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Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories opens with a note from author Torrey Peters. Still on the heels of her 2021 hit novel Detransition, Baby, Peters shares that she was motivated to keep digging into trans identity this time, posing an underlying question connecting the four stories in her new book: “What does it even mean to be trans?”
It’s quite a question to be asking at this moment in time, as fascist gender policing reaches a boiling point. Those in power are interested in defining transness only insofar that they think they can separate and eradicate it. Well-meaning allies seek to define it through the lens of oppression, lack, and cookie-cutter narratives; even trans folks ourselves can get caught up in gatekeeping traps, seduced by the notion that if we can only find the right words, the right timeline, the right way to be trans, then existential threats will vanish.
The trans characters in Stag Dance didn’t fall out of a coconut tree; they all live under the stifling weight of gender norms. But rather than focusing on the macro, Peters zooms into their interiorities, desires and close
relationships, lighting up the pages with specificity, sucker-punch revelations, and some good old-fashioned romantic suspense.
In the titular novel at the heart of the book, a seemingly all-male camp of grizzly lumberjacks plan a dance. To liven things up, lumberjacks have the option to pin a brown cloth triangle onto the crotch of their pants—a makeshift “bush”—and attend as “women” for courting and dancing with. The opportunity stirs something inside Babe, the biggest and ugliest guy in the group, who is the first to claim a bush for himself. He tries to play it for laughs at first, but that changes as he gets to know Lisen, a more delicate and effeminate lumberjack who flirts and wrestles with the other guys.
Watching Lisen tease the men, Babe feels a difficult-to-name stirring:
“His sauciness disturbed me, or rather, I was disturbed by the unctuous temptation it endangered in me, a queer need like
how it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even as you know somewhere in your mind you must have the word, that you don’t lack it at all, only its use.”
Trans people can recognize this feeling; it’s the first time you encounter another trans person and feel a terrified-yet-excited surge of familiarity. This crew of 1800s lumberjacks haven’t heard the
word “transgender,” and they certainly don’t have knowledge of gender-affirming care. But none of that matters when Babe wears his brown cloth and hooks up with the camp boss: “With eyes closed, there existed no difference between the triangle and myself: Distinction collapsed, and it was on me and of me and in me.”
Like “Stag Dance,” short story “The Chaser” also takes place in the single-sex environment of a boarding school bedroom, where a teenage boy starts secretly hooking up with his feminine roommate Robbie. In the confines of a dark bedroom, where bodies become shapes and curves, their attraction is undeniable. But when a new semester comes and room assignments change, tenderness with Robbie becomes humiliating and untenable for the protagonist: “What was hot for me before was that he was feminine and available, and I set all the terms.”
That’s just one instance of many in which trans women are betrayed in Stag Dance. To be a trans woman in Peters’ stories is to constantly live on a razor’s edge between cis people’s desire and disgust, which often co-mingle. And it often means betraying other trans people yourself, in the pursuit of mainstream approval.
You can see that dichotomy in today’s conservative media: There’s a rabid obsession with all trans people—but especially transfem folks—that so clearly stems from insecurity. They are angry at trans people for alighting their own gender and sexuality anxieties, for exposing the absurdity of the gender binary.
There’s a reason transphobes hate being asked their pronouns, and try to claim “cisgender” is a slur: If you have to work to define your cisness, then that means you are in some way defining your own gender, and then doesn’t that make you a little bit trans, too?
That’s exactly what “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” the collection’s most inventive story, explores so deftly. A small team of trans women in Seattle develop and disperse a highly contagious injection that takes away humans’ ability to produce their own hormones, and the US quickly becomes a civil war-torn free-
for-all, where everyone is forced to source their own hormones.
“I was thinking I want to live in a world where everyone has to choose their gender,” one of the culprits says by way of explanation. But interestingly, this does not erase the distinction between trans and cis: A group of trans women who transitioned well before the infection broke out find each other and develop their own community on an abandoned farm, living under the shared principle of “t4t.” The familiar dating app acronym becomes a philosophy of respecting and looking out for other trans folks above all else.
While they’re ostensibly living in a world where everyone is trans in the physical sense, these trans women still find safety primarily in each other. Old resentments, rivalries, and desperation to appeal to cis people for safety and validation fade away. “All it took was the end of the world t o make that happen,” one trans homesteader observes.
The stories in Stag Dance aren’t about brave, articulate transgender people overcoming oppression and leading the way into a genderless utopia. They are instead about messy, flawed trans people attempting to find survival while achieving a modicum of authenticity, in a hostile world where cis people’s own gender anxieties—and the violence those anxieties can provoke—lurk around every corner.
In the end, true safety can only be found with each other. That seems a salient lesson to remember as new policies attempt to separate the “QT” from the “LGB”—and even to distinguish the good, quiet trans
people who keep to themselves from the ones who insist on playing sports, dressing outside the binary, using restrooms without passing, teaching young people, and other apparently flagrant offenses.
Still, it’d be a disservice to present these stories only as political fodder. As Peters notes in her introduction, this collection is about trans people as “just people yearning, crashing, loving, and messing up.” These characters stayed with me, and once you crack open Stag Dance, you’ll want to
spend some time with them as well.
Stag Dance was published on Tues March 11. Torrey Peters appears in conversation with Aster Olsen, Ebo Barton, Corinne Manning, and Amber Flame at the Wyncote NW Forum, 1119 8th in Seattle on Wed March 19, FREE w/ option to purchase book, tickets and info here.
