Stag Dance: A Novel & Tales opens with a be aware from writer Torrey Peters. Nonetheless on the heels of her 2021 hit novel Detransition, Child, Peters shares that she was motivated to maintain digging into trans id this time, posing an underlying query connecting the 4 tales in her new guide: “What does it even imply to be trans?”
It’s fairly a query to be asking at this second in time, as fascist gender policing reaches a boiling level. These in energy are taken with defining transness solely insofar that they assume they’ll separate and eradicate it. Properly-meaning allies search to outline it by the lens of oppression, lack, and cookie-cutter narratives; even trans of us ourselves can get caught up in gatekeeping traps, seduced by the notion that if we will solely discover the correct phrases, the correct timeline, the proper technique to be trans, then existential threats will vanish.
The trans characters in Stag Dance didn’t fall out of a coconut tree; all of them dwell underneath the stifling weight of gender norms. However reasonably than specializing in the macro, Peters zooms into their interiorities, wishes, and shut relationships, lighting up the pages with specificity, sucker-punch revelations, and some good old school romantic suspense.
Within the titular novel on the coronary heart of the guide, a seemingly all-male camp of grizzly lumberjacks plan a dance. To liven issues up, lumberjacks have the choice to pin a brown material triangle onto the crotch of their pants—a makeshift “bush”—and attend as “girls” for courting and dancing with. The chance stirs one thing inside Babe, the largest and ugliest man within the group, who’s the primary to say a bush for himself. He tries to play it for laughs at first, however that adjustments as he will get to know Lisen, a extra delicate and effeminate lumberjack who flirts and wrestles with the opposite guys.
Watching Lisen tease the boys, Babe feels a difficult-to-name stirring:
“His sauciness disturbed me, or reasonably, I used to be disturbed by the unctuous temptation it endangered in me, a queer want like the way it feels to overlook the right phrase for one thing, whilst you recognize someplace in your thoughts you have to have the phrase, that you simply don’t lack it in any respect, solely its use.”
Trans individuals can acknowledge this sense; it’s the primary time you encounter one other trans particular person and really feel a terrified-yet-excited surge of familiarity. This crew of 1800s lumberjacks haven’t heard the
phrase “transgender,” and so they actually don’t have information of gender-affirming care. However none of that issues when Babe wears his brown material and hooks up with the camp boss: “With eyes closed, there existed no distinction between the triangle and myself: Distinction collapsed, and it was on me and of me and in me.”
Like “Stag Dance,” quick story “The Chaser” additionally takes place within the single-sex surroundings of a boarding college bed room, the place a teenage boy begins secretly hooking up along with his female roommate Robbie. Within the confines of a darkish bed room, the place our bodies develop into shapes and curves, their attraction is plain. However when a brand new semester comes and room assignments change, tenderness with Robbie turns into humiliating and untenable for the protagonist: “What was sizzling for me earlier than was that he was female and obtainable, and I set all of the phrases.”
That’s only one occasion of many during which trans girls are betrayed in Stag Dance. To be a trans girl in Peters’ tales is to always dwell on a razor’s edge between cis individuals’s want and disgust, which frequently co-mingle. And it typically means betraying different trans individuals your self, within the pursuit of mainstream approval.
You’ll be able to see that dichotomy in at the moment’s conservative media: There’s a rabid obsession with all trans individuals—however particularly transfem of us—that so clearly stems from insecurity. They’re offended at trans individuals for alighting their very own gender and sexuality anxieties, for exposing the absurdity of the gender binary.
There’s a purpose transphobes hate being requested their pronouns, and attempt to declare “cisgender” is a slur: If you must work to outline your cisness, then meaning you might be ultimately defining your individual gender, after which doesn’t that make you a bit of bit trans, too?
That’s precisely what “Infect Your Buddies and Liked Ones,” the gathering’s most creative story, explores so deftly. A small staff of trans girls in Seattle develop and disperse a extremely contagious injection that takes away people’ potential to supply their very own hormones, and the US rapidly turns into a civil war-torn free-
for-all, the place everyone seems to be pressured to supply their very own hormones.
“I used to be considering I wish to dwell in a world the place everybody has to decide on their gender,” one of many culprits says by means of clarification. However curiously, this doesn’t erase the excellence between trans and cis: A bunch of trans girls who transitioned properly earlier than the an infection broke out discover one another and develop their very own group on an deserted farm, dwelling underneath the shared precept of “t4t.” The acquainted courting app acronym turns into a philosophy of respecting and searching for different trans of us above all else.
Whereas they’re ostensibly dwelling in a world the place everyone seems to be trans within the bodily sense, these trans girls nonetheless discover security primarily in one another. Outdated resentments, rivalries, and desperation to enchantment to cis individuals for security and validation fade away. “All it took was the top of the world t o make that occur,” one trans homesteader observes.
The tales in Stag Dance aren’t about courageous, articulate transgender individuals overcoming oppression and main the best way right into a genderless utopia. They’re as a substitute about messy, flawed trans individuals searching for survival whereas reaching a modicum of authenticity, in a hostile world the place cis individuals’s personal gender anxieties—and the violence these anxieties can provoke—lurk round each nook.
In the long run, true security can solely be discovered with one another. That appears a salient lesson to recollect as new insurance policies try and separate the “QT” from the “LGB”—and even to tell apart the great, quiet trans
individuals who maintain to themselves from those who insist on enjoying sports activities, dressing outdoors the binary, utilizing restrooms with out passing, educating younger individuals, and different apparently flagrant offenses.
Nonetheless, it’d be a disservice to current these tales solely as political fodder. As Peters notes in her introduction, this assortment is about trans individuals as “simply individuals craving, crashing, loving, and messing up.” These characters stayed with me, and when you crack open Stag Dance, you’ll wish to spend a while with them as properly.
See Torrey Peters at City Corridor Wednesday, March 19, 7:30 pm, free–$28, all ages.
This story was initially printed in our sister paper, Portland Mercury.
