In The Wake of The Only Trans Novel

a good old-fashioned blog post about Torrey Peters, “Stag Dance," and parody

In the car the other night, my friend and I got stuck laughing at a passing thought: “It’s so weird that Detransition, Baby is like, thee Trans Novel.”

I have tried and failed to write this introduction several times over; I struggle to let such a wildly false statement sit, even rhetorically. Peters is not the only trans woman whose fiction is in stock at the local Barnes and Noble. DtB isn’t the only text to get optioned for movies and television. It’s litfic! About millennials! in NYC! It clearly wasn’t the first book to cover that territory. Besides, even a brief sojourn into the most popular book spaces, either online or in-person, makes it clear that such a market is dwarfed by genre fiction and YA nonsense.

And who gives a fuck about too-broad market conjecture? When it comes to other trans writers who have published major work in the past five years, the list is luxurious: Allison Rumfitt, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Jamie Hood, Grace Byron, Eric LaRocca, Davey Davis, T. Fleischmann, Kay Gabriel, Jackie Ess, Imogen Binnie, Akwaeke Emezi, Casey Plett, Aurora Mattia, and those are just the names I can think of in 30 secondds while staring absentmindedly at one of my bookshelves. There are many more. I am not even considering Topside Press and its ilk, which Peters herself has labeled as a major inspiration for her work. Detransition, Baby is part of a massive contemporary movement that began before Peters first published in a literary journal and has only continued to proliferate in the past four years.

It is futile, then, for me to offer a critique couched in some vague anecdotal evidence. I doubt where it’s even relevant that my boss, or my Midwestern godmother, or the book club stalwarts, had their first and maybe only exposure to a book about trans people, by a trans person, in DtB. It probably doesn’t matter that this novel is or was the only novel to shape your average NPR listener’s perspective on trans people, alongside dozens of interactions with us and hundreds of monologues on our existence from various pundits. It is likely not worth mentioning that it was the only book written by a trans person on the New York Times list of the 100 Greatest Books of the 21st Century.

Because, to trans people, Detransition, Baby was just another book - one we read and discussed casually, just like a dozen other books - ones by our friends, and friends of friends, and exes, and mutuals, and mentors, and distant idols. There is a context here so obvious and omnipresent for anyone even minorly aware of trans realism that framing DtB as a uniquely tokenized publication, one somehow representative not just of a population’s artistic capabilities or political preoccupations but the material mundanities of our lives, felt like an overly simplistic conclusion.

But to the rest of the world, Detransition, Baby was it. Here was a text meant to encapsulate an entire subculture, an authentic peepshow into trans identity, courtesy of the Big Four. Perhaps I shudder at the broad claim that DtB has been put on a pedestal not because of the copious evidence and perspectives I can offer to the contrary, but rather because I believe such a funneled perspective does a disservice not only to a multi-faceted cultural moment that has been coalescing over the past decade, but also to Peters herself.

What was so funny about Detransition Baby’s success, I think, is that the prevailing takeaway from my cohort was that the book was satirical. Sure, the central tension of DtB - whether those so defined by their own reinvention, perversity, and death drive could create stable, sustainable domesticity - was earnest, tragic, and transparently affecting. But this was a novel dedicated to “divorced cis women” who Peters compares to trans women. Peters subverted the millennial narcissism of infinite self-discovery with a that treated normative desires as if they were profound acts of deviancy. It read like Paul Verhoven’s Normal People. It was thrilling to read a book that so precisely deflected assimilationist narratives beneath the pristine veneer of a middlebrow tearjerker tour-de-force. How do you follow that up?

In a way, Stag Dance doesn’t. A collection of four novellas (though, in press, they are referred to as “one novel and three stories”), half of it technically pre-dates her debut. The two stories that bookend the collection were available for free on her website as e-books between 2016 and 2021 (alongside a now ironically-titled zine called “How to Become a Really Really Not Famous Trans Writer Lady”). I have had those PDFs on my hard drive for years and I won’t give them up now. Like my files for The Earthquake Room or Nevada, their digital nature does not preclude the books from a worn texture. These books have been copied, passed around, and screenshotted amongst my peers. When I spoke about my bookshelf earlier, I imagined these there.

The book starts with “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” a post-apocalyptic bit of speculative fiction about a world where all humans lose the ability to produce hormones, thus rendering everybody trans. The irony of this thought experimentation is that, in the end, “nobody” is trans anymore. Some people were trans, like the protagonist and her one-time codependent best friend, but t4t tattoos are confusing now, funny vestiges of a way of thinking about bodies that serves no function anymore. What at first seems like it might turn into a utopian thought experiment. A wasteland road trip through the Pacific Northwest is interspersed with flashbacks to arguments between these two trans women, or between one of them and a man they’re fucking. There is a prevailing exhaustion in the girls’ words, a disdain for their status as more visible aberrations. It is cathartic and relatable. But the future segments interrogate this anger in more provocative ways. This is a story where two women are so fed up with the world, with each other, that they accidentally render the “thing” that defines their sense of self universal - and thus, anonymous. Not 40 pages into Stag Dance and Peter has reaffirmed her passion for Schrodinger’s Parody. She provokes the reader with a paradox she refuses to resolve: Whether trans women could even stand hanging out with one another, if they didn’t, like, have to.

