Stag Dance

In her genre-bending and gender-bending novella collection, Torrey Peters de/reconstructs gender, transness and identity. Each story set in a different time, place, genre and world, Peters annihilates any possibility of categorisation, of binary, problematising not only the binary between man and woman, but also that of

cisgender and transgender. Like her first novel, Detransition, Baby, Peters is uninterested in making her trans and gender-diverse characters palatable, likeable, or relatable to cisgender people. Instead, her characters are messy, amoral, and achingly human.

The stories range from dystopia, to romance, to fable, to horror. Peters writes of a future in which the body becomes unable to produce gender hormones, so everybody must take hormone enhancement therapy; a Quaker boarding school in which two roommates fool around and discover more about gender and sexuality than they expected; isolated loggers throwing a ‘stag dance’ in which the men can choose to dress as women to be courted by other men; and a trans and cross-dressing event where the lines between gender and fetishism seem to blur.

All characters construct their genders in such complicated ways that in each story, there is no clear boundary between the transgender and the cisgender characters. What do we lose when we make arguments for being a true transwoman, a true crossdresser? Who do we lose when we refuse to allow entry to our communities and identities? What good does it do to us to be a ‘good’ trans person?

These stories are carnal, intimate, raw around the edges – they show a trans femininity that is not always soft and polite, nor hard and harsh. I fell into each story like I was drowning – they were suffocating, inevitable, purifying, lovely. Torrey Peters is a writer I know I will turn to again and again and again.

Peters asks many questions throughout these stories, and answers very few. What does shine throughout is a bone-deep love for trans women, especially trans women who refuse to play by the rules.