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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Appearances
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, very much.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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