Amongst the myriad attacks on civil liberties that have characterized Donald Trump's second term of government, the assault on trans rights across American society have been particularly horrifying and far reaching, from executive orders limiting gender affirming care for young people to bans on trans people serving the armed services. The demonization and minimization of the human experience of people on the basis of their gender alienates and endangers entire communities.
It is culturally a pretty terrifying time to be a trans person in America. I was thinking about what that might mean as a backdrop to being a trans artist in America today, what it might feel like producing new work that can be personal and political and provocative, but also unabashed, that needn't represent an entire community, or be consumed by trauma, or have a responsibility to respond to a malignant government that's denying your.
Very excit distance.
But great art thrives in response to tyranny, and great artists find ways to be funny and fierce and utterly themselves in the face of external forces beyond their control. Tory Peters is all too aware of the weight of expectation, but with her new book, she's shown herself again to be a great artist and ridiculously fun to read. Her twenty twenty one novel, De Transition Baby was a sensation
and a revelation. It follows the dynamics between three thirty something Brooklynites grappling with the idea of parenting and raising a child. That those three models of womanhood, motherhood, and adulthood formed an unconventional triangle was more a question of
setting than purely subject. Reese a transwoman, Katrina a ciswoman, and Ames, who in the book has detransitioned and is navigating life as a man after no longer being amy as a mainstream literary success story in the early twenty twenties. It was incredibly frank about the lives of its characters, charmingly unconcerned with explaining cultural specifics, localized terminology, or social mores.
It was just this irresistibly likable comedy of manners. That it was a book by a major new transwriter was both precisely the point and completely beside the point. Tory Peters's debut was long listed for the Women's Prize in the UK, named one of the New York Times Best Books of the twenty first Century so Far and was widely beloved and acclaimed. So the follow up, stag Dance, is a collection of four stories, each falling into a
fairly specific genre. The first, infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, is spec fiction in an imagined gender apocalypse. Then there's The Chaser, a teen romance, one part Brideshead Revisited, one part a kind of literary twilight with anxiety rather than vampires and werewolves. Third is the titular Story, probably better described as a short novel about a group of restless lumberjacks working in an illegal winter logging outfit who plan a dance that some of them will volunteered to attend
as women. And finally, the last story, The Masker, a horror infused Las Vegas set exploration of kink and difficult choices. Each of the four stories is arresting and surprising in its own way. Each plays with genre and gender with equal flare and confidence. The world is unmistakably in conversation with the shit show of contemporary politics and society, but it also sits outside and above it resolutely thrillingly its
own thing. This is a book of four stories and an author with big, expansive ideas about the human experience are Michael Williams and this is Read. This the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. Of the four stories collected in stag Dance, both infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and The Masker were self
published by Tory almost a decade ago. They were published as independent novellas part of a publishing project that Tory extended to other trans writers who were unable to find homes for their writing. In the interviews about stag Dance, Tory has said she's less interested in the binary between men and women and more interested in the binary between CIS people and trans people and how false and reductive that idea is.
In the book's.
Acknowledgment, she refers to her never ending transition, otherwise known as ongoing trans life. I wanted to begin with the book's long gestation period and the ways in which it reflects an evolving sensibility, an ongoing transition for its author.
One of the products of that of genesis for this book is that it's a decade worth of work in the one book, and I'm curious about the ways in which when you look back over those first novellas, how much your appetite for what you want to do as a writer has changed, how much your capacity for what you want to do as a writer has changed, And how hard it was not to get under the hood and tinker and rewrite your earlier self.
Well had I had the permission to do so. I mean, I think I'm a better writer now. So I went back to go polish the sentences. And the thing is, in twenty sixteen, I was like angrier than I was now. I was more like kind of punk and angry, and when I started polishing it, the thing is, like, it's hard to have polish and anger at the same time. And as I started polishing the sentences, yeah, they were
getting better, but they were also getting less urgent. I mean I was putting the book together in like twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four, where it was pre Trump and pre what's happened in the UK, but I had like an inkling that it was coming, and I was like, you know, if I'm going to start this book with it with something, I want to hand the mic to somebody who's angry and wants to speak about it. And
that's really myself from ten years before. So I actually just got rid of all my changes, went back to the original, and the original was full of typos because I was really of the belief that, like everybody should be writing, and that the idea that you have to have an immaculate page is actually a thing that keeps people away from writing.
