Say what you see: AGP.
About the book
Stag Dance is comprised of four short stories (or quartet, if you prefer to be poncey, which they do). The first is called Infect your friends and loved ones and imagines a world where GnRH, the hormone responsible for the release of sex hormones, is altered, with those affected requiring exogenous sex hormones for the rest of their lives. It’s a novel idea for a science fiction story for sure, and you’d expect a protagonist to wonder how this might shape humanity. Instead, from the sample available on Amazon (I’m not buying it, even if I did fork out to hear Peters speak) a trans-identified male simply has a series of sexual encounters instead. ‘She’ is desired by all, regardless whether ‘her’ lovers are ‘cis’ or ‘trans’, male or female.
Autogynephilia
The paragraphs below sum up perfectly what the story is about; classic autogynephilia (AGP).
Notably there is a pointed dig at Michael Bailey, in which the protagonist fantasises about making Bailey ‘pseudo-trans’. Bailey was a sexologist who famously wrote about autogynephilia and, right after publication of his book – The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism – the transvestites came for him with pitchforks. Accusations were made about sexual impropriety, ethics violations, comparing his work to Nazi propaganda and one activist even posted photos of Bailey’s children online, alongside sexually explicit captions, as this New York Times‘ article details. Bailey’s harassment lasted two years.
All for a book that Wesley Yang describes as a ‘very kindly, even somewhat indulgent, portrayal of the men with this paraphilia that argued that under certain circumstances medical transition was justified to facilitate allowing these men to live their paraphilia full time.’
The room
Loads of trans-identified males at this event. Much more than usual and different from the ones normally seen, as they all looked to be in their late 20s to 30s, in little gangs, none of them trying to dress like ‘ladies’. (On reflection, they were just like the ones I’d come across at the Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley performance, possibly the same.) Deliberately unkempt-looking, long greasy hair, gangly limbs and unfashionable creased clothes, proving that you can take the Dave out of the Pub but you can’t get the Pub out of the Dave. A night out for the AGPs.
Gay’s the Word
A bloke from Gay’s the Word bookshop did the introduction. It was responsible for bringing Torrey Peters to the Soutbank that evening. Upcoming events included the 40th anniversary of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a story in which the main character experiences an exorcism to fix her same sex attraction. After the talk there would be signings and book sales, the entire proceeds from which would go to Gendered Intelligence (an organisation which promotes conversion therapy for homosexuals), so he urged us to buy an extra copy to give friends or a lending library. (This was all to do with the recent and unmentionable Supreme Court Judgment.) The crowd naturally clapped and cheered this.
Interestingly, he noted that the stories were about crossdressing.
The interviewer
Eliza Clark gushed over Peters for the entire interview. She is an author of horror fiction with a focus on body horror, so I understand why it was thought she would be a good fit to interview him.
The interview
The story of the book
It was written over ten years, starting in 2015 (i.e. the Trans Tipping Point), which he described as a time when people began to think of trans as something ‘new and complicated’ and in need of a new narrative. However, Peters felt that trans lives weren’t that complicated to understand (true, if you understand the paraphilia which drives the phenomenon) and set about writing these stories, which were self-published originally. They were experiments in genre, he said, but meant ‘sharing sissy porn with friends’.
The Chaser
A romance, a cross between Twilight and Brideshead Revisited, according to the author. Peters did a reading, promising us that he would do it in his best bro voice, quipping it wasn’t too different from his regular voice (the exact same, in fact). It started off not too bad, not brilliant prose, but listenable. However, after, what felt like, several minutes of hearing the main character ruminate over hair conditioner, and ending with an erection, I was losing the will to live. A reminder that no one will ever say ‘no’ to these people.
Peters reflected that at the time he wrote the story, he felt the debate over trans issues had become so stuck, the only way to move the conversation on was to do something creative. Fiction might be a way round it, he’d thought. The story revolved around a ‘cis guy’ being attracted to another man, Robbie, who may or may not be a not-yet-out ‘trans woman’, or else just homosexual. (Why call it The Chaser in that case? Which is a question Clark should have asked but was too busy giggling.)
Peters had one of the characters in Detransition Baby say that they were pro-chaser. People being into your body was not the worst thing, so as long as they weren’t trying to be you. Hmm. In his story, The Chaser, the theoretically trans character could also be dark and creepy and he wanted people to be unsure about which of the two characters was the chaser. Clark, the ditz, thought the story ‘so romantic’ and wanted to know more about the romance aspects of his work. ‘Um, yeah, I think there’s a lot of sex in my work,’ said Peters rather politely, explaining that he wasn’t interested in exploring romantic love, but did have an interest in solidarity between friends and noted that this was a common theme amongst other trans artists.
