Torrey Peters
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Torrey Peters’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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 amazing to be back.
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.
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.
And so I'm interested at what point does a person suddenly consider themselves trans and why?
Sure. So each of the stories in this collection is in a different genre. And Stag Dance is my Americana Western tall tale.
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.
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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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