Can a Trans Writer Be America’s Next Great Novelist? Torrey Peters Thinks So.

“Perhaps Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel,” wrote Professor Grace Lavery in The Guardian of the debut novel by Torrey Peters. This sentiment was commonplace in 2021, when the book took the literary world by storm. At the time, author Meredith Talusan explored the book’s unusually broad popularity, writing that Destransition, Baby, which follows three characters with different gender experiences that consider raising a baby together, “not only connects with cis readers at a thematic level, but also amplifies the novel’s resonance through its link with the long tradition of the white, middle-class American novel.”

Case in point: the headline for The New York Times obituary of Phillip Roth, considered a champion of the white, middle-class, American novel, read: “Towering Novelist Who Explored Lust, Jewish Life and America, Dies at 85.” Roth was able to write about the Jewish experience while speaking to multiple audiences. He was deemed a towering—or, in other words, great—American novelist without sacrificing his minority identity, his Jewishness. Is it possible that a trans writer can achieve the same, allowing the genre of trans fiction to transcend its tokenization? And can a trans writer provoke similar questions about what it means to be American while writing about the trans experience? Perhaps that writer is Torrey Peters, whose new book of short stories, Stag Dance, takes readers to a cross-dressing convention in Vegas, an illegal winter logging camp in the early 1900s, and a post-apocalyptic world where a contagion has ceased all natural hormone production in humans. Last week, I visited her Brooklyn apartment, filled with narrow but towering bookshelves, to find out.

———

ADAM ELI: Hi, Torrey.

TORREY PETERS: Hi. Thanks for coming over.

ELI: Absolutely. I’m in your apartment in Brooklyn, but you just got back from Colombia.

PETERS: Yeah.

ELI: And you also live in Vermont?

PETERS: I like to keep it a little bit of mystique as to where I am. The Vermont place is actually a 12 by 12 log cabin. It’s not totally livable.

ELI: 12 by 12?

PETERS: It’s tiny. There’s no plumbing or electricity, and you have to walk to it. It really is like, an 1880s kind of situation. But for the last four years, I’ve spent every winter on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. I started going there during the pandemic to try and write and get away from things, from the American context. Actually, I am applying for Colombian residency. I decided to do that the last couple weeks because there have been so many anti-trans executive orders. For instance, my name was on a list that some Republican congressman brought up as the reason to deny funding to the Edinburgh Literary Festival.

ELI: Wow.

PETERS: The United States had given money to Edinburgh to bring over “transatlantic writers.” Because they brought me and I, ostensibly, promote what they are calling gender ideology—which I think just means being trans or writing about trans people—they cut the funding to Edinburgh. Trans people are no longer eligible for NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grants and things like that. I want to be able to write against that, but I also want to be able to have mental space and not just constantly be in the maelstrom of bullshit. So I’ve been in Colombia the last couple years. And while being in Colombia, I have started reading more Latin American writers. When you think about fascism and right-wing governments, oftentimes people think about European history, but it’s been flaring up on and off all throughout the Americas. There’s a history of Latin American writers who know how to respond to this, how to continue making art in it, how to group together and go other places for a while. [Gabriel] García Márquez finished One Hundred Years of Solitude in Mexico City. Roberto Bolaño was writing in Mexico. Writing a novel is a three-year project, so in anticipation of what seems to be happening in the States, I’m more and more trying to establish a place to look from outside of it as well as from within it.

ELI: You mentioned a few writers, and the person who comes to mind, for me, is Reinaldo Arenas from Cuba. Are there any other authors writing about fascism that you think would be interesting for American audiences to read?

PETERS: Those writers that I’m talking about aren’t actually writing directly about fascism. Mario Vargas Llosa, for instance—although he’s Peruvian—wrote about a Dominican dictator in The Feast Of The Goat as a stand-in for things that were happening elsewhere in Latin America. I think as a novelist, oftentimes, you’re not writing one-to-one like, “This happened in my country, and now I have to write about this dictator who is fucking things over.” Again, if you think about Bolaño, he’s writing about a context of thought that was endemic, and that’s the kind of thing that I want to do. There’s a style of American thought that I grew up around that always has had a propensity to turn dark, but is especially dark right now. And weirdly, you can trace that to trans issues, which have ended up at the center of American darkness around the manipulation of ideas and fear. I would not have guessed that transness would be one of the keys to understanding the rise of American fascism, but here we are. So how do you actually step back to think about the connections between being trans and something as stupid as crypto?

