With her groundbreaking debut, Detransition, Baby, author Torrey Peters unwittingly became the face of an emerging culture war. As one of the first Transgender literary talents to be acquired by a major US publisher, she found herself equally heralded and scrutinised. In the UK, her longlisting for the prestigious Women’s Prize was met with a – frankly insane – open letter signed by long dead writers including Emily Dickinson, opposing the inclusion of a Trans woman.
Four years on, Peters has never been so galvanised. Since President Trump was inaugurated, he has repeatedly monstered the Transgender community as a scapegoat. Passports, sports and healthcare have all been targeted under swingeing presidential orders. “There was a shock for the first month,” Torrey sighs from her home in Brooklyn. “Now it’s like, these guys are fucking buffoons. We’re smarter and better than them. We make better art and we’re better at strategizing.”
And that’s exactly what Torrey is doing – strategizing. The community are rallying; putting plans in place to safeguard their future, their healthcare, their papers. This is what it has come to. “There are people who are very scared, but the weirdos and freaks are not scared,” she says. “This has always been an outlaw culture; this was always against authority. If you look at these [new] laws, we’re reverting to a mid-’00s situation, and that was actually a time of Trans culture flourishing. That’s when we got together to make it happen. We’re getting together; we’re figuring out ways of doing things. There’s a feeling of solidarity that I haven’t felt in 10 years. Instead of bickering about, Am I doing Trans right? It’s like ,Oh shit, we have an enemy and we have our work cut out.”
It’s no coincidence, in that case, that Peters’ diverse new collection Stag Dance, which consists of a novella, and three further short stories, centres around aspects of gendered experience. “The theme is sisterhood.” she explains. “I don’t mean that in some sort of soft focus, we all love each other way. Sisters can be cruel, but there’s an intimacy among sisters when you’re set up to compete for a limited amount of family resources. That intimacy allows for betrayal and cruelty which are in these stories. I think of Trans women as my sisters; we can hurt each other in ways that no one else can, but also, the wordlessness of understanding is incredibly sustaining. They already know.”
Her novella centres around burly Babe Bunyan, a lumberjack who surprises himself and his fellow loggers when he decides to don a fabric vagina to become a ‘skooch’ at the titular dance. This decision draws him into the orbit of the camp’s resident pretty boy, the mercurial Lisen, who is in a secret tryst with boss Daglish. “Trans women are set up as rivals,” says Torrey. “In Stag Dance, it seems like Babe and Lisen are competing for the love of a cis man, but actually their primary occupation is with each other. In love triangles, you actually spend all your time thinking about your rival. It’s a weird love, a weird obsession. Who gets the real estate in your brain? That’s who you’re in the relationship with.”
Torrey was in the middle of writing a screenplay when inspiration struck. “I spent the last two years building a sauna in the woods,” she says. “I wondered who used to live there. Who were these guys in the cold and mud? I read a book called Readjusting America’s Frontier Past, in which I learned about the stag dances where men who were working camps in the west, would get lonely and throw dances where some of the men would come as women. One of the ways you’d signify you were a woman was a triangle of brown fabric. So on the nose! If I made it up, people would be like Torrey, you’re a pervert!”
As a Trans writer, Torrey often finds herself the subject of fixation, but Stag Dance deserves recognition for its sheer technical brilliance. Babe’s vernacular, at times, feels almost foreign to English itself, with wordplay that dances on its own. “The voice of Babe came to me in his logger dialect. I knew the syntax – sort of a mix of Moby Dick and Cormac McCarthy; that Americana feel,” she explains. “There’s a book, Lumberjack Lingo, from 1941 where children catalogued the phrases their parents used. They’re chewy. The word for an egg was a ‘cackleberry’! I love ‘Scandahoovian Dymanite’ for tobacco. You can understand what is meant, but the texture is so rich.”
This attention to linguistic detail also ties into Torrey’s exploration of transition in Stag Dance, where the word ‘Trans’ is never mentioned, and Lisen’s pronouns shift subtly from he to she. “What actually constitutes a transition?” asks Torrey. “Is it just a series of symbols and do those symbols sit uneasily? [Babe] was crying out to talk about it in his way. A phrase like gender dysphoria doesn’t exist, so he says “no mirror has ever befriended me”. That’s gender dysphoria, but that’s how it feels. Writing as a logger allowed me to explore what had calcified in discourse style language. What is the real sadness?”
Indeed, at the heart of Stag Dance, gender and transness are ever-present, though often unnamed. The camp’s brutal, rugged conditions, rooted in a harsh wilderness, are inherently masculine. “That was a crisis for me as I was building my sauna,” she says. “I transitioned, and then years later I’m out in the woods with a drill and a hammer. How come all of this stuff is so male-coded? What got me out of it was talking to Vermont women. This shit is only male-coded if you’re from the city! If you’re a woman in Vermont, of course you’re out there in the mud! Women are building stuff; they all know how to split wood. What is gender when it’s not being performed in hegemonic urban spaces?”
In her bestselling debut Detransition, Baby, Torrey invited cisgender readers into the lives of trans women through the universal lens of motherhood. But when it comes to her new collection, which delves into the often-complex dynamics between Trans people, did she worry it might alienate cis readers? “The reality is, gender is always a negotiation,” she says. “Cis people negotiate too – whether it’s through makeup or get in the pickup truck, we each signify how we want to be treated in the world. At what point does someone become trans? People think of it as quite ‘other’ but, in fact, the emotions of being trans are familiar to cis people. Desire, the difference between how you’re seen and how you want to be seen – cis people understand this, too. Ninety nine percent of the Trans experience is also the cis experience.”
It’s why, in the collection, only a handful of characters outwardly use the label of Transgender. “In The Chaser [a lusty boarding school piece exploring the relationship between a jock and an effeminate student], he’s not a trans narrator; he’s a bro with weird feelings.” says Torrey. “He’s going through problems because there’s a shame over his desires towards Robbie. What he goes through is a very Trans experience though – he experiences shame, and doesn’t know what he means for his labels. It’s all relatable because the trans experience isn’t the Trans experience, it’s the human experience.”
As she contemplates her next steps, Torrey is already thinking about her next big project. While she’ll be spending much of 2025 touring, she’s also planning a deep dive into the political and economic forces that intersect with Transness. “I plan to write an epic about politic economy and power and how it relates to Transness. I don’t think it’s a mistake that transness is at the centre of so much policy. A part of me thinks there’s a web that connects crypto, right-wing memes to the thinking that makes transness possible. What the fuck is going on? But I’m not the writer that can write that yet.”
Just a few years ago, Torrey wasn’t a lumberjack either, and yet here she is evolving, redefining herself and defying expectations. Her transformation has been nothing short of remarkable, and it’s clear that she’s only just getting started. With her distinct voice and relentless drive, she may well be on her way to becoming the Great American Novelist the country didn’t know it needed. And as she continues to break boundaries, it’s impossible not to wonder where her next reinvention will take her.