So, literally nothing like Twilight or Brideshead Revisited then and not a romance. Got it.
‘Pigs,’ giggled Clark, ‘are a motif of your work’
‘That’s very astute of you, the stories are ordered from most pigs to least pigs,’ Peters retorted, after she’d listed all the pigs in the stories. It was funny quip, to be fair, but the second time he’d made her look an idiot (which she is). He didn’t explain the presence of pigs though, wanting us to believe it incidental.
Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones
Peters briefly described the plot: two trans women release a contagion resulting in everyone having to take exogenous hormones. It was written in 2016 before the pandemic. Clark asked an arse-licking question about what it was like to introduce his audience to ‘transgender bio-terrorism’. Peters responded by pointing out the story was similar in structure to Detransition Baby and a dry run for it. He was given the opportunity to rewrite the material, however, he wanted the anger to remain, so he didn’t polish the prose, despite having grown as a writer.
The joke in the story was twofold; one, as if you need to have a contagion in order to choose your gender? As if everybody isn’t choosing their gender every day! (According to him, every morning, when we put on our clothes, we are choosing what gender we are. Dumbass.) The second joke is that nothing really happens with this contagion, except you stop producing sex hormones (oh, that all?) and that everyone is freaking out about having to make an explicit choice, which they had been making implicitly all along. (Why anyone who is ‘cis’ would suddenly choose to be the opposite gender and start taking cross sex hormones, appeared to have never occurred to him or the story.)
The binary Peters was interested in, wasn’t the binary between male and female, rather cis and trans. In the story, cis people are suddenly made aware of the emotional landscape of the trans person. Making no sense, Peters then grandly explained that ‘cis people’ have been aware of such emotions all along and that he was more interested in people ‘failing in gender’, than succeeding. We are all failing in gender, apparently.
Clark felt that being able to identify your own failures in gender presentation was incredibly threatening and this was why certain people were so obsessed with trans people. Peters leapt to agree, feeling that trans people were used as a scapegoat but were also a beacon of hope (snort), which some people found terrifying.
‘When you hear terfs talk about gender you really get the sense that they fucking hate being women,’ said Clark smartly, adding that she thought terfs were petrified by the idea of ‘you actually don’t have to do this.’ This was such a perfect piece of intellectual google, given Peters had just said – and Clark had agreed – that we all have to do gender. Doh!
Stag Dance
Peters said that the story was based in historical fact. In the past, men working in mining camps and the like, would put on dances where some would attend as men, some as women. The tradition amongst lumberjacks choosing to attend as female, would be to cut out a triangle from their burlap sack and pin the fabric to their crotch. This, according to Peters, was transition ‘stripped down to its barest parts.’ Of course, the triangle is also a ‘symbol of queerness.’ The main character is typical lumberjack Babe Bunyan, a nod to Americana’s Paul Bunyan, who pins the triangle to his crotch and gets into a rivalry with the camp twink for the boss’s affections.
Then Peters did a reading of a sex scene from the story, which included a description of an industrial accident where a man’s hand is degloved of its skin. All of this in Peters’ ‘lumberjack’ voice. It was through exploring the character of Babe that Peters felt opened up enough to discuss the joy of his own prosthesis (not explained further, thank god).
Prosthetics are part of your presentation, part of your sex life, and there’s a way in which your body becomes more than your body and there’s something kinda magic about it.
Torrey Peters
Having the lumberjack character think through gender dysphoria reanimated the issue for him personally. For example, the character says ‘no mirror has ever befriended me,’ which is something Peters’ experienced – he used to feel insulted when he looked in them. Transition, Peters’ reflected, was deeply unfair because it depended on how much money you had and how feminine you already were. Therefore Babe, as a very masculine man, was up against it, and jealous of the twink because he didn’t need to try so hard. In other words, it sounds like yet another reference to the academic classifications between AGP and homosexual-transsexuals put into fiction.
Clark identified with Babe because she too had once fucked up her eyebrows. She also thought it was a story about ‘the politics of being desired’ and that ‘cis’ men didn’t understand the feminising effect of being desired. Peters felt it was ironic that Babe couldn’t understand why he was desirable, being the strongest, tallest, biggest guy around.
The Masker
Peters explained that The Masker is a horror story about a sissy fetishist, i.e. someone into ‘forced feminisation’ (don’t look it up), who goes to Las Vegas for a crossdressing convention and ends up ‘caught between’ an older trans woman, who is very into respectability, versus a fetishist who wears a full body woman suit made out of silicone. It might seem like the darkest story but really it was secretly hopeful, which is why he put it last.