ELI: Yeah, and how that may, or may not, relate to writing fiction.

PETERS: Fiction’s about pattern finding, right? Those connections are so diffuse that you can’t trace them all, but you can find a story that evokes them. That, to me, is the moment we’re in. I have to be able to see that stuff, and part of it is stepping back and trying to see the big picture without the day-to-day fucking you up.

ELI: That makes sense. These three stories read as classically fiction in some ways. They’re not horror or fantasy or hyperrealist. So my question is, is it possible to be a trans fiction writer that isn’t responding to an urgent political crisis? Or is writing a story about two people jerking off in boarding school, as they do in “The Chaser,” a luxury of the Obama era?

PETERS: I think it’s possible to be just a fiction writer, and I don’t think that it’s a luxury. Oftentimes, what fiction does is approach the problems of the moment from the side. By that, I mean we’re in this era where if I give you an intellectual case for something, you’ve already heard it before. The internet is full of people telling you how to intellectualize a problem. What I think people actually respond to these days is emotional situations, where emotions are the side door into changing how people think. They’ll feel something, and then having felt it, they’ll intellectualize the reason why they feel something. As a fiction writer, when I write about two kids jerking off at boarding school or giving each other blowjobs on the soccer field, what’s actually going on is—you have a character who is like a classic bro and you have a character who is feminine. You can feel what is between them—both the affection, the desire, the love, and all the shame that’s preventing that from happening. Then you can say, “Why are these people ashamed?” The answer becomes things like, “Well, maybe it’s homophobia. Maybe the bro who’s narrating it is afraid of his attraction to his roommate.” Or maybe because that roommate is feminine, there’s a misogyny that the character feels towards anybody who is feminine. He’s so interested in impressing other people with what a tough man he is that he actually can’t accept the love that’s available for him. From there you can say, “Well, this is the cost of misogyny. This is the cost of homophobia.” But if I started by saying, “Hey, homophobia is bad, you shouldn’t do it,” nobody is going to listen to me. If you’ve been watching these two kids hookup in the woods at a boarding school and you felt what they felt, you’re willing to go to these places politically and intellectually that I think you’re not willing to go otherwise. So the work of a fiction writer now is to soften people up to ways of thinking that come from how they feel first, rather than trying to convince people. You can give the greatest reasons in the world for why people should respect me as a trans woman. They’re not going to. But if I can make people feel something, they come around to thinking it’s on their own terms because they felt it first.

ELI: Absolutely. Is that always true of American fiction?

PETERS: I think it’s come and gone. I think a lot about journalism during the Vietnam War when people were so polarized over the war that, essentially, they couldn’t hear stories about it without immediately reverting to their opinions. Out of that, you had the rise of Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe and Hunter S.Thompson, who were telling these stories that were strange and emotional and included novelistic details. People began feeling things about the era and the culture rather than thinking about them. So it’s not new to this moment. I think that we go in and out of periods where people are able to hear each other. For writers like Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, the work that they’re doing is political work, but oftentimes the books that people felt changed them were books in which the approach was emotional. People talk about Beloved and the horrors of slavery, but they weren’t thinking about cotton economies; they were thinking about the anguish that’s written in that book.

ELI: How would you define the idea of the Great American Novel, or the Great American Novelist?

