#transliterature – the shiny diaries

Torrey Peters is back with a brand new book after her phenomenally successful genre bending debut, “Detransition, Baby”. Her debut work made her one of the best trans writers of our times and also got her many awards and nominations. Now, does this new book, follow its predecessor’s footsteps? Let’s find out.

Stag Dance is a collection of three short stories and a novella. There’s no theme that’s connecting the stories. They range from dystopia to old world, from rigid sexuality to fluid and questioning genders and sexualities, from morality to immoral obsessions, from functionally perverse to dysfunctionally obtuse narratives.

The story, Infect your friends and loved ones, set in a dystopian future, has two trans women, exploring their troubled and harmful relationship dynamics, through emotionally abusive codependency that’s morphed into a toxic, traumatic bond. They navigate the above entanglement in a world where humans have lost the ability to produce their own sex hormones after a pandemic and these and other trans women are obsessing over animal estrogens. In the story, The Chaser, the narrator is a boy sharing a boarding school room with another boy, Robbie, who’s effeminate mannerisms and curvy body gets the narrator infatuated with him. What follows is a sequence of events in which the narrator gets sexually intimate with Robbie multiple times and even convinces him to cross dress for him. Later he ignores Robbie and when Robbie confronts him about his problematic attitude, the narrator refuses to acknowledge it at first as he feels obligated to safeguard his puritanical masculinity which he thinks is being threatened by Robbie. Eventually he does understand his feelings for Robbie but that comes with a grotesque scene involving the butchering of an animal and a hormonally charged climax. The story, The Masker, involves a cross dresser guy, Krys, exploring his new found identity but soon finds himself being emotionally manipulated by an elder trans woman and another cross dresser called, The Masker. The story does touch upon issues of self determination and fetishisation of queer identities and the obstacles one faces with the gatekeepers of gender and sexuality. The scenes of physical violence and emotional abuse by the Masker were unnerving and can open a pandora’s box of the untold, unreported assaults and aggressions that are prevalent and pervasive in the queer and trans communities.

The titular novella, Stag Dance, was the weakest link. Set somewhere in