I like the typos punk and I'm not going to I'm going to turn off the little suggestions for I am too punk for that little life.
There were like some typos that were like pretty embarrassing. There was I misspelled Columbia, which is a country I now live in. I spelled it like the university, and that really kind of confused the class origins of one character. But there aren't typos in this version. But at the time, I was like, I want everybody to be writing. I
want everybody to be telling their stories. And I think that, like, you know, there were people I know who didn't go to college and in fact would be anxious, you know, even just crossing a college campus. But like, I don't belong here. I do have, like, you know, a college education, and I want to be like, it doesn't matter. The
reason you're writing. What writing's for is to move people, And I wanted especially a lot of the trans girls who are around me, to not feel like, oh, if it's not super polished, I can't put it into the world. It's like, no, you're mad, You've got something to say, put it in the world. And this is going to be example of that.
I'm interested that younger self fueled by anger and urgency. Yeah, I'm curious about the relationship between finding a rightly voice and finding a personal identity and the ways in which they dovetailed or the one was an expression of the other.
Well, I think this election has a series of different voices. But I do think that I developed a kind of sensibility out of that, which has to do with not explaining myself very much. By the time I was writing d Transition Baby, I'd gone through a series of fights with other trans women. I wasn't like, sort of starry eyed about the idea of easy solidarity along identity lines. You know. I understood that communities aren't constantly falling apart.
People are having difficult times. And also I've ran into plenty of trans people who don't like my writing, you know, So it was like, I can't say I write for all trans people except for the like you know, thirty
percent who hate what I'm doing or something. So, you know, I began to think more about kind of affinity and writing for people with whom I have affinity, and also the fact that like a lot of the books that I was reading when I was reading The Transition Baby, were by this woman a little bit older than me. That was the time that Fronte was, you know, really big, and I realized, I'm reading all these books by like divorce This women because divorced This women especially went through
something like a transition. They had to start their lives over and like not get better. And so I began to sort of think about writing as when I say it's like to move people, it's also sometimes to speak back. You know, early on, I wanted to speak back to
all the trans women around me. I slowly began to want to speak back to these Divorced This women who were writing books where they were asking questions just like mine but slightly scance, and I wanted to be like, well, look at my perspective, and that sort of decision to speak back, but also to speak back without necessarily always explaining myself as though I'm the outsider.
It's my favorite thing about your writing.
And it hit me with The Transition Baby, which was the first of yours that I read, but is the exhilarating thing of the confidence of saying, no, this is the world the story exists in, and it's your job. Whether it's lumberjack slang or whether it's whether it's the very particular conversations going on in the trans family in New York, whatever it is, you can be a radar wherever and catch up with this your own space.
Yeah, And you know, I give I think I give readers credit for being able to do it.
You know.
I think it's kind of condescending to readers to basically be like, let me slow down for you and and essentially ruin the momentum of a story because I actually think you're like too stupid to understand it. You know. I tend to give my readers credit. There was like a really funny tweet when you Transition Baby came out of like this grandfather sending his gay grandson like a series of what is a twink? What is a bareback? Like? What is like all these different you know, and it
was like that's what I want. You know. It's like, look, you have resources for figuring out that grandpa his resource was apparently his grandson by.
Text, but you know you can probably history that his grandson.
It's probably the best.
I mean, it was really like I don't know, I just give I give people credit for and I think that sensibility shows up, you know, even now where it's like in this new book, the biggest piece in it is written in lumberjack slang, which I don't explain at all, and so people are like, oh, you didn't explain the trans terms, and it's like, well, I don't even explain obscure lumberjack slang that nobody knows, you know, and that some of it has given me the confidence to basically
be like you just get in it, you go hard, and that actually if you're doing that people, people will keep up, whether you're doing trans brook line or whether you're doing turn of the century lumberjack dances.