PETERS: I think those people I mentioned did that. Someone like Philip Roth was willing to be Philip Roth for 40 years. When Philip Roth started, he actually did appear onstage with writers like James Baldwin as a minority writer, but by the time he died, his literature got taken up by the mainstream. I think a lot about who gets considered to be a great American writer and how you need the luxury of longevity to make yourself into something like that. James Baldwin didn’t. He is a great American writer, but he wasn’t talked about as a great American writer because he was just so fucking exhausted by the time he died. He’s going to court cases and trying to show up for all these people and he just doesn’t have the energy to write, even though he was writing at such a high level. For me, as a trans writer, is the Philip Roth trajectory available to me? Could I be commenting on American stuff long enough that a trans perspective becomes an American one? Or is my trajectory much more like what happened to James Baldwin, where you’re just fighting for so long that eventually you get tired and can’t produce at the rate that someone like Philip Roth did? Some of that is what you can do as a writer, and some of it is the kind of headwinds you’re facing in society. What’s interesting, for me, is whether a queer writer is going to be able to do that—or if trying to get people to see what you’re doing eventually just wears you out.

ELI: And how do you feel right now? Tired, or energized?

PETERS: I feel energized, actually. I’m running into a context that’s actively hostile, a government that has put my life at the center of its policy. Although it’s a horrible time, it’s actually a huge opportunity. There’s a lot of people who have said that we don’t have to care about trans lives. Like, the fucking New York Times op-ed recently said, “These trans issues are marginal.” Well, I’d be happy to be left alone. But if you put our lives at the center of your political policy, your package of political repression, then it also offers us a huge opportunity to be like, “Okay, let us tell you what we really are.” They can try and shut us up, but if we’re making the better art and we’ve got the more compelling stories and you’ve put us at the center, then it’s a huge opportunity for us. It is such a moment of backlash and crackdown, but at the same time I’ve never seen so many trans books published by presses. Emily St. James’s Woodworking came out this month, Denne Michele Norris has a book this year, Jamie Hood has a book this year, Harron Walker has a book this year, Grace Byron, Tommy Dorfman and Rose Dommu all have books this year. 

ELI: When it comes to the book that we’re talking about, which I loved, the first thing that many readers familiar with you might notice is that this is a big departure from your previous novel. Writing a book in rural lumberjack slang is very different from the urban comedy of Destransition, Baby.

PETERS: It was the only thing I could write in some ways. I had done so much on Detransition, Baby, and there were so many expectations about following that up. It was like, “Well, let me write a book that nobody thinks that they want.” Nobody was expecting it, and in a weird way, that gave me total freedom. I wasn’t writing under the shadow of Detransition, Baby. I was writing in a totally different way, and I found all this stuff that was very interesting. Because I think a lot of the language that we use in modern times—especially language around gender—gets immediately subsumed and taken over and calcified by discourse. If I say something like, “gender dysphoria,” you hardly even hear that word. It’s like a rock falling on the ground. You don’t feel anything. So I started writing this book with this lumberjack character, and then I started researching logger slang. In developing this character, I found that having to write about things that I care about in a voice that’s totally different from mine actually made these things almost brand-new to me. For instance, there’s a scene in the book where the lumberjack goes to a dance with other loggers. They’re lonely, it’s the winter, they’re working in the woods, and they decide to stay and dance together. Some of the loggers cut out this brown fabric triangle that they hang over their crotch, and that signifies that they’re going to dance as women. One of the things that I’ve always been curious about is the way that, with trans people, your body becomes more than just itself. You can wear heels, and that changes how you feel. Or in sex, somebody might wear a strap-on. In all these different ways, the trans body can be an assemblage of different stuff, and I often have a hard time talking about that in normal language. But when I had to explain it in the voice of a lumberjack, it was so simple and weirdly poetic. He wanted to have sex with this guy, and he’s wearing a brown triangle. When he is trying to find an analogy for it, he remembers in his weird lumberjack slang a degloving accident that another lumberjack came up with, in the way that lumberjacks are always hurting themselves and creating prostheses. The prostheses become part of their bodies as they’re navigating the woods. Similarly, that’s what he was doing with his gender. Essentially, he wanted a prosthesis—which was just this brown triangle to signify gender—to also become part of his body. So he comes up with a speech in lumberjack language, which is full of words like “backwoods tinkering” and “shadetree sawbones,” which actually gives feeling to the things that have become so calcified in our discourse. To hear a lumberjack say it, it’s defamiliarized. You hear it anew and you actually feel it.