The masker tries to persuade the sissy that being a fetishist is more awesome than being trans, and that being in the closet had the added benefit of being able to keep everything, like the wife and kids (nice). Peters quipped he thought this a pretty compelling argument and some men in the audience sniggered. Vegas was a metaphor for the closet and everyone enjoys going to Vegas. Hmm.
Yet again, Peters hinted back to the academic theories about transvestism and transsexualism, bemoaning that ‘if you had any sexuality’ you would be classed as a fetishist, though stopped short of saying AGP out loud. The protagonist is trapped between these two arguments about the nature of the beast and it was supposed to be a suffocating icky read. Also, this dichotomy had been ‘forced on trans women for a long time’ (about fifty years max., if we’re honest). It is probably the most pro-transition story he has written. Clark sighed as if she had understood.
The current political moment
Clark wanted Peters to comment on the current political moment but he wasn’t ready to leave The Masker just yet. It was the story which had been the most weaponised against him, with terfs having dug out excerpts where the character came to ‘transness through her sexuality’.
Terfs dug up The Masker and they found sections where the character was talking about her desires and like basically talking about her sexuality and like the ways that she came to transness through her sexuality. Um, which I stand by. I basically think that like that story is also about that like some people come to transness through sexuality and that’s valid and then this gets weaponised against trans people. This is like what is behind bathroom bills, right, because if trans women have any sexuality, that makes them dangerous, and we can’t have them in *trans’ [SIC] spaces.
Torrey Peters – *A Freudian slip.
Terfs had posted excerpts from The Masker all over Twitter! As if the text were his literal thoughts! On remembering this, Peters became narked at how ‘illiterate’ terfs were (unlike himself, saying ‘like’ all the time) and that it was ‘not such a great analysis, terfs.’ He had at-the-ready gag too: ‘I want to kill my landlord,’ Dostoevsky. Bravo.
Peters had originally self-published these stories on the trans writing scene in Brooklyn, wanting to impress other trans-identified males, notably Morgan M. Page ‘who was probably somewhere in here tonight.’ (He wasn’t, Big Bird can easily be spotted at a hundred paces.) He wanted to be like them, especially the ones who had bonded at Camp Trans in 2006, which was a protest against an ‘exclusionary music festival’. It was a protest but it was also an opportunity to exchange ideas and creativity. Therefore, out of bad moments, something beautiful could arise. Over the last few weeks he had done so many speaking events and so many trans people had attended – not that he was clocking who was trans of course! They hadn’t come just to see Torrey, they were also writers, musicians, artists. There was an inevitable future of cultural flourishing which will arise out of this moment, because the bad times push trans people together, and when trans people come together, they make art. Massive round of applause.
Question and Answer session
First question was asked by a trans-identified male. He wanted to know why Peters placed transness in the pastoral, rather than the metropole. Peters responded that trans people were often forced into urban areas, for example when having to get their medications, but it was ultimately a false metaphor. He knew people who wanted to make transness be about the woods and farming and about the earth and grounding. Bleurghhh!
Was Torrey Peters expecting to get nominated for the Women’s Prize again? Obviously being nominated had been massive, going from an unknown to selling tons of books, to now having his self-published works in print. He wouldn’t have anything to do with the Women’s Prize again though, as – shock horror – the organisers had asked him for his passport (someone near me did actually suck in breath). Peters wouldn’t give it to them though, because in 2021 it was easy to get an F on your passport as an American, but not if you were British (completely untrue, by the way). Peters wouldn’t comply because he fundamentally disagreed with the notion that ‘you’re more of a woman if your government makes your passport process easy.’ People murmured in disgusted agreement. Some even clapped. In a year’s time, when his passport runs out, he would no longer be able to have a passport with an F on it (so really this was all about him, nothing to do with his British compatriots). This meant no ‘trans women’ could be nominated going forward. I suspect it is routine for competitions to ask entrants for this information, and that the Women’s Prize didn’t give a shit about his sex marker, rather, it being the whole point, but there you go.
Clark encouraged any authors/publishers in the room not to submit works to the Women’s Prize and to send them abuse via Twitter instead. How very grown up.
Detransition baby
Well, culture does eat politics, though at some point surely people will get bored of these narcissistic shitheads? I’m forever hopeful. This man’s account of being abused and forcibly medicalised as a teen, sums up everything that needs to be said in response to men like Torrey Peters.
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The Lies They Tell 
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