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Its been four years since Torrey Peters published her critically acclaimed debut,Detransition, Baby.
This is a bit of genius.
Torrey Peters:My first public interaction with you, Andrea, was a little bit of a tiff.
I was like,This young upstart wrote a better essay than me.
I started complaining about it, and it was all on the record.
And then Harron published it.
What do you think about that?
Andrea responded very eloquently and I think correctly.
I stewed about it.
I was like,I dont know who Andrea thinks she is to talk back to me.
But it was a period in my life where I was having a breakup, so I got distracted.
And slowly, Andrea started writing more and more pieces.
I was like,Well, those are pretty good pieces.Soon she won a Pulitzer.
And I was like,Thank God I got distracted.
But Ive always been curious what wouldve happened had I actually taken on Andrea Long Chu.
So I was thinking you should start out by showing me a little bit of what you got.
Just roast me for a bit.
Show me what I was missing.
Just roast you?Just lay into me!
I mean, I dont want to roast you.
You clearly have a big presentation in the morning.
You look like you really scored at Womens Warehouse.I did, I did.
I can take it.
You look like the surprise guest at a business-casual gender-reveal party.Its a boy.
Thats enough …Im so happy that was a review of my suit and not my book.
The book is genuinely so, so good seriously.
And I dont have that opinion about a lot of things.
Not even as a critic, just as a reader.
It was honestly so great to read.
It was like,Well, the publishing industry is not going to publish my work.
Im just going to self-publish.
And so, the original publication was full of typos.
There were sentences that didnt totally work.
You just need the energy.
And so it was funny to look at it in the context of this book.
Im not the person who was willing to take risks.
Im not the person who is willing to leave mistakes on the page just to make a point.
And so, I was like, I actually cant edit this.
And thenStag Dance,the main story in the book, is completely written in this weird lumberjack slang.
They would cut out a little brown fabric triangle and theyd paste the triangle upside down over their crotch.
But in some ways that narrative was a reaction toDetransition, Baby.
There was so much pressure.
It was like, You wrote this comedy of manners.
How are you going to follow it up?
And I was like, You know what no one wants?
A logger dance discussing the various ways to cut down a tree.
And in a weird way, that totally freed me.
I could say whatever I wanted.
I got to reinvent a lot of what I was feeling in the logger language.
Part of what you experience reading it is, like, Who talks like this?
I found this dictionary of logger slang from 1941 that was compiled by the children of loggers.
An egg is a cackleberry; chewing tobacco is Scandihoovian dynamite.
And I was like,I just want to write these weird words.
A phrase like gender dysphoria, when I say it now, feels so overdetermined.
Babe Bunyan, in the novel, says, Mirrors do not befriend me.
I was like,thatis how it feels.
Partly because of the time; Babe Bunyan cant know anything.
But also for instance, the second story, The Chaser, takes place at a boarding school.
And neither one of them know exactly whats going on.
And so it opens up a whole thing.
For me, oftentimes transness is about knowing things about whats going on with your feelings.
It is something that comes through with a number of different characters in the book.
And the other person is totally on the fetishist level; he wears a full-body silicone woman suit.
His way of doing things is kind of appealing keep everything and have great sex.
Who wouldnt want it?
The life of a trans woman could be the future, could be the past.
And that moment of indeterminacy in time is something that really interested me.
Its an extremely bad and dangerous thing.
Were already seeing the weaponization of certainty against trans people.
How do you constitute that kind of thing?
Whats the difference between how people want to see me and how I want to be seen?
Theyre constantly trying to assert a sense of what it means that they are trans.
So, theres a problem.On the one hand, you want it to feel intuitive.
On the other, theres such a demand to intellectualize it or make it available through language.
I have the language, I have this thing, and yet I am constantly rejected.
