“I actually think that trans lives are pretty understandable,” says Torrey Peters, the author of the acclaimed 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, and, more recently, the novel-and-stories collection Stag Dance. “In fact, you can tell trans stories in any genre.” To prove that point, as much to herself and her community as to any wider audience, she began writing short stories and novellas in 2015, two of which she self-published the following year as Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker. Both are dark and challenging (Peters uses the word “extreme”) tales of gender and transition, and both bookend Stag Dance, with the former introducing the collection and the latter sealing it with a literal kiss. As Peters outlines in the acknowledgments for Stag Dance, she wrote the collection’s four pieces over the course of a decade. Most recently, she turned to the titular novel, a bizarre and brilliant turn-of-the-century tall tale involving a Paul Bunyan-esque lumberjack who yearns to be seen and treated as a woman.
There’s little about Stag Dance’s premise that broadcasts relatability, familiarity, or even comprehension to a modern audience. And yet it is precisely this narrative distance that lends the novel such wonder. The protagonist, Babe Bunyan, and his fellow loggers speak in a dynamic industry slang that translates eggs to “cackleberries,” chewing tobacco to “Scandihoovian dynamite,” and homemade liquor to “cougar milk.” Each word is unusual and intentional, having been unearthed during Peters’s research into real-life historical logging camps. It is paradoxically owing to this alien language, which Peters describes as “chewy,” that Babe’s emotions are laid all the more bare. A man who avoids his own reflection—lest he see his brute ugliness reflected back at him—Babe wants terribly to be perceived as beautiful, feminine, and desirable. When the camp’s overseer proposes a “stag dance,” for which a handful of the men can opt to attend the party as women, Babe’s heart surges at the opportunity. To designate himself as a woman, he wears a small inverted triangle of brown fabric attached to his crotch. But he soon learns that the triangle alone cannot designate him as male or female; his gender presentation is as much about what the men around him perceive as it is about his own feelings.
Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories by Torrey Peters
“It was really interesting to talk about the things I cared about in logger slang,” Peters says during our Zoom conversation in early March. “The way I would normally say things—with, maybe, a tinge of having read gender theory, or a tinge of discourse-y internet [jargon]—you couldn’t do it with logger slang. So in some ways, you had to really break down, like, ‘What are these emotions? What am I actually feeling?’ Things that felt dead to me in modern language came alive to me in logger slang.”
In painting specific strokes with such foreign words, she could transmit a larger message: that “the things that make me trans,” as Peters puts it, are emotions that people who don’t necessarily identify as trans still experience. “Our genders are in negotiation with other people,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘I want to be seen this way, and so I’m going to take on these symbols and this way of behaving so that, hopefully, you’ll see what I’m doing is felicitous and you’ll engage with what I’m trying to put out there.’ That negotiation isn’t happening just for trans people.”
Peters brings up the example of cisgender men like Elon Musk, who “are going around the stage with a chainsaw.” (This exact event took place at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.) “I’ll be like, ‘That doesn’t look like you know how to use a chainsaw,’” she says. “They’re trying to negotiate their gender with me, like, ‘Check me out; I have a chainsaw.’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t buy it.’”
She continues, “That’s exactly what happens to me as a trans woman. I say, ‘I’m a woman,’ and people say, ‘I don’t buy it.’ And sometimes it’s not fair. Sometimes it’s like, ‘I want to be seen as a rugged dude, but I go on Tinder and everybody tells me I’m six inches too short.’ That’s unfair. It’s arbitrary that you’re [considered] six inches too short, and you don’t get to [present as manly as] you want. But we’re all [negotiating these judgments and emotions], and we’re doing it all the time.”
After writing The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones in the mid-2010s, Peters “got sidetracked” with her first novel, Detransition, Baby, which debuted in 2021 to immense acclaim. In the wake of that book’s success, she penned The Chaser, another short story in Stag Dance—this time about a kid at an all-boys Quaker boarding school who develops a relationship with his femme-presenting roommate. Finally, Peters spent some time building a sauna in an off-grid log cabin in Vermont, where she chopped her own firewood and developed a fascination with logging. That interest, of course, segued into Stag Dance. “I was like, ‘I want to do something so different,’” she says. “‘Almost something that nobody is asking for.’ Nobody was like, ‘What we really want is a lumberjack.’”
But once she’d finished writing the tall tale, she realized that the “concerns” she’d outlined through a logger’s perspective were the same as those of her previous three short stories, “just evolved and put into different situations.”
As Peters puts it, “Only four characters in all the stories identify as trans, but all of them have the feelings that I think of as the ‘building blocks’ of trans experience, which are pretty universal: wanting to be with a certain person, presenting yourself [a certain way], getting through shame.” The book doesn’t aim to break down the male-female binary, which she says people “associate with trans-ness,” but rather “a binary between cis people and trans people. So instead of saying, like, ‘Oh, this [character] is clearly trans, and you can tell,’ the book asks, ‘When does somebody start becoming trans?’ Because the emotions that make somebody trans, you find in everybody.”
When it was first published, Detransition, Baby (unintentionally) positioned Peters as a mouthpiece for the broader trans community, and particularly for the trans literary scene, given the general rarity of trans literature within the mainstream publishing ecosystem. (As Vulture recently described, “The national bestseller turned Peters into the latest de facto face of trans lit.”) Peters “chafed a little at that expectation,” largely because there’s “weird stuff in Detransition, Baby, and there’s plenty of trans women who are like, ‘That book does not represent me.’” Four years later, there are a number of traditionally published novels by trans women to be released in 2025 alone—such as When the Harvest Comes by Denne Michele Norris, Woodworking by Emily St. James, and Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn, to name a few—which has led Peters to feel more relaxed about how Stag Dance might be received. When she doesn’t feel the pressure to speak on behalf of trans women as a monolith, Peters says, she can actually articulate her political beliefs in clear and precise ways. But she also feels that her fiction best articulates her politics.
“The real work that I have to offer is...” She pauses. “I think I’m okay at talking about trans issues. I’m okay at it. But I think I’m good at fiction. And I’m good at making people feel emotions that they’re surprised to feel. And then when they feel those emotions, they go looking for the reason: ‘Why did I feel this way when I read this book?’ And at that point, I’m happy to do my work: ‘Well, here’s why I think you felt that way.’”