The eponymous novella, which comprises almost half the book’s length, follows a group of 19th century secluded lumberjacks as they organize a dance where several of the men will show up ‘as women.’ When our narrator, Babe Bunyan, the biggest and burliest of them all, volunteers to dress as a woman, he is put in catty competition with an effeminate twink, vying for the attention of the group’s leader. Here Peters turns her gaze towards the historical queer underground, painting it as one both uninhibited and entirely lacking in solidarity. The narrator practically bashful in his outpouring vulnerabilities, yet the joy of the text is derived from a procession of little jokes about fumbling through an early queerness, in all senses of the term. That tension nicely suits Peters’ form; though the plot reads, on paper, like a fable, Peters writes with an achingly modern sensibility.

The tall tale of “Stag Dance” is not just the folk monsters that stalk the men, but also our collective ability to draw a straight line between us and some elusive, unsurveilled, prelapsarian queer underground. Peters projects herself onto these men with an open heart. Her strongmen speak with different words and offer different details than her contemporary characters, but they do not use different sentence patterns.

Perhaps that’s why I find “Stag Dance,” despite being a clear scene-to-scene evolution for Peters’ prose, a bit of a dud, particularly its ending. I generally dislike when the deus-ex-machina of a tale is also a metaphor, especially when it’s a big, broad visual gag after a hundred pages of smaller, funnier linguistic ones. Of course, taking a more rigidly auteurist approach to the collection means that even a disappointing tale offers welcome insight. Peters does not work in pastiche. Similar to Peters’ total disinterest in the machinations of the virus in the opening novella, any pretense of genre fiction is more just a set-up for a punchline.

“The Masker,” Peters’ other previously published novella, is some of the meanest fiction I have ever read, and a nice reminder of how odd, it is, that Torrey Peters is the author that Gen-X Democrats are most likely to have read. The story like it could fall out from the binding if you don’t pinch the spine just right, the body of the book rejecting one of its organs. I cannot read it without seeing the dysphoric cartoons scattered throughout its original print layout. Its lurid, omnidirectional cruelty knows no bounds. In terms of my own practice, there are few pieces of writing more directly influential. What a gnarly piece of work. That something so fully to a perpetually in-circulation still so wholly feels like some shit you’d pick up for a buck at a zine market is proof of Peters’ voice.

It is also a nice reminder that, in spite of her (externally appointed) position as a representative of Trans Literature, she is still writing for trans people - often specifically trans women. “The Masker” is about fetishization as a violence, how easily we demonize trans women who seek to protect us, how we talk ourselves out of our own actualization in favor of some dehumanizing ritualistic “third option.” If you, dear reader, only read one thing by Torrey Peters, let it be this.

I wanted to discuss “The Chaser” last, though it is placed second in the text itself, asit is by far my favorite thing Peters has ever published. A virtuosic riff on the mid-century bildingsroman, a writer’s-workshop-ass boarding school showpiece, and a cutting story of the adolescent obsession with queerness as a hidden, compartmentalized thing. The story of a Quaker school boy who steals a dress for his roommate to wear when they fuck at night, Peters writes with unsparing clarity about the ways children seek at once to both consume and destroy anyone who represents unfulfilled parts of themselves. It makes my heart implode that she also writes with tenderness, that they destroy themselves for each other like the faggots and transexuals who have come before them, that the boys really love each other, that they must let their self-destructive hypocrisy ruin childhood innocence on the way to being the person the other already sees them to be. By the time they are kissing, covered in pig’s blood, in the middle of the field, you see their lives ahead of them and yourself behind them. It is such a staggeringly precise story, a perfect inversion of the Knowles and Salingers associated so heavily with being their age. It is strongest rendition of everything Peters has been up to in her work heretofore, a reaffirmation that no matter the marketing complex behind her output, she is still writing for trans people, not just about us.

I adored reading Stag Dance. It’s a victory lap, a battle cry, a referendum, a compilation of experiments. Torrey Peters is a rare talent, one we are lucky is getting financed on such a scale. The four stories taken as a whole, as varied as they are in tenor and construction, share one undeniable, hysterical throughline. How do you follow-up the only book people will ever read about being trans? A bunch of stories about the freaks who aren’t. Duh.

love ya lots,

helmet girl