Author Torrey Peters on why her existence ‘terrifies some people’

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Torrey Peters. The writer, 43, is the author of Detransition, Baby, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and named a top-100 NYT book of the century. Her latest book is Stag Dance.

Torrey Peters: “We’re being treated with cruelty … The fact that someone like me can exist terrifies some people.”Credit: ¬© Daniel Cohen / Headpress

POLITICS

You’re American. How are you feeling about your country right now? I’m very scared. There have already been four executive orders drastically limiting trans rights. In a year and a half, I don’t know what will happen when I try to renew my passport. [The Trump administration will only issue passports that match the birth-assigned sex of the applicants.]

What does this tell you about how trans people like yourself are perceived by those in power in America? We’re being treated with cruelty. It’s one of the reasons why I write fiction: “What does it actually feel like to be trans?” Right now, the ultimate goal seems to be that they don’t want us to exist.

Where does this hatred of trans people come from? The fact that someone like me can exist terrifies some people. Because: “What if you had control of your body and you got to do whatever you wanted with it? What if the things that you were told you must do aren’t actually what you must do?” But I think their regrets and fears are about themselves, not about me.

To what extent is your fiction an explicitly political project? It’s not overtly political. But people are so closed-down right now, and you can’t get to them through pure logic or reason. Instead, I try to approach them through emotion. People don’t care about facts anyway; in my country, we have “alternative facts”. But if you can make somebody feel something – and oftentimes that’s the work of fiction – they can’t go back.

Even the word “detransition” is so politically loaded, among transgender and cisgender people alike. Why did you want to focus on the word and concept in your first novel? The whole argument around “detransitioning” is an attempt to weaponise regret. Nobody says, “Well, 7 per cent of people regret having kids, so nobody should have kids.” The idea that nobody can ever transition because they might have regret is an infantile response. And this is an adult book.

What’s keeping you and your trans friends hanging in right now? To some degree, spite. Vengeance. Some of these [transphobic] old men are pretty old. We’re going to live to see the end of them, one way or another.

MONEY

Writers don’t often talk about money. May I ask, how do you make it work for you? To be honest, I had a sugar daddy while I was writing. Novels take a ton of work and time. I don’t have any tech skills; I don’t have any coding skills. If I’d been trying to get a job as a trans woman, I would’ve been making retail minimum wage. So I made a calculation: “Well, there’s a guy who wants to make my life – and therefore my art – possible.” In a lot of ways, I cared about him: it wasn’t a purely transactional thing, although the transaction was explicit. I also told myself that until the 20th century, this is how all writers lived: they had patrons. So I was just like, “Well, I’m now part of a 2000-year tradition of patronage.“

To what extent is there a tax on being a trans person? In terms of pay rates, it maps almost identically with cis women. When a trans woman transitions, she makes about 30 per cent less. When a trans guy transitions, he tends to get about a 30 per cent raise. Trans people: we experience the same sexism as everybody else.

If you weren’t a writer, what’s plan B? These days? I’d be a sauna-builder.

Wow, that’s not the answer I was expecting. Why? I got super into sauna. I studied Finnish sauna design, then ended up building a wood-fired sauna from scratch in the middle of the woods in Vermont with my partner. It took us two years on the weekends, and it was one of the most satisfying things I’ve ever done.

DEATH

What losses have impacted you the most? Last year, I lost a friend who was like a mother figure to a lot of New York’s trans community. Her name was Cecilia Gentili. She was an Argentine trans woman who immigrated to New York and was a sex worker, an activist, an author. She was also a kind of mother to an entire generation of young trans girls, especially Latina trans girls. She died of an accidental overdose, and I really miss her. Losing her – she was only 52 – hit me and a lot of people I know really hard. It seemed so unfair. She’d struggled for 50 years, but she’d just bought a house and gotten her United States citizenship. It seems so cosmically unjust.

That’s devastatingly unfair. She became a kind of icon. Stuff will be named after her in New York City. But she was also just my friend. And I miss her.

How would you like to die – ideally? In a Titanic-style accident. I like the idea of not leaving behind a body. I don’t want other people poking at it, looking at it or doing my make-up for me. No, thanks. And I like the idea of going in a world-historic way. Also, it’s cold water, so it’s like a cold plunge. Maybe you’d get a few endorphins. No mess, no fuss and it’s legendary. Then they’ll make a movie about it a hundred years later.

Torrey Peters will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival (May 8-11) and the Sydney Writers’ Festival (May 19-27).

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