This is a digression, but I'm curious as a rader, is that what you like to be thrown in? Do you gravitate towards books that encourage you to do the work to meet them?
I mean, sometimes, you know, I think that the thing is like I've been trained to have the books be easy for me, and I've been trained by school to think if I don't understand every single word, I'm like somehow fail the book, and I think that that's not a natural inclination. Sometimes people will tell me, like with the Lumberjack stuff, that like, I read this book the way that I felt when I was a kid, when you're reading a book when you're a kid and you
just like don't know one word persons. The most magical reading I had for myself as a kid was oftentimes where I was like trying so hard to build a world and being like I think this is what that word means. I think this is what that world. But there was like all this possibility and all this texture to it. And my joke is that like, oftentimes when you don't understand things that people are telling you, you'll pay attention to so much more things and you end
up with a much more textured experience. When I go to the car mechanic, you know, he opens up the hood of the car and he's like your alternator is something something with the camshaft or this or that, and it's like I'm struggling to understand what you're selling me. But I sure do know that I'm at the car mechanic right now. The experience of being at the car mechanic is incredibly vivid because I have so little idea
what you're saying. That is actually a really interesting experience in language that is not so frequently captured in what is often valued in language right now, which is either language that is quite transparent or readers that are so knowledgeable that they can read a whole passage of Joyce
and know every single reference. There's something interesting about struggling and about creating context and texture and possibilities that might not exactly be what the author is saying, or that might not be like correct.
And one of the ways you get to do exactly that so effectively in stag dance is through genre as well. Like so you mentioned speculative fiction, but you know there's also horror, there's teen romance.
By playing with genre, you've got convention.
Which helps set up expectation, and then you've got freedom to take that way you take it.
That's absolutely right, it's very well said. Some of it is that, like these genres have been so developed that it saves me a lot of work in in fact, your finds and loved ones, Like, there are these guys on the road who are like hunting the main character. It's like, if you've read The Road by CORNK. McCarthy, if you've seen Mad Max or whatever, like, you don't really need to explain their motivations. You can just be like their hunters on the road, just like gesture that
was great. That would have been a whole chapter of explaining something that everybody already knows. And I can just sort of like point over there and be like, yeah, you know those guys and then get on with what I care about, which is the relationship between the two women in the book, which you know, there are people who want to know everything about those hunters on the Road and they want to know that entire world. And I discovered I'm not that kind of writer.
Tell me about the choice of teen romance as a set of generic conventions that are useful to playing well.
I like the fact that teens don't know anything that sounds condescending, by I mean it actually with a lot of respect. At the time, like you know, people were talking about trans stuff and it was just nobody was hearing each other. Everybody had their sort of arguments that they'd already predigested, and they're just sort of like bumping their predigested arguments into each other. When it came to
trans stuff, nobody was convincing each other of anything. And I was thinking about the last time that happened, I think, you know, in a massive way in the United States, was over the Vietnam War, and that out of that came new journalism, where journalists were sort of like, I can't tell you facts and figures anymore because nobody believes them.
There's no shared reality and these kinds of facts, and so journalists started taking the techniques of novelists Joan Diddyon, Tom Wolf, Gayta Lease, and they started writing sort of things that were like, let me just try and get to an emotional truth and then never mind all of the facts and figures around it. Something similar has happened with not just trans stuff, but with any kind of
identity sort of thing. As soon as a reader says this is a story about misogyny, everyone's sort of got this liberal arts discourse, the analysis that can just be snapped onto it. This is a story about homophobia snaps in place. You know, certainly transphobia the same thing, and so one of the things that was fun was writing number one is fun to write from the perspective of like a bro. That was fun and like having a
bro who didn't know anything about his own emotions. But then two, to not have him understand his own feelings meant that if he doesn't know what he's feeling exactly, it's harder for a reader to come in with their predigested analysis, and then you just have to feel what he's feeling. So the teen romance story was is a story of a kind of bro athlete. Cis white guy who starts hooking up with his roommate and it's unclear what his roommate is. They end up treating each other cruelly.
