What does it even mean to be trans? That's the first question Torrey Peters asks readers in her new book, Stag Dance, and it's the question that everyone should be asking themselves right now.Stag Dance is a collection of four novellas that poke into the dark corners of gender, delving into taboo topics and investigating the line between trans and cis. Brittany sits down with Torrey to discuss Stag Dance, what makes a transition, and the raised stakes for trans people in the current political climate.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What does it mean to be trans?
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A warning, this segment contains references to sex, sexuality, and rape. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
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
My guest today is a repeat guest for the show.
It's amazing to be back.
That's author Tori Peters. She came on It's Been a Minute in 2021 to talk about her last book called Detransition Baby. It was a blockbuster of a novel that brought trans literature to a huge audience. And let me tell you, Tori is not afraid to ask the pointed questions about gender and our culture's relationship to it. Like, what does it even mean to be trans?
And what if all of us, cis and trans, had to choose our genders? That's exactly what she dives into in her new book called Stag Dance. It's a collection of four novellas. I'm here with Tori to explore the nuances of gender, desire, and performance, and the stakes of writing this book in our current political climate.
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Chapter 2: How is gender a negotiation?
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.
So the reason I want to talk about these together is because they both deal in the ambiguity of gender and sexuality. In The Chaser, you mentioned there's this teen boy who knows his roommate has some kind of gender going on and he likes it.
But also in The Masker, the main character has to decide whether his fetish for dressing himself up in feminine clothes is connected to a desire to be a woman or not. And I know that this is also contentious to discuss as well.
Yeah, very much.
Yeah. Trans people have been accused of only transitioning as part of a fetish, even if they're just trying to live mundane lives in a different gender. But at the same time, gender and sexuality are somewhat interlinked. What did you want to explore about where those two things connect, gender and sexuality?
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.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in Stag Dance?
All right, that's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR. I'm Brittany Luce. Talk soon.