"Gender is a negotiation" whether you realize it or not.
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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. So I want to start with the epigraph of this book, your letter to the reader before the book even begins. And in it, you say, what interests me, what has always interested me is the binary between cis and trans. Where is the line? Is it even a binary? Talk to me about that. And what about that binary needs some investigation?
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?
Hmm. Well, let's get into Stag Dance, specifically the titular story. Can you give the listeners a short synopsis?
Sure. So each of the stories in this collection is in a different genre. And Stag Dance is my Americana Western tall tale.
Definitely.
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.
I'm really glad to hear you describe this as your Americana Western story, because I want to shout out how incredible the language was throughout that novella. It was all in this old-timey vernacular, and it gave such a clear picture of the world that the characters were in. It gave me such a clear picture inside Babe, the main character's mind. The thing I was really interested in with Stag Dance was how Babe came to understand his feelings about gender without having... any of the modern language that we have. But even when there are no available words for Babe to understand his desires, he goes on desiring to feel feminine anyway. In what ways does our language around gender today help people to understand themselves?
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