They love each other. He can't admit that he loves his roommate, but they love each other. And you know, you could say, like, well, is he cruel and in love because he thinks that Robbie is a boy and he's secretly gay and this is a homophobic story. Is he cruel because Robbie's very feminine and disdains femininity and
this is a story of misogyny. If you know that this is written by Tory, you could say, well, maybe Robbie's a pre transition trans girl, and this is a story of transphobia, but actually it's all of those things and none of those things all at once, and so you actually just get to sort of the emotions that this character is going through without quite being able to name them, and therefore you can't sort of bring a
lot of your pre digestive analysis to what's happening. And my hope then is what you discover is the character who's supposed to be the trans character, Robbie, the feminine roommate, has all the things that the strong cis character is supposed to have. That character has agency, that character is able to state his desires, able to sort of carry through a plan, And the character who's supposed to be the sort of like strong centered character has all the
hallmarks of a trans character. Where there's a big gap between how he wants to be and how the world perceives him, and he's trying to close that gap through performance,
through like acting out in a certain way. He's full of shame, he's sort of stuck in that he knows he needs to make some sort of big move, but he can't make that big move, and as a result, both love and sex are closed off to him and the way they might be to somebody who is trans but pre transition or something that like those things that are supposed to be trans are actually things that the Cis character goes through, which is kind of my larger point that like, we're all we're all kind of going
through this stuff.
I think that's what I love about that story is the sense of uncertainty and play isn't just for your characters, but it is also an active engagement with your readers and their expectation of what they get from a Tory Peters story as well. That in this collection, And I might be wrong, but I would say you can come on the fingers of one hand the number of characters who identify as trans. That doesn't mean that their relationship to their gender, to their identity, to all this stuff
isn't actively in play. But it's not about self identified trans identity as such.
Yeah, I'm actually very uninterested in trans identity. The longer I've been trans, the less I know what it means to be trans. And for me, being trans is like I'm kind of standing with a bunch of other people and we have each other's box. You know in a sort of political way, but in a sort of like ontological like are we the same in some like you know, deep deep way, Like no, I don't necessarily see that
we are. This person has come from the east and I have come from the west, and you know, I have people arriving at this place from all cardinal directions, from all different types of experiences metaphorically speaking, and I don't understand many other people's experiences. I don't understand, Like you call yourself trans, but like it was because you talk to your therapist and your therapist suggested it and
it sounded good to you. Well, like that sounds totally alien to me given my experience in somebody else's experience and what I've been through sounds totally alien and weird to them other than we're all here. So I don't really know what it means to be trans. And then once I say I don't really know what it means to be trans, then it doesn't really matter whether you
call yourself trans or not. I'm just kind of interested in the experience of, oh, you have weird gender feelings, and you're like interested in essentially having my back or me having or back or us understanding each other. So I don't really care what you call it. I'm just interested in what those experiences might be that they got
you here. Recently, I ended up on a reddit that had to do with ozimpic and making your own ozimpic or your own GLP one, whatever those things are, and the formats in the reddit discussions we're almost the same as what you find in a transreddit. Whereas before and after photos arguments about whether or not one should conform to these conventional beauty standards, the transversion is like, why should I have to pass? Why should I not get to feel beautiful in this way? Why should I have
to take hormones? Why should you have to take hormones to be trans? All these things? So the experiences are like emotionally so resonant, and the identities had nothing to do with one another. I feel the same thing when I look at so many of the men that are out in the world today, where I'm like, you're really mad because you want to be seen and with your gender in a certain way, and you're failing at this gender and it hurts your feelings and you're mad about it.
