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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.”
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Stag Dance is out now