ELI: Something that really came through to me in the lumberjack story, even though the lumberjack’s situation and language is very different from the world I live in, is the envy of others. There’s another character in the camp who one might describe as “twink-y.” I have no idea where the identity of twink enters that space, but it feels like the lumberjack is constantly jealous—

PETERS: Totally. Envious and jealous.

ELI: There’s envy. There’s sisterhood. Then there’s a whole bunch more envy and anger.

PETERS: And resentment. That’s the thing—a lumberjack story allows me to talk about things that are really dangerous in the trans community. One of the things that I think is central to that story is the question of, “Who gets to transition and how easy it is for different people to transition?” The party line is that you declare yourself a gender, and then everybody will respect it. But the way it actually works is that you declare yourself a gender, and then you have to negotiate that with the entire world all the time. Different people have different levels of ease in that negotiation—whether you have money, what your childhood was like, and just what your body is. It’s not like everybody can do the same five steps and have a transition. One person might have to do 20 steps and they still might not be accepted, and some other person can do two steps.

ELI: In our preparation for this conversation, we spoke about how, in certain respects, we’re all trans, which is one of themes within the book. Could you talk a little bit about that?

PETERS: Sure. I think of the stories as a little bit kaleidoscopic. It’s playing with a lot of different themes in trans stories. There’s four pieces. One you could say is a little bit post-apocalyptic; one is a teen romance; one is this tall tale, lumberjack Americana; and the last one is a body horror story. If you look at all of the characters, you see that only maybe four of them actually identify as trans in some ways, and yet I think the stories are very trans in what they’re interested in.

ELI: And the characters are all different types on the spectrum of gender.

PETERS: Exactly. A lot of times when people talk about trans stuff, they think that the binary that needs to be broken is male/female. But the binary that I was the most interested in when I was writing the stories is the binary between cis and trans. I often hear people talking about trans lives as though it must be something other or hard to understand. Like, “I just don’t know what it’s like to be born in a different body.” But, in fact, most of the things that make me trans are things that everybody else, including cis people, experience. Like, how do I get other people to desire me as I want to be? How do I present myself to other people so that they see a coherent piece of self? How do I negotiate with the body that I have to get what I want? That sounds very trans, but actually some guy who is like, “I want to be a rugged tool-using guy.” Listen to anybody on Twitter complain about going on Tinder and they’re like, “I was four inches too short for people to consider me a rugged guy.” These are the things that are the building blocks of how I came to my understanding of myself as trans, and I think that everybody’s actually doing it all the time. So if that’s the case, at what point does somebody become trans? What distinguishes that experience from the guy who is trying to have a “rugged guy” identity but who has a body people don’t immediately identify as rugged? Is that experience a trans experience? Most people would say no, but I would say that actually that frustration is very much like my frustration as a trans person. Again, the boarding school story that you talked about is not narrated by a trans person. That’s a story narrated by a soccer-playing bro whose problems are, in fact, the same as the potentially trans roommate that he’s attracted to. How does he want the world to see him? How can he get over the shame of who he wants to present himself to be to his father and to his peers? That’s a trans problem, and it was no stretch for me to write that narrator, because his problems are my problems.

ELI: That’s beautifully said. I really do think that that comes through in the book, and that speaks to something else I wanted to bring up. In the reader’s edition, there’s a beautiful letter at the front. Is it okay if I read a part of it to you?

PETERS: Yeah, please.

ELI: “This my attempt to explore the emotional, lived questions the binary between cis and trans provokes, feel around in the murky and taboo edges of transness, where it is not even clear what transness or cisness even is, where imperfect politics and outer sexuality lurk. Where we are just people yearning, crashing, loving and messing up”. Could you talk to me a little bit about that quote?