You want to be a rugged man, and then you go on the dating apps and everybody sells your four inches too short, and you're furious about it, and so you go and you get like a home construction supplies that you stack around you to sort of compensate for that, you know, and I'm making fun of it, but like, that's also the trans experience. You feel like your body doesn't do a certain thing you wish it would, and you get a bunch of accouterments to surround you to
make it look a certain way. We're all doing it, We're all kind of failing at it. And I'm interested in the people who have the guts to look at this and be like, what's going on? Or many of the characters in these stories, I think I'm seeing them through that lens rather than through like naming them along their identity.
I really love that.
But I wonder how complicated that is. By becoming the visible face of trans literature and the representative voice of you know, the ways in which you are claimed by others or stuff is ascribed to you. After the success of d Transition, Baby, does it make it that much harder not to have to be the good trans voice, the giver of advice?
Do you think about yourself.
Differently off the back of the stratospheric fame that is D Transition Baby.
Well, I think that the nice thing is that D Transition Baby did well enough that the publishers gave a bunch of other trans women a chance. I can think of like fifteen other trans women who have books out in the States this spring. I can think of a handful of others in the UK. I wish I was more up to date on who's getting published here in Australia, and I apologize for not knowing that. But the more people that there are out there, the more I get
to be my own idiosyncratic weirdo, you know. And that's the freedom I want for myself. And I think that while I was doing Detransition, maybe I had to be a little bit more buttoned up. But the success of it has opened up things enough that I can just point to other people. You want a story about that
kind of representation, here's five, right. I mean, we haven't even talked about the Lumberjacks story, but I think nobody would say, like, the representative story of the trans experience in the twenty first century and the United States is a bunch of nineteenth century lumberjacks putting on a dance, wearing triangles over their crouches like that's not and that's sort.
Of all I think they're saying it now, and I'm sorry about that. Coming up after the break, Tory reveals the genesis behind her title story and explains why you have to truly love someone to be cruel to them.
We'll be right back.
Brunswick. Bob's voice carried through the stunted spruce saplings that held fast the banks of the ravine. I neared and saw that he was potlatching with Mikels and stubbed Nelson, and the snow between the three knelt a fourth figure. It was Lison, a pretty whistle punk from somewhere in Scandinhouvia. Old timber beasts like Mickels took a special pleasure in ordering Lison about making him scamper to fetch this or that. But at night Lison liked to do a strange thing.
While other men sprawled down to roll the guff, Lison would pull out a little book. He had a diary of sorts, filled with blank pages, and without asking leave, he'd select a man and begin to sketch him, holding a pencil in his fine, slim hands that made a set with the fine bones of his cheek and jaw, which slanted at just the same angle as his glinting
eyes as he stared brazen at his chosen jack. He never once selected me for his drawing diary, which I told myself was no matter, because in fact his sauciness disturbed me, or rather I was disturbed by the unctious temptation it engendered in me, a queer need, like how it feels to forget the perfect word for something, even as you know somewhere in near mind you must have the word that you don't lack it at all, only
its use. As a consequence, I was stilted in Leson's presence, which made the needy lacking feeling worse, and my stiltness clearly amused him, so that his lips lifted into a saucy smirk, as if he understood something I didn't, And him being so amused that me struck me as ever, the more saucy.
We couldn't resist giving you a taste of the lumberjack slang that defines the title story of this book, stag Dance. It's tory giving it a raid and the story's the longest in the collection. It's also maybe the most fun. Tory Flex's impressive skills as a stylist, and the whole thing is kind of mischievous rather than sanctimonious. To fully appreciate the complexity of this story, I asked Tori too set up for the genesis behind stag dance.
A stag dance is something that men would do when they were working camps that were like all male, like mining camps, rail camps, some Civil war battalions, and logging camps,
like way out in the woods. They'd be working all men, they get lonely and they would put on dances where some of the men would attend the dance as women, and the logger specifically would cut a triangle of brown fabric like maybe three inches to a highpot noose and they would turn it upside dowance was inverted, and then they'd put over the crotch and symbolism is probably evident to anybody listening to this podcast, and then they would
go to the dance as women. And I was just like, I love this because I mean not this is just like so on the nose where it's like this is transition like broken down to its like most basic symbol, but also the fact there's like an upside down triangle which has resonances with like the Second World War, with like the reclaimed upside down triangle, and like HIV activism. And here it was like with lumberjacks doing it.
