Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Torrey Peters returns with Stag Dance, another stunning, genre-defying exploration of the nuances and intimacies of trans identity
Following her Women’s Prize-nominated 2021 debut Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters is back with Stag Dance, a quartet of genre-defying stories which explore the possibilities of gender and identity.
Infect Your Friends And Loved Ones starts strong with a full-on gender apocalypse; in a dystopian future, a not-quite-accidental contagion means that people are no longer capable of sex-hormone production, and must each choose their own gender. A tender, tentative love story comes up against toxic masculinity in The Chaser, when two roommates at a Quaker boarding school embark on a secret relationship until things start to spiral out of control when a new school term begins.
The titular story is the longest of the four, and offers a group of lonely loggers on an illegal tree-chopping job a way to entertain themselves, by hosting a dance where they can choose – if they wish – to dress as women for the evening and be courted by the other lumberjacks. Finally, horror-ish story The Masker rounds off the collection with fetish, forced feminisation and internalised transmisogyny.
Taken altogether, Peters’ writing truly defies pigeonholing, pushing through genre and styles as she interrogates gender and various performances of it in multiple directions. She gives her characters nuance and fullness within the confined spaces of these short stories, and as they progress, Stag Dance becomes a moving portrait of different aspects of trans culture.
