It’s been four years since Torrey Peters published her critically acclaimed debut, Detransition, Baby. That book was, by design, a conventional literary novel, one that explored questions of transition through a clever, and ultimately brutal, reimagining of the marriage plot. Peters’s new book, Stag Dance, feels like a radical departure from that approach — and in a way, a radical return to it, since the three stories collected alongside the titular new novel were originally self-published by Peters in the years preceding her debut. The book’s cast includes boarding-school jocks, fetishists in full-body rubber suits, lonely lumberjacks going courting in the depths of winter. What it does not include, for the most part, is actual trans people, in the modern, GLAAD-approved sense. This is a bit of genius. Peters has discovered a great secret that eludes many marginalized writers, obscured from them by publishers, critics, and the pall of their own anxiety: Sometimes the best way to write about your experience is to stop assuming you know what your experience is. I recently spoke with Peters at her book launch at the Strand in New York, where she delved into her new experiments with style, the limitations of the trans­–cis binary, and what old-timey loggers called chewing tobacco.

Torrey Peters: My first public interaction with you, Andrea, was a little bit of a tiff. Harron Walker wrote a profile of me and in the course of talking to me, I didn’t understand the concept of “on the record.” At the time, Andrea’s incredible essay “On Liking Women” had just come out, and I was probably a bit jealous. I was like, This young upstart wrote a better essay than me. I started complaining about it, and it was all on the record. And then Harron published it. Not only did she publish it, but being a good reporter, she called Andrea and said, “This is what Torrey said about you. What do you think about that?”

Andrea responded very eloquently and I think correctly. I stewed about it. I was like, I don’t know who Andrea thinks she is to talk back to me. I have self-published one novella! And then I was like, I’m going to show her you can’t talk to me that way. But it was a period in my life where I was having a breakup, so I got distracted. And slowly, Andrea started writing more and more pieces. I was like, Well, those are pretty good pieces. Soon she won a Pulitzer. And I was like, Thank God I got distracted.

But I’ve always been curious what would’ve happened had I actually taken on Andrea Long Chu. So I was thinking you should start out by showing me a little bit of what you got. Just roast me for a bit. Show me what I was missing.

Just roast you? 
Just lay into me!

I mean, I don’t want to roast you. You clearly have a big presentation in the morning. You look like you really scored at Women’s Warehouse.
I did, I did.

I do want to know, if you are here, who is working security at Dylan Mulvaney’s book launch?
Come on. I can take it.

You look like the surprise guest at a business-casual gender-reveal party.
It’s a boy. 

Okay. Okay. That’s enough …
I’m so happy that was a review of my suit and not my book.

The book is genuinely so, so good — seriously. And I don’t have that opinion about a lot of things. Not even as a critic, just as a reader. It was honestly so great to read. Let’s do talk about the book. I have all these questions about time and temporality, but the most surface-level version of that is: There is new stuff, and there’s old stuff in this collection. I’m wondering how it all came together and what it’s like having material that predates Detransition, Baby sitting alongside the new stuff. 
The first piece in the collection is called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, which I originally self-published in 2015. And it was a little funny to go back to it, because the energy at the time was sort of punk. It was like, Well, the publishing industry is not going to publish my work. I don’t care. I’m just going to self-publish. And so, the original publication was full of typos. There were sentences that didn’t totally work. At the time I was like, I want that. I wanted people to pick up this book and say, “You don’t need an immaculate page in order to move readers. You just need the energy.” And so it was funny to look at it in the context of this book. I thought that I would rewrite and update it, but when I found it, I was like, “I can’t capture that energy anymore.” I’m not the person who was willing to take risks. I’m not the person who is willing to leave mistakes on the page just to make a point. And so, I was like, I actually can’t edit this.

And then Stag Dance, the main story in the book, is completely written in this weird lumberjack slang. It’s the story of a bunch of loggers, who would work these long winter camps and, when they got lonely, they’d put on a dance, and some of the men would dance as women. They would cut out a little brown fabric triangle and they’d paste the triangle upside down over their crotch. Anyone who showed up with that little triangle played the role of a woman and danced with all of the other men in these isolated camps in the west. And they actually did this everywhere; soldiers did it, railroad workers did it, miners did it — it was fairly common in the west.

But in some ways that narrative was a reaction to Detransition, Baby. There was so much pressure. It was like, “You wrote this comedy of manners. How are you going to follow it up?” And I was like, “You know what no one wants? A logger dance discussing the various ways to cut down a tree.” And in a weird way, that totally freed me. I could say whatever I wanted. I got to reinvent a lot of what I was feeling in the logger language. And so it sits strangely with Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, but for me, that resonance produces something really interesting.

There is a kind of tenderness to the voice in Stag Dance; the narrator, Babe Bunyan, repeats certain phrases and offers these little clarifications to the reader. Part of what you experience reading it is, like, “Who talks like this?” And that is, for my money, a better representation of the trans experience than just, like, here are some trans characters talking to each other about being trans. One of the things I would be interested in hearing you talk about is, one, the decision to write about non-trans or slightly trans characters but also the decision to explore these strange genre places, where it’s more about little bits of language and feeling instead of being trans.
Part of it was that the language was so unfamiliar. I found this dictionary of logger slang from 1941 that was compiled by the children of loggers. An egg is a cackleberry; chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite. And I was like, I just want to write these weird words.

