Stag Dance Review: Torrey Peters’ t4t tattoo, homemade estrogen and negotiating gender

-Tiaan La Grange

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Torrey Peters said it was her first time in Cape Town, albeit virtually, before she asked that the cameraman pan to The Book Lounge’s denizens so that she could peer around and say “hello”. Some staff and attendees sported the hot pink T-shirts promoting the launch of her new book, Stag Dance, a collection of four pieces of short fiction. The crowd, hanging on to her every word, was buzzing to talk to her—some adorers had been dreaming of the moment since reading her critically successful debut novel, Detransition, Baby.

Earlier, Peters had gotten up out of her seat and left the frame of the projector screen to fetch a vial of estrogen she had synthesised at a workshop along with other transgender women. The moment uncannily captured the current political climate. It felt like a precarious privilege to gather and discuss a book about gender identity and sexuality amidst growing anti-trans sentiment in our country and abroad. Peters exudes pragmatism, however. Access to estrogen becomes difficult and increasingly expensive? Cook up your own with friends. Misrepresentation and misinformation co-opting narratives about marginalised groups? Write damn good fiction that’s honest about transgender experiences. 

Although the current political atmosphere of the American author’s home country is increasingly hostile towards transgender people, Peters said that the discourse around transgender experiences is now infinitely more nuanced. When she was first published, she was seen as the authoritative voice on transgender fiction, mostly because she was the only one who garnered a widespread readership. This season, she’s among almost two dozen transgender writers making waves within the publishing scene. Peters, among this crowd, is interested in how fiction can show universal feelings through the eyes of characters that navigate–and negotiate–their gender identity and expression.

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, the first of the collection, is a dystopian short story about the gender apocalypse brought about by an unstable ex-girlfriend. It’s arresting and unsettling. It is simultaneously unputdownable. Right out of the gate, Peters extends a respect to her reader: That even those unfamiliar with transitioning jargon and hormone therapy will believe the world she constructs post-gender apocalypse. Peters imagines a world where everyone is, in effect, forced to choose their gender. And she delivers the perfect gut-punch, putting the reader in the shoes of those who suffer the injustice of having to while the rest of the world judges them for it.

tiaan's copy at tiaan's house taken by ashley (before beating tiaan at beer pong)

With a second story, Peters explores suppressed desire and the unravelling of an illicit boarding school romance. If you read the collection of short fiction from start to finish, this is where the book introduces an interesting dissection of masculinity. The Chaser, and the titular novella, Stag Dance, which follows a group of rowdy lumberjacks planning a dance some would attend as women, both offer a profound gender study. It’s as much an exploration of how much of gender is socially co-constructed as it is an observation of how hegemonic masculinity dictates the behaviour of men. 

Peters depicts an often time frustrating paradox that men who manage a hold on machismo while flippantly playing at other gender expressions are seen as truly masculine: For example, flapping wrists, putting on a high-pitched voice and then going back to chugging beer, or dog-piling and wrestling intimately with other men, all the while expertly avoiding an erection. Hypermasculine men can therefore safely play around with gender expression because they can comfortably and believably revert to a happy hegemonic version of masculinity. It becomes threatening when someone indefinitely disrupts this hegemony.

Peters’ takes on relationships between queer people are razor-sharp and she's soberingly direct about conversations in transgender discourse, and it shows in her writing. It’s unlike anything out there. Writers like Peters introduce a fresh perspective in speculative fiction. She flits between internal struggles and interpersonal relationships with unparalleled ease. She offers the reader a look into the most intimate thoughts and embarrassments of queer people and she pushes them into the spotlight to see just how resilient and fallible her characters can be. Stag Dance arouses and scandalises, laying bare the thoughts and feelings many people–of all genders–entertain in privacy.

At the book launch, Peters referenced a t4t tattoo inspired by the tradition of transgender people looking for one another in newspaper classifieds. It takes on a different meaning in her first story, where transgender characters get the tattoo as a mark of sisterhood; that they would choose their relationship with other transgender people before anything else. This sentiment is an integral part of the first and closing story, The Masker, but it goes beyond fiction. Peters bears a t4t tattoo in real life and she claims that this sisterhood is much more literal than a rainbow-washed blanket term like the queer “community” to her. Sisterhood often necessitates disagreements, jealousy and judgment as much as it means solidarity.

Those who can be the cruellest to transgender people, according to Peters, are other transgender people. In a way, this is true for any identity group. The author relates an idea throughout the book that people who understand each other and who are bound together by shared lived experiences have the most power to let one another down. Criticism and betrayal hurt infinitely more when it comes from someone like yourself. The t4t idea, then, is something deeper. In a world that can be dangerous to transgender people, it means that there are others like you, who know you, and would help make lab-grown estrogen at home when your country defunds hormone therapy for transgender people. (Earlier, Peters had gotten up out of her seat and left the frame of the projector screen to fetch a vial of estrogen she had synthesised at a workshop.)

Peters is an intelligent speaker and a deeply intriguing author. Stag Dance is at once a masterclass in short fiction writing and an essential addition to the growing list of fiction that happened to be written by transgender authors.