Written by Montreal writer Chris Bergeron and translated by Natalia Hero, Valid was chosen for the One eRead Canada campaign by The Canadian Urban Libraries Council. This means that through the month of this past April, the novel was available in both e-book and audiobook formats in English and French to all patrons of participating libraries. For Bergeron, who first published the novel in French in 2021, this recognition is all the more important in the current political climate. "The conversation around queer literature in libraries and the presence that it should or shouldn't have in public libraries wasn't as fraught with very difficult debates as it is today," said Bergeron on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "The fact that librarians from across the country decided to give a nod to my book and share it to their audiences and their communities is a great sign of open mindedness and it reminds me of what this country is about." She joined Roach to discuss the inspiration behind her novel, her portrayal of the city of Montreal and her approach to trans revolution. Mattea Roach: Christelle is a 70-year-old trans woman who is in a situation where she's forced to live as a man. What are the circumstances that have led her to closet herself and live as Christian when we first meet her? Chris Bergeron: One of the things I was noticing during the pandemic when I was writing most of the book, was that people were talking about the safety and the well-being of a majority of people and not so much about the particulars in terms of health. So, I imagined if we lived in a world that went from crisis to crisis or at least if that was the public message. The rights and the needs of minority groups would be ignored. In fact, it's what we are seeing today as political discourse. It's almost a way to get elected today. So in that world, in that extrapolation of the world we're seeing today, I imagine a world where essentially not only were rights not validated, but actually removed. Anything that stood out of this average or common point of view of what should be a perfect citizen would be erased. In order to survive and actually be on the good side of whatever authority is in the book, my character has to detransition. It's something that exists in today's world — for example, somebody who is trans right now living in Russia, where it's essentially been criminalized to be trans. It's a reality that has existed in the past and exists today and will probably continue to exist in the future. Valid is written in this monologue style where most of it is essentially your main character, Christelle, telling her life story from her childhood into her adulthood as now, an elderly closeted trans woman. Why did you choose to craft the narrative in this way? It comes back to how the book actually started. I was giving and I still give talks across the country talking about what it's like to be trans and what that experience is and what the experience is at work and some of the challenges I faced, all of that. My publisher actually came to one of these talks and we chatted after and said, "Oh, you should write a book about all that." So I started with this autobiography and very quickly realized that that book had been written before: the story of a trans person and a coming of age story, how I came out of the closet and this and that. And I thought, "What's the point of that book if it's been done before?" I figured that it would be more interesting if I used the book as an opportunity to exercise my fears and tackle the big question, which is how will I age and is there a possibility of a happy old age for a trans person when the world is going to hell? How will I age and is there a possibility of a happy old age for a trans person when the world is going to hell? - Chris Bergeron That's where I thought I might have something new here with this notion of dystopian autofiction. Projecting myself into the future and asking myself how would I react? And obviously, I position myself as a coward because very few of us are actual heroes. The city of Montreal feels to me like a character in this story. You've actually said that you feel that Montreal is a transgender city, which is really interesting. What did you mean by that? First of all, nobody can figure out what it is. It's French. It's a large French metropolis. But then it's got 800,000 anglophones. On top of that, it has another third of the population that comes from elsewhere in the world, first or second generation immigrants. Some would say it's a high tech hub where there's a lot of AI labs and aviation research, but then it's also one of the poorest places in Canada — and it's all these things at the same time. Of course, the fact that it's always a giant construction site. It's literally always transitioning. It's always going from one identity to another. I saw it when it was back in the 90s, an indie, quiet town with a lot of artists. And then it became sort of a revolutionary left wing hub back when we had the carrés rouges. So it's always trying to be something it's not and it can't quite figure out what it is. It's always a bit of a loser compared to all the other cities — and that also makes it a bit trans. We're the sort of eternal teenager with gender issues and identity issues that are like, what am I? Who am I? Who am I today? And there'll probably never be an answer to that question, which is wonderful. We reach this breaking point at the end of your novel, where it becomes a novel about revolution. What does revolution mean for you as a trans person in 2025? Resist and resist by existing is the message. Using words, using our stories and telling our stories, no matter the risk, because the risk is going to be there. The system collapses under the weight of the words of people who are in marginalized communities. - Chris Bergeron The system collapses under the weight of the words of people who are in marginalized communities. In my book, that's how the revolution happened. People telling their stories to this AI who can't process these things. I think today, our words are just as powerful.
