Here, Peters talks to Vogue about releasing a book about transness in the current political climate, why she’s no longer bothered about people reading her own life into those of her characters, and why fiction is the perfect “side door” to challenge people’s preexisting views around gender.
Vogue: I’m speaking to you a few weeks out from the book’s publication—when you released Detransition, Baby, it was at the height of the pandemic. How does it feel different this time?
Torrey Peters: I’m excited, but it feels like a totally different thing. I think when I published Detransition, Baby, it was one of the first fiction books by a trans woman about trans women on one of the big four presses in the United States. So it felt like there was a lot of pressure, even sometimes tacitly, to represent. And if you’ve read Detransition, Baby, you’ll know it’s a very particular story. I was never like, “This is the universal trans story.” We’re not all trying to have a baby with our boss. [Laughs.] And I really chafed at the idea that I had to represent all other trans women.
The cool thing now is that I can think of 15, maybe 20 other books by trans writers coming out this spring, which means that I just get to be myself. That also feels good because this book is very much my particular weird shit that I love. But at the same time, obviously, the political climate sucks. I would never have guessed that I was publishing Detransition, Baby in a high watermark for trans rights, but it seems to be the case. And as a result, whereas before I was like, “I don’t want to talk about politics, I just want to talk about literature,” now I feel like if I get a platform, I’m not going to pass it up.
You’re publishing this as a novel and three stories—how did you arrive at that format? And how did you find the right sequencing for them?
I think that the customary or obvious way to do it is to put “Stag Dance” last. But I think “Stag Dance” really questions transition, and the idea of transition. What constitutes a transition? Who gets to transition? Which bodies? And the fact that transition isn’t fair. Some people have an easy time transitioning, some people have a hard time transitioning. One character has a hard time. Another, it’s almost like he can’t not transition. And sometimes transition doesn’t work for people. That’s not really the party line, I think. The party line is you declare that you’re trans and then you transition and you do these steps and everybody’s valid. That’s not an argument that I necessarily think I want to end the book on. I didn’t want to end the book basically being like, transition’s hard. I think what I take away from “The Masker” [the final story in the collection] is that there’s a seduction and a horror of being in a closet, of repressing yourself. I think you can look at the choices that character makes, and hopefully the reader’s like, “Actually, I want to do the opposite.” And even though it’s a dark note to end on, I think it has a call to action that something like “Stag Dance” doesn’t really have. I wanted to end on something that felt like a gut punch, and I want people to walk away and be like, “Yeah, maybe I should make a big decision, even if I’m afraid of it.”
