Read a letter penned by Stag Dance author Torrey Peters.
In this letter, author Torrey Peters talks about the journey of writing Stag Dance.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking a chance on Stag Dance. It took me about a decade to write – a decade that started with the period just after my gender transition and ran through the year or so after I published my first novel. Each time that I encountered something puzzling, incongruous, upsetting, or even infuriating, I found myself wanting to figure it out in narrative form (usually a novel or novella). Fiction can be a great test case for living. You just give your characters problems similar to (or more extreme than) your own, then leave it to them to solve – or at least, to better articulate. But looking back over what I wrote, I found that many of the pieces asked an ambiguous question by ghostly subtext: What does it even mean to be trans?
Obviously, in a general or political sense this question has been asked and answered many times over. But to address the puzzles put to me by living life, I felt I needed to evade the usual approaches to the question. I needed to find a back door. Let me put it this way: Almost everything I read about transness seeks to complicate, destabilize, or even break down the binary between male and female, masculinity and femininity, men and women. That’s all well and good but, to be honest, after my first novel, Detransition, Baby, I’ve felt less invested in exploring those distinctions.
What interests me, what has always interested me, is the binary between cis and trans. Where is the line? Is it even a binary?
This seems sort of theoretical. But that’s where Stag Dance comes in. This is my attempt to
explore the emotional, lived questions the binary between cis and trans provokes, to feel around in the murky and taboo edges of transness, where it’s not even clear what transness or cisness even is, where imperfect politics and outré sexuality lurk. Where we are just people yearning, crashing, loving, and messing up. I wrote these four pieces across genres, across time periods, and yes, across and within genders. I hope that the variety reveals a constant. By the end of Stag Dance, I hope your own views and certainties may have gotten a shake, so that you can’t say for sure who counts as trans, who counts as cis, not only within the book, but even, and perhaps more freeingly, when you look up from the page.
With gratitude for your reading time,
Torrey
Stag Dance
by Torrey Peters
Trans life past, present and future is explored in this kaleidoscopic follow-up to the Women's Prize-nominated Detransition, Baby.
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