So so weird that history, and how like if you'd made it up, what would have felt a bit.
Contrived totally, it would have been like, oh, come on, Tory, like but it was like, no, they did that. And so the story is about Babe Bunyan. And in the States there's this tradition of tall tales and one of them is about Paul Bunyan, who was like the greatest
lagger in the country. If you like drive to certain parts of the Midwest, like Wisconsin and Minnesota, on the roadside stands, you'll see the statue of this like big bearded man and like a red flannel with an axe, and that's Paul Bunyan, the greatest, strongest, and he was like, you know, a giant, and he had a giant also,
a giant blue ox named Babe. So the main cacharacter my book is named Babe Bunyan, which is a nickname given to him by other loggers because he's as tall and as good with an ax as Paul Bunyan, and he's as ugly as Paul Bunyan's. He's got a face
like Paul Bunyan's, a big blue ox. And the story is about what happens when Babe Bunyan decides to go to the stag Dance as one of the women, and like the way it throws the entire camp into disarray and he ends up in like a rivalry with like the youngest, prettiest kind of camp punk and things kind of just go from there.
It's such a wonderful story and such an exciting kind of shift from you as a writer as well, because while it carries all the hallmarks of what at this point two books and we've come to know and love as your style, it's also entirely its own thing. And that's partly about language and partly about the voice you've found.
How did you find your way into that.
Vo Well, I was I was building a sauna in the woods.
Good. That was exactly what I thought, So.
I, like, you know, there were a couple of things up and like the sort of reception to de Transition Baby was a little bit overwhelming, and I like, I had a couple different responses to that. One was to start spending more time out of the city. And I got really into sauna, the proper Finnish style sauna, like what makes for a good sauna. So I decided I
was going to build a really good, finish sauna. And I don't know that much about construction or anything, so I started learning about tools, and then also I had to start like learning a chainsaw to clear a place with the sauna, and also to make firewoods. I began like learning that's a spruce, that's a maple, that's you know,
learning my trees. So the area in which I was doing it was a former logging country, and I was dirty and I was uncomfortable all the time, and I was a little bit like thinking about my gender as I was in the woods, like I'm doing this these very typically masculine things of cutting down trees with chainsaws,
and how do I feel about my gender? So that was on my mind, and I was also feeling like all of this pressure to follow up the Transition Baby in a sort of you know, domestic comedy kind of sphere. And not feeling like I had the thing to follow it up. And then I was thinking also kind of like about what if I just did a really different voice,
maybe that would free me up. And then I found this book published in nineteen forty one, and it's a collection of logger slang collected by the children of bloggers, which I normally would have like totally ignored, except that I was building the sona and thinking about logging, and the language was so interesting and weird. You know, I'm used to sort of like cowboy language and as an American or like other language, but it was something like
really different and just like totally gone. And so the examples of words would be, like, I mean, the one I always say because it's sort of easy to see just like the weird patterns of thought that are behind it. There's cackleberry for an egg, because like a hen cackles and then it lays an egg and need to like find it and pick it like a berry, So that's your cackleberry. A preacher is a sky pilot because they
guides you to heaven. Your hand is a lunch hook because you sort of scoop your lunch and hook it into your mouth. Chewing tobacco is Scandahoovian dynamite. I don't know why they say Scanda Hoovia instead of Scandinavia, but it's just really fun. There were so many strange expressions that just felt like very lived in. Like when you had dinner with like all the other men, it was a symphony in tin because everybody's just they're eating so fast with their tin dishes that there's just the sound
of tin on tin. Yeah. I read it, and I was like, I see how it's to live this. So I was like looking to follow up interested in logging, and I was also under all these expectations to follow up. And I was like, well, what if I just wrote a book in logger slang and came up with like a lagger dialect. Nobody's expecting it, probably nobody wants it, And in a weird way, that like frees me up
to like actually have fun again writing. And so I started it, and I kind of wanted to do like an Americana syntax, like you know, something somewhere between like Melville and Cornick McCarthy, like that's sort of like King James rhythms, but like didn't quite get it right. And so I found this weird syntax and cadence and put all those pieces together and found that I was just like having a really good time.
