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