Torrey Peters takes my Zoom call from Colombia, where she’s about to go shopping for sapotes. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sapote?” she says. “It’s, like, cross a sweet potato with a banana with a mango.”
She’s well-equipped for the hunt; she speaks the language. I respond in Spanish, hoping to vicariously experience her ambience – but our internet connection glitches, my audacity having tempted fate.
We power through the technical difficulties to discuss Peters’s new book, Stag Dance, a compilation of four novellas originally written between 2013 and 2023. The novellas, a sustained study of desire, sisterhood, ego and self-deceit, trouble many binaries: cis versus trans experience, literary versus genre fiction, self-image versus how the world sees you. Her characters are humanly flawed, offering “half a claim of responsibility and half a shrugging abdication of it, the way one might explain that there’s garbage everywhere because a raccoon got into the trash. Yeah, you could have fastened down the lid, but raccoons gonna raccoon, so what can you do?”
Four years ago Peters became one of anglophone literature’s most celebrated trans writers with her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, about three New Yorkers contemplating parenthood. The book, rave-reviewed for its irreverent voice, tight plotting and psychological acuity, drew the ire of British transphobes when it was longlisted for the Women’s Prize. As a fellow nominee, I did the sane, obvious thing and publicly supported Peters. She and I were total strangers then, and this is our first time speaking in person. The UK imbroglio is now behind her.
“It’s the only time I’ve had someone put a photograph from my Instagram in the Daily Mail,” she says. “Meanwhile, Terfs [trans exclusionary radical feminists] are online saying I’m a danger to children.” But support from readers and fellow authors drowned out the bigots. “UK readers were. like, ‘Let’s buy the book and find out if that’s true,’ not to mention writers who never met me, like yourself, who defended me in a hostile press. I ended up from that incident with more faith in people, even though it was so stupid.”
A bunch of people responded that it had liberated them from shame to say that sexuality is one way to arrive at a realisation that one is trans
— Peters on The Masker
The four novellas in her follow-up, Stag Dance, stemmed from her start in self-publishing. It’s rare for an author to achieve mainstream recognition through this route, but industry barriers left it her only option after she took her creative writing MFA at Iowa.
“I wrote a novel that had nothing to do with being trans, even as I was coming out as trans,” she says. She tried to get it conventionally published, “and yet nobody wanted it”.
Rejected as a novelist, she turned to writing essays about her transition. “The agents told me that what I wrote is icky. Just basic uninformed transphobia. And I kind of gave up, honestly. For two years, three years, I didn’t write anything.”
In the end community drew Peters back to her craft: she discovered trans writers, largely Brooklyn-based, who made her feel seen on the page. This scene was attached to the independent Topside Press, but there wasn’t enough space to publish everyone. Peters hatched a plan: she and other trans women could all self-publish novellas and trade them.
She put her Adobe passwords online for free with lessons on how to use the software, hoping to start a novella movement. No one joined her. “Initially I thought of [my first two novellas] as failures,” she says, “because it didn’t launch this development. But then slowly, they started getting passed around.” A cult fandom grew.
She had planned to write a suite of five genre-inspired novellas. The first two drew on speculative fiction (Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones) and horror (The Masker). But the third, a soap opera, was unco-operative regarding word limit; like Fair City, it went on forever. The story grew into Detransition, Baby.
Before selling this novel to a traditional publisher, Peters continued with the self-published novella project, writing a teen romance (The Chaser) and a western tall tale (Stag Dance). The eponymous collection Stag Dance now brings the four novellas for the first time to a mainstream audience.
Self-publishing let Peters test her community’s reaction to trans characters who defy respectability politics. Like Camila Sosa Villada, Carmen Maria Machado, Garth Greenwell and indeed James Baldwin, Peters fearlessly tackles stigmatised areas of queer life.
The Masker, about a cross-dresser (“that online sissy”) realising they’re trans, was the scariest novella to write. “Admitting to any kind of sexual aspect to a trans identity can be politically dangerous,” says Peters. “But not talking about it is equally bad. I refuse to be silenced by bigots.” In the end The Masker was freeing for many trans readers. “A bunch of people responded that it had liberated them from shame to say that sexuality is one way to arrive at a realisation that one is trans.” Not everyone liked it. “But that is fine. No group of people who share a political identity march in lockstep.”
