Author Torrey Peters Breaks New Ground with 'Detransition Baby'

Four years ago, Torrey Peters made history with her debut novel Detransition, Baby when she became one of the first trans fiction writers to be published by a major US publishing house.

The novel, a sharp comedy of manners set in the 2010s in Brooklyn's trans community, was a critical and commercial success — a bestseller and winner of the Pen/Hemingway Award, Amazon buying the TV rights, and a spot on The New York Times' best books of the 21st century list.

Perhaps more importantly, it opened the gates.

\"Even though the political times were better for trans people when Detransition, Baby came out, I was one of one or two trans women with one of the big four presses that year,\" Peters tells ABC Arts. \"This spring, I can think of 15 or 20 myself, and I'm sure there's more that I don't know.\"

In Detransition, Baby three women, trans and cis, are brought together over an unexpected pregnancy. (Supplied)

Nobody, including Peters, thought her follow-up would be historical fiction about 19th-century lumberjacks. Or that the characters would speak using near-indecipherable slang words like crackleberry (eggs) and Scandahoovian Dynamite (tobacco) — all taken from a real dictionary collated by the children of loggers.

While the titular story of Stag Dance, Peters' follow-up collection, is a world away from 2010s Brooklyn, it was that distance that allowed her to approach questions of identity and gender anew.

\"Following Detransition, Baby, I felt like there was pressure on me to do something witty and sparkling,\" says Peters, who was in Australia earlier this year for the Sydney and Melbourne writers' festivals. \"And I was like, 'Well, there probably is not a lot of expectations on me to do the logger thing, so I'm free to do it how I want.'\"

The story was inspired by her own retreat to a long-abandoned log cabin in Vermont, a fixer-upper bought as an escape after the success of Detransition, Baby transformed her into, arguably, the best-known trans writer — overnight to most, though Peters was established within the US's trans literary world via two self-published novellas, which reappear in Stag Dance.

\"Really, it's a shack — 12 feet by 12 feet, no running water, no electricity, an outhouse,\" Peters says. \"It's very cold, muddy and dirty up there. And I loved it, in some ways.

\"The area was previously logged, and it's been about 100 years so the forest has grown up — but I thought about people who were living in that forest without even the mild amenities that I had.\"

During her reading, Peters learned about stag dances, an 18th and 19th-century US tradition where outposts of isolated men would throw parties with a select few acting as women for the night, signified via a triangle cloth placed over their crotch.

\"It seemed like such a funny, potent symbol,\" she says. \"'One of us is a woman, so we just cut some brown fabric and put it over our crotch' — the most on-the-nose, over-simplified thing that you can imagine.

\" I was like, 'I have to write this.' \"

Stag Dance's protagonist is Babe Bunyon — a strong, burly beast of a man who surprises everyone, including himself, by volunteering for an \"ersatz twat\". It's never quite explained why Babe wants to be a \"skooch\" (sexy lady) for the night.

The New Yorker described Stag Dance as \"confronting the unruliness of our desires\". (Supplied)

Instead, it's an \"unwanted yearning\" that arrives and never leaves, though Babe regularly describes his \"uncommon size and strength\" as a source of agony, lamenting his giant feet and strongman muscles.

\"He probably does not see himself very clearly,\" Peters says. \"The ways he insults himself are quite extreme — he says things like, 'You could set a beer glass on my brow shelf,' which is a particular site of anxiety for trans women. So, suddenly, I started lending him my insecurities, things that I actually would never say to anybody.\"

We, in the 21st century, might read Babe as a trans woman experiencing dysmorphia, but he lacks that language — a gift to Peters, who says that these terms, while useful to explain trans experience, are somewhat emotionally \"ossified\" from overuse.

\"With the brow, you're like, 'That's preposterous, you're dysmorphic,'\" Peters says. \"But he would never use a word like that.

\"And trying to have a logger say it without any of the modern language, I rediscovered things that I found pretty magical about the trans experience.\"

Where writing academically about an experience can \"deaden\" it, she says, resisting that language frees up space to focus on the feelings associated with that experience, instead.

At the same time, Peters notes that only a few figures across Stag Dance's four genre-spanning stories — including the apocalyptic Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, teen love story The Chaser, and sexual thriller The Masker — identify as trans.

Babe and most of the other characters fall into what Peters calls the \"weird gender feelings\" category. More broadly, they all experience some disconnect between how they appear to the world and how they feel inside, something Peters says almost everyone can relate to.

\"It's highlighted in trans people, but that's more a result of our society,\" she says. \"It exists in cis people too.\"

Stag Dance arrives in a much different political climate in the US from Detransition, Baby. Some of the second Trump administration's first executive orders removed hard-earned trans support and rights, including the ability to have a different gender from that assigned at birth on a passport, as well as funds supporting trans youth or any program that \"promotes gender ideology\".

When asked if she worries that the political climate will halt trans literature's mainstream success, Peters is adamant it won't. She points towards those 20 books she mentioned earlier, including works by Rose Dommu, Tommy Dorfman, Harron Walker and Emily St. James.

\"Although this era is bad, we have more of a voice than we've ever had before,\" she says.

\"And I think our stories are better, our art is better, our worldview is more joyous and compelling. I think we have a better time. I think we throw better parties and, if people get a chance to see that, I think they're gonna like what we're doing.\"

Torrey Peters' Stag Dance is out now.