Torrey Peters
Appearances
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
But the value in it for me is like, maybe this will free people a little bit to read it. To basically be like... If the sexuality is getting so kind of baroque because of the fear and the repression, you know, maybe that is a sign that something's going on with your gender. Maybe you can actually figure this out.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Well, I think that there's a tradition of this outside of just trans communities of great writers creating characters who are really difficult to talk about the real issues in a way that feels, in the end, liberatory. You can think of Philip Roth writing Poor Noise Complaint, you know, which was totally Jewish communities were like, this is an outrageous caricature.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I think a lot about Toni Morrison writing The Bluest Eye. Oh, yeah. Those kinds of things that the 10-year-old girl thinks about sort of valorizing blue eyes or certainly the treatment of her very abusive father towards her in a black family, all of that could have been weaponized.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
But to me, you can't understand the context of racism if you don't see the tragedy of it, if you don't see the way that it can warp a young girl's visions of beauty or warp the way a family looks. And similarly, I think you can't see how transphobia and fear of trans people's
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
expression and the way that that locks us down can cause such suffering if you don't show the bad parts, if you don't show the consequences of that. And to me, I think that's both important for trans people to recognize and it's important for other readers to recognize that if you say this character seems to me sort of monstrous, well, why?
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
The first story, they unleash a contagion that kind of almost destroys the world and world-ending fury is a result of the kind of treatment that these characters feel.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Sure. It's the sci-fi novella in the book. It takes place in Seattle where two trans girls infect the entire world with a contagion that has the effect of blocking the body's ability to produce hormones so that everyone will have to basically take artificial hormones because their own body's not producing it.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
meaning that everybody in the world will have to make the explicit choice to cultivate their gender that trans people already have to make. And so the question is sort of like, what if everybody has to choose their gender the way that trans people do?
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
My joke about it is that actually we already live in a world where everybody has to choose their gender. And everybody already is choosing their gender. It's just they're not aware of it. They're like, oh, I was born in this gender. Well, sure, you were born in that body, but you're choosing your gender. You're choosing how you present yourself based on the constraints that you have.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
What kind of clothes can you afford? What kind of body do you have? How much time do you have to work on your body or negotiate that stuff with other people? These are all constraints that we already have. And so the irony is actually like a dystopian world where everybody has to run around trying to find the things that they can scrounge up to make a gender that feels good to them.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I don't think it has a different dimension, but it definitely has different stakes. I spend part of every year in Colombia, and in a year I have to renew my passport. And the F marker, which I've had for years and which corresponds with how I look and things like that, is going to be taken away from me. And I show that passport. There's a lot of police blocks because the roads are just policed.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Well, I think that when people hear the word trans, they're generally thinking about a binary or even a continuum between male and female. And that's a fine thing to investigate. But I'm less interested in that. I'm interested in the emotions and life experiences that I think about as like structuring my trans life, desire, desire.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
So I show that I'll be on an empty road somewhere showing my passport to a couple of cops. I do that frequently. And in two years, you know, I don't know if it's going to be danger or not, but I'm going to be showing something that has an M on it. in an empty road. And that's a small thing. I wrote an essay about that for New York Magazine.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
That's a small thing, but it's a new and increased danger in my life. That's a material danger in my life. That is going to be the case in so many ways for so many people, that things are going to be more dangerous. Where prisoners, they're moving all the trans women prisoners, or they're attempting to, to move them into male jails. That's going to cause violence.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Your listeners can look up the word V-coding, V-coding, to see what happens to trans women in male prisons.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Yeah. These kinds of things, they have horrific stakes. And I hope to be able to kind of write into those stakes, even though I'm no longer eligible for an NEA grant. I still hope that I'll be able to write into those stakes.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Thank you so much for having me and for such thoughtful questions. I really appreciate the chance to come back.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
occasionally shame, how I want to appear to other people, how I want other people to treat me and see me. These are not things that are unique to trans people. The only thing that's unique to trans people is that we sort of cross one binary, but the things that make us trans are kind of emotions that are available to everybody and that everybody experiences.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And so I'm interested at what point does a person suddenly consider themselves trans and why?
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Sure. So each of the stories in this collection is in a different genre. And Stag Dance is my Americana Western tall tale.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
You can think of it in the realm of Paul Bunyan or John Henry. It takes place at a remote winter logging camp where the lonely men, they really did do this historically, decide to put on a dance where any of the loggers can come to the dance and dance as a woman.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And in this story, the biggest, strongest, ugliest of the loggers, who's jealous of the prettiest boy in camp, decides that he'll attend the dance as a woman. And this decision unleashes a kind of chaos that plays out in the camp.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Yeah. I mean, that was actually part of the project of that story is that I've been, you know, talking about trans stuff for 10 years. And in a lot of ways, I oftentimes feel that the language is ossified, that actually it's, you know, you hear a word like gender dysphoria and you have a sense of what it means, but you don't really have a sense of how it feels. And in writing this book...
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I came across this dictionary of lager slang. So like a word for egg, for instance, might be cackleberry, like the hen cackles and it lays eggs, which are like berries that they can pick. So they would say we're eating cackleberries. And so the language is totally strange. And the project was partially, can I describe the feelings that I relate to in
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
in language that's totally alien to me, that's strange to me. And I found that over the course of the project, yeah, I could. Actually, because, again, the feelings of trying to get right with yourself, the feelings of having desire, the feelings of frustration with the body that you might have, these aren't things that you need a degree in gender studies to talk about. And they were actually...