Peters’s empathy extends to those with transphobic attitudes. In The Chaser, set in a Quaker boarding school, a heterosexual bro protagonist denies his love for his roommate, a closeted trans girl. “That kind of not-too-much thinking was a skill I had,” he confesses.
“I think that’s really sad,” says Peters. “It’s not a far reach to empathise with this person who’s actually being quite cruel to trans people, because the reasons that he’s being cruel are the same reasons that trans people are cruel to themselves.”
Peters, wide-ranging in her compassion, is equally panoramic in the jobs she gives her characters. Far from the stereotypical MFA writer whose characters are – get this – MFA writers, hers slaughter pigs and illegally log trees “To timber trespass in the full of winter was to countenance ice slicks, frozen fingers, and sunlight hours so short the workday extended from dark to dark.”
The inspiration for her lumberjacks in Stag Dance came from building a sauna in the middle of the woods in Vermont. Along with researching how to cut trees, Peters consulted turn-of-the-century dictionaries of logger slang to give her narrator a suitably rugged voice. This setting offers a hegemonically masculine ambience in which to conduct a thought experiment: can you simply slap a brown triangle of burlap fabric on your crotch and call it a transition?
“To toe the line,” says Peters, “is to say that every transition works the same and is equally valid. And politically that’s true. But looking at how people actually live, the Austenian word that I settled on is ‘felicitous’. Some people have ‘felicitous’ transitions. The rest of the world, whether they’re transphobic or not, will instinctively use the right pronoun because a series of symbols and performances are being pulled off.” Others have “infelicitous” transitions in which the world does not respond as desired.
“And although I think all transitions are valid,” she adds, “it doesn’t seem to me to make sense to pretend that this isn’t happening. Because the world is gendering you all the time. I can say, like, fuck them, but I can’t pretend that they’re not doing it. And they’re not just doing it to me because I’m trans. They’re doing it to everybody. If you’re a femme woman in a hardware store and someone won’t let you pick up a hammer, the work of gendering is being done to you.”
The things trans people feel are things cis people feel. Confusion about sexuality, desire to perform one’s gender, weird feelings about sex and fetish, shame
— Torrey Peters
This theme of collective gendering also shapes Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. Here Peters uses the sci-fi premise of an artificial virus to present a vivid and sometimes ugly conception of trans sisterhood. The novella’s protagonists feud over whether to assimilate into heteronormative life or pursue radical separatism; they abrade one another as only true family can. “You have to understand somebody to be so cruel,” says Peters. “Cruelty has a kind of intimacy to it.”
If cruelty requires intimacy, so does humour. Like Jonathan Franzen, Peters extracts her best one-liners from microscopic awareness of her characters’ foibles. “Franzen and I are both Midwesterners, so there’s a shared sensibility there,” she agrees. Fellow Midwesterners David Foster Wallace and the Coen brothers have also influenced her dark comedy. You can hear all their voices in lines like these: “Digna’s personality changed ... and ‘our love lost its rhythm’, which was Lexi’s surprisingly poetic way of saying that, in fits of jealousy, Digna repeatedly beat the shit out of her.”
Peters is a natural heir to these established humorists. She also owes much to the independent trans writing scene she emerged from; her wit is sharp in part because she honed it in a brutally funny community. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones saves all its best zingers for trans-girl-on-trans-girl violence.
From self-publishing to mainstream acclaim, Peters has kept questioning the boundary between cis and trans experience. “The things trans people feel are things cis people feel,” she says. “Confusion about sexuality, desire to perform one’s gender, weird feelings about sex and fetish, shame.”
“[Stag Dance] is the end of a 10-year project that includes Detransition, Baby,” she says. “My hope and my feeling is that [the books] speak to each other and that my preoccupations have remained the same. If you look at this collection, there’s a handful of characters that identify politically as trans. But a lot of other characters don’t fit into what you would call modern trans politics. They’re not able to speak to it.”
Instead Peters’s characters illuminate the dark shadows of the subconscious, upturning long-held pieties and half-chewed precepts. If sunlight is the best disinfectant, Stag Dance is a kajillion-watt quasar destined to reach the darkest corners of every taboo. For anyone nursing secret shame – that is, for anyone Irish – this book will be a succour.