Oh, it's so good to read. And that language has this kind of baroque play to it. That's a odds with the expectation of a kind of inarticulate stoicism that the two pull in opposite. On the one hand, you have the sheer poetry of a symphony in tin, and then you have people who you assume are conditioned not to say what they want or need or who they are.
Yeah, part of the fun of it was to actually give Babe an excess of language. You know that, like the access of language actually had to do with some part of like his muteness around his desires. You know, it's like I can say all these things, but I'm like circling around the thing that I actually wanted. The like flowardness of everything around it kind of shows what is difficult to say or what needs to be sort of said in new ways.
A few times before, you mentioned characters being cruel to one another, and actually, I think across all your work, you're one of the best writers I've ever read on the interplay between cruelty and intimacy and the ways in which the two of them are part of the same thing.
Yeah, I think you have to like love somebody in a certain way to be like truly cruel to them, or at least you have to understand them, and like certainly I think that like cruelty has an aspect of betrayal to it, and you know, to be betrayed, you
have to like trust and know somebody. I think for something like Detransition Baby, the structuring relationship is like mothers and daughters, but for this book, I would say it's sisters, and the ways that like your sister is the person who you go to who can understand you, who comes from where you come from, has seen you from when you're young. If you make a change, they're like, well, that's you now, but I know everywhere you've come from, and there's like a such a safety in that. But
also that's the person you're most vulnerable to. That's the person who can betray you, who can can knife you most cruelly. And so almost everybody in the book, no matter their gender, they end up as sisters, like Babe Bunyan and Lison, who's like the pretty boy in camp. It's meant to be a little bit funny that there's this you know, big strong logger and he's essentially sisterly with the young.
Pretty boy, and never more sisterly than when ultimately they're in competition. Yes, that that becomes the micro of acceptance. Isn't solidarity, it's recognition of rivalry.
Yeah.
The character says like, to be rivals is to be something the same, you know that, And he's almost proud when he can be in the same league of contention as Lison. They end up competing for the affections of the camp boss. And I do think that that's oftentimes, like, you know, the way that desire triangulates, like, well, how do I know if I'm pretty, the prettier girl is looking for this guy, and so if I get the guide, no matter what people say about me, if I get
the guy, I must ergo be the prettiest. Really, what I'm talking about underneath all of it is my relationships with other trans women, you know, and like the ways that we negotiate what it means to be trans, what it means to be feminine. The scarcity of resources that are available for us trans women are my sisters, and they are also the people that can hurt me the most.
I knew after D Transition Baby, I wanted to read anything you write after stag Dance. I now can no longer confidently say what a Tory Peter's novel looks like, but I know I want to read it even more than ever. It's been such a trait to have you in here today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Tory Peter's latest book is Stag Dance. It's available everywhere now and if you haven't yet read D Transition Baby, go back to that as well. It is excellent And if you're in or around Sydney, Tory will be at Sydney Riders Festival this weekend SWF dot org dot au. Before we get out of here, I wanted to let you know what else I've been reading this week, and longtime listeners to the show might know that I am a bit of a crime fiction junkie. I couldn't resist
picking up the new Dovla mctannan. She's Perth based, Irish born. She's returned to her detective hero Cormack Riley with this. It's the fourth Comack Riley book. It's called The Unquiet Grave and it's terrific. It's available at your local independent bookstore or library. That's it for this week's show. If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot read. This is a Schwarz Media production, made possible by the generous support of
our A group. The show's produced and edited by Clara Ames, with mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalt and Fetcher. Our transcripts are edited by Posey mcacky. Thanks for listening, See you next week.