In a lot of ways, trying to write about the feelings that I have in these words made the feelings new to me. A phrase like gender dysphoria, when I say it now, feels so overdetermined. It’s just clunks. Babe Bunyan, in the novel, says, “Mirrors do not befriend me.” I was like, that is how it feels. And I would never have said that if I was not pretending to be a logger to myself.
I’m very interested in having my characters not know things. Partly because of the time; Babe Bunyan can’t know anything. But also for instance, the second story, “The Chaser,” takes place at a boarding school. And in that story there’s a kind of soccer-playing-bro type, who starts hooking up with his roommate, who’s femme. And neither one of them know exactly what’s going on. If you know me as an author, you’d probably say, “All right, this Robbie character is probably a pre-transition trans girl,” but the characters don’t know that. And so it opens up a whole thing. For me, oftentimes transness is about knowing things about what’s going on with your feelings.

It is something that comes through with a number of different characters in the book. I think you have said that you’re less interested in the binary between men and women and more interested in the binary between whatever a trans person is and whatever a cis person is — that a cis woman who likes pretty dresses in her 20s, and works on cars and wears overalls in her 50s, has also undergone something in a non-trivial way. It seems like a lot of what the book is trying to do, in my mind, is create a kind of space for freedom between the present, five years from now, ten years from now, and also five minutes from now — that gender is something that is lived over time and that has to be reckoned with expansively.
In the story The Masker, there’s a sissy who’s into online sissy culture and she goes to Vegas, where two people want to take her under their wings. One is a trans woman, who’s probably very into respectability politics and the “correct” way to be a woman. And the other person is totally on the fetishist level; he wears a full-body silicone woman suit. And that person, I think, makes a very compelling case for doing it his way, which is basically, like, he’s a doctor and he gets to go dress up and have great, wild, fetishistic sex, then go back to being a doctor and being respected. His way of doing things is kind of appealing — keep everything and have great sex. Who wouldn’t want it? And meanwhile, this idea that you have to transition and you have to tell everybody that you’re doing this thing — it didn’t look that appealing in the story. And I think there is this open question of what the sissy will choose: The fetishist could be the future, could be the past. The life of a trans woman could be the future, could be the past. And that moment of indeterminacy in time is something that really interested me.

Well, part of the reason that something like that is important is that we do not know who is trans. And the attempt to give a boundary to that, we are learning, is not actually a good thing. It’s an extremely bad and dangerous thing. We’re already seeing the weaponization of certainty against trans people. But then the question becomes, “If community can’t be found in a group of people, then how do you think about it?” How do you constitute that kind of thing? Is it more of an ethic or a sensibility or a way of being?
Something I’m trying to do is see trans less as an identity and more of an invitation. And a lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like them. It’s about taking away the markers of what it means to be trans, and instead looking at the emotional building blocks of this experience, which are often pretty universal things, like the difference between how you’re seen and how you want to be seen.

All the things that the soccer bro in The Chaser is experiencing are actually the same things that the trans character is experiencing — a fear of “what am I going to lose if I make this decision? What’s the difference between how people want to see me and how I want to be seen?” So I think the way I want to approach ethics and politics is through the door of emotion, where people can be like, “Oh yeah, I kind of get that.” Then they have the ability to think through and discover all sorts of stuff, because they felt something first. Four characters in the book actively identify as trans and the rest are just people going through weird feelings, which is all of us, which means that there’s an affinity and a solidarity for all of us who have weird feelings.

And notably, I think at least three of the four actively trans-identifying characters sort of won’t shut up about it. They’re constantly trying to assert a sense of what it means that they are trans. There is something particular about the kind of identity formation that involves that kind of act of will or language. Then when we’re thinking about these sort of liminal characters who may never even cross the threshold into transness, there is this sense that it’s something that, insofar as it exists, just exists in their heads. So, there’s a problem. On the one hand, you want it to feel intuitive. On the other, there’s such a demand to intellectualize it or make it available through language. I have no idea what the resolution between these things is, but there is a particular kind of problem in the trans case, in that asserting consciousness is part of the identity.
I kind of feel like the party line around trans stuff is, like, you declare yourself a thing, you come up with a language for it, then you are that thing. But in fact, what Babe Bunyan runs into — which I felt very free to do in logger slang, and which felt more fraught to approach in contemporary language — is that declaring one’s gender ends up being a negotiation with all these people around you. And that because it’s a negotiation with all these people around you, it’s not the same for every single person. And that depending on how much money you have, the body you were born with, how you were raised, one person’s transition may be much easier.

The idea that language is all that you need to do this actually produces a lot of misery for people, because if the idea is you declare that you’re trans and everybody goes, “Yeah, that’s great, you’re trans,” then you walk through life and people give you a hard time, then you say, “Well, I did it. I have the language, I have this thing, and yet I am constantly rejected.” And I think that is unfair, and it’s really hard to talk about, because it produces jealousies even within the trans community. And that’s not something I felt like I could talk about in a contemporary sort of story, but I could create a mythic lumberjack who can talk about that kind of stuff and be frustrated over that unfairness. And for me, the fact that you’re constantly negotiating with people who aren’t negotiating on the same terms or language is one of the most frustrating things about my experience — but it’s also the experience of anybody going through the world trying to declare who they are.

 The Stag Dance author on exploring transness as a feeling through logger slang. “I was like, I just want to write these weird words.”