PETERS: Yeah. I’m very interested in the emotional avalanches to these sorts of things. When you’ve met enough trans people you realize, “You can end up at this destination coming from all four cardinal directions, and the experience is not necessarily the same.” When I say that I’m trans, what I’m essentially saying is that I’m standing in solidarity. I feel an affinity with other trans people. It doesn’t mean that everything we’ve experienced is the same. It doesn’t mean that we have decided to make the same choices. I don’t think there’s one thing that you can diagnose and be like, “Well, you feel this way, do the equation, now you’re trans.” Trans is just a name for a bunch of people who decide to have each other’s back. Once I’ve decided that the most important thing for me about being trans is having the backs of other people who decide to stand with me, then there’s not any real reason why I can’t expand that to all sorts of people, including people who don’t necessarily decide that the word trans applies to them. I’m trying to present these stories that, to me, are showing the emotional core of how someone like me might end up identifying as trans. None of it is easy or clean—it is not like you go to a doctor and get  a diagnosis. In fact, it’s things like showing up at a cross-dressing event in Vegas and running into a female masker and the kind of emotions that brings up, both in terms of feeling repelled and feeling attracted. Those are the weird decisions and choices and experiences, rather than any kind of easy metric, or even similarities between trans people.

ELI: That view of transness—of unity and having other people’s back—makes me think of our mutual beloved person Cecilia [Gentili], which is how we met. Something I wanted to talk to you about is how Cecilia’s legacy is appropriately discussed often in its grandeur, but especially around community organizing and healthcare. Something that gets a bit overshadowed is her artistic contributions, specifically her literary contributions. I know that you were in a writing group with her.

PETERS: Yeah. Cecilia’s an incredible example of that because Cecilia is somebody who—I don’t know where she had the energy for it—had people’s back, and not only in a general sense. She had this strange magic of making you feel like you knew the real her. Everybody who ran into her feels that. My version of Cecilia was as a writer. I started out hanging with her and Cyd Nova back in, I don’t know, 2018. We had a writing group. I was in the midst of writing Detransition, Baby and she was performing these spoken stories about her life. She was like, “I actually really think I want to write these down. How do I capture the extemporaneous spoken quality of them in a story?” So she, Cyd, and I met for a number of years, and eventually she got a draft. These stories were really impressive, interesting literary pieces. I think it was last winter I saw her show that was based on those pieces performed by nine or ten other trans women. I was so used to how Cecilia performed it, but when Peppermint performed it, it felt like a totally different piece. The fact that this piece could be performed by all sorts of different personalities shows its literary merit. In the same way that a Shakespeare sonnet can be performed 20 different ways, the pieces that Cecilia wrote not only can be performed 20 different ways, they were performed all these different ways, and they hit no matter who the actress was. They just worked.

ELI: And they’re funny.

PETERS: And moving. I’m so pissed, I know she was working on a sequel of pieces that were going to be about her life after she moved from Argentina to Miami, and then another series of pieces about New York City. She and I had actually tried to write a screenplay together. It was based very loosely on her feelings about meeting her boyfriend’s Brooklyn family. It’s just this huge loss that we never got to hear and see all that stuff.

ELI: When it comes to film and TV, everyone is going to kill me if I don’t ask—are we getting a Detransition, Baby movie? A miniseries? Are you working on anything in that space?

PETERS: I think Detransition, Baby is dead as a television show. Somebody else might resurrect it, but it was just the vagaries of Hollywood. They fired all of the executives who had bought Detransition, Baby, which I’ve subsequently learned is just something that happens when a writer goes to Hollywood. Lilly Wachowski and I wrote a pilot for the first story in this book called Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones, which was about a contagion that causes everybody to stop being able to produce their own hormones. Everybody has to, essentially, choose their own gender the same way that trans people do. Everybody has to make an explicit choice that was previously a tacit choice, and that causes society to fall into conflict. It was super cool writing with Lilly. I’m somebody who writes in prose, so I don’t think about how every little detail will look. The whole opening scene ended up revolving around somebody losing their shoe and having to run without a shoe. That doesn’t work in prose. [But with screenwriting] you can anchor things around all these different images. She was just so cool to work with, and I hope it continues to move along and that she gets to direct it, because it will be so fucking cool.

ELI: Well, I think we’re all hoping for that. Thank you so much for talking with me.

PETERS: Of course. Thank you for speaking with me.