Torrey Peters isn’t afraid to tell you who her work is for. It’s all right there in the name of her surprise hit novel: Detransition, Baby, a cutting dramedy about queer motherhood, trans women, and the strange paths heartbreak sends us down. Of using that polarizing word “Detransition,” a term that has been weaponized in recent years by sensationalist media and anti-trans activists to delegitimize trans people, the author says, “If you can’t get past that [word], if the title offends you, you’re not going to like what’s in the pages.”
Peters has gotten used to taking these defiant stances on her boundary-pushing work. Her previous 2016 underground novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, tackle the most shameful, difficult, and darkly funny aspects of the lives of trans women. One is a complex portrait of a young, silicone mask-clad sissy who must choose between her forced feminization fantasy or transitioning to live as a woman, while the other follows gun-toting trans women unable to resolve their interpersonal conflicts in a near-future hormone apocalypse.
Still, little could have prepared Peters for the transphobic backlash that came when Detransition, Baby was nominated this March for the prestigious Women’s Prize for Fiction in the U.K., a country currently gripped by anti-trans moral panic. Ironically, the resulting media furor drove sales of the book. Now, the national best-seller is being adapted into a television series, with Peters set to executive produce.
This year, them. is honoring Peters as part of our annual Now List, our awards for LGBTQ+ visionaries. She sat down with friend and fellow writer Morgan M. Page to talk about the move to TV, the paucity of critical engagement with work by marginalized writers, and the important role of community in shaping her literary sensibility.
Motherhood in its many iterations is one of the central themes of the novel. I remember years ago when you first described this book to me, you told me it was about bug chasing — the mostly-mythical act of a person pursuing seroconversion to HIV — something that ended up having a smaller role. Are there themes that you’ve been surprised how few people have picked up on?
[Laughs] First of all, that’s a loaded question from you personally, the motherhood thing! Of course I didn’t talk about the whole motherhood thing with you, I was like, “Yeah, it’s about bug chasing, nothing to do with elders and community.” You’re the funniest person to do this interview, because I can’t lie to you!
I think something that other trans and minority writers have talked about in this is that people don’t want to talk that much about craft when you’re trans. It’s not like, “this is just great craft,” it’s like, “oh, this is trans and that’s why people are paying attention.” I don’t get asked that many questions about how it got put together, what the language is, what I’m trying to do. You know, I spent years developing a style and a set of skills, and I think the style is intricately bound up with what I’m trying to say. Reese’s voice and the way that it’s catty, that’s not just me on the page, those are all intentional things.
I’m excited that you’ve written a pilot for a television adaptation of Detransition, Baby. Do you have particular concerns about adapting more controversial elements, such as casting a detransitioned character like Ames?