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Well, one of the things I was kind of looking at is actually what constitutes a transition. In the logging camp, anyone who had a brown fabric triangle over their crotch would go to the dance as a woman. And that's like a very gendered symbol.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I oftentimes think of transition as you're kind of putting on symbols because a transition, you know, I think in the sort of like dogma of kind of trans thought is, The idea is like, well, you declare yourself a thing and then you go out and kind of become that thing. And that's not actually how I see it working.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I think that oftentimes gender is actually a negotiation with all these people around us. The dream is that you live in a society where you can just say, this is who I want to be and everybody accepts you. But in fact, they don't. You're sort of negotiating with people. And I don't just think that's trans people who are negotiating. I think if you're...
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I think that oftentimes gender is actually a negotiation with all these people around us. The dream is that you live in a society where you can just say, this is who I want to be, and everybody accepts you. But in fact, they don't. You're sort of negotiating with people
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
A woman, and you're like, I want to be taken seriously at the office. Well, you might wear a suit because that's a symbol, you know? And it's unfortunate that one would have to, like, sort of take on these gendered symbols in order to get respect. But we're all constantly negotiating that way, including trans people. Whenever you decide that you're making a transition, you...
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Take on certain symbols. And the thing is, those symbols, they don't work equally for everybody. The reality of the way that we treat bodies in this moment is that certain people could say, well, I'm going to transition. Like the Leeson character, who's young and pretty, he puts on a triangle, he goes to the dance.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Everyone is going to use she pronouns because they all want to dance with the prettiest body. logger. While when Babe shows up, there's no amount of symbols and makeup or anything that he could put on his body to have people kind of agree to that negotiation. And so there's a way in which certain transitions become felicitous and certain transitions don't become felicitous.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And for me, I wanted to write about it because it seems like something that's actually very painful within kind of queer liberation You can say whatever you want and that's what you are. But pretending that's the case when people are actually in pain, when they're like, no, nobody's treating this way even though I'm doing it, it's a painful thing and it's something that's difficult to talk about.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And for me, those kinds of stories work best in fiction. I can create a logger and I can be like, how might this feel? What's this frustration like? And when you say that your heart breaks for that logger every time he calls himself ugly, that's the kind of empathy that I'm looking for. I'm looking to generate that for readers.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Yeah. And certain people, those symbols work on them even though they're not trying to transition. I know somebody who was a sort of masculine presenting woman who... is cis and considers herself cis. She doesn't identify as trans. And she had an altercation in an elevator because somebody misunderstood the ways that she presented herself.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
These are things that are operative for all of us all the time. And I think it's why I sort of say that, oh, this binary between who's cis and who's trans, I'm interested in kind of breaking it down and seeing how it works for everybody.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
I'm afraid of it being weaponized, but the value in it for me is like, maybe this will free people a little bit to read it.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
It's amazing to be back.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Sure. The Chaser in my spectrum of genre is my teen romance. You can think of sort of the angst and yearning somewhere between maybe a separate piece and Twilight.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Yeah, there you go. It's narrated by a teenage bro. He starts hooking up with his feminine roommate, Robbie, who seems to be a pre-transition trans girl. But the narrator's shame means that he refuses to admit his love for Robbie, and that refusal slowly leads to his humiliating social downfall. And then The Masker, it's my horror piece.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
It takes place in Vegas when a young cross-dresser attends a party and is forced to choose between two alarming paths. One path represented by a pushy, older, sisterly trans woman, and the other by a man in a full-body, fetish, silicone female suit.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
Yeah, I think that I was doing much of what you just described, that historically, the trans people who got access to surgery were people who sort of said, I'm only attracted to men, and I just want to basically transition and live exactly as cis women. And anybody who said, yeah, I have some sexuality things going on with it, were sort of considered perverts.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And so then as a result, the trans community for a long time basically said gender and sexuality are separate. And us transitioning has nothing to do with sexuality. And for me, I sort of, I was writing and I was like, that doesn't actually seem to be how I feel things myself and how other people, not all trans people, because I think trans people come to this from all different directions.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
For me, oftentimes sexuality is sort of like a alarm, a harbinger of gender, that what you want and who you want to be is often a reflection or connected to your gender. When people are attracted to other people, they're attracted to other people, but they're also attracted as a type of person. You know, like, I don't just want to be with this man. I want to be with this man as a woman.
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"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And that a lot of what eroticism and sexuality is is also about getting to feel who you are. And that's not just for trans people. That's for all sorts of people. And so the question for me is, like, why is this so dangerous when trans people do it? And what happens when trans people are so afraid of of their own sexuality, that they repress it. How does it come out again?
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And so in The Masker, for instance, you have a trans woman who's very, very respectability politics. You know, a former cop who transitioned, who is very much like, you should just be a regular, normal woman.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And then on the other path, you have somebody who maybe was trans, and I think it's very taboo to say that a fetishist like the Masker character could be trans, but I'm kind of interested in maybe this is actually a trans person who's repressed their desires so much, repressed their gender so much, repressed all these things. That stuff, when you repress it, it doesn't go away.
It's Been a Minute
"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
And that's not just when trans people repress things that doesn't go away. When anybody represses things, yeah. And I think for me it was very taboo to write a character that was like, maybe that character is trans. And especially in this political climate where any bits of sexuality are weaponized against trans people, I'm afraid of it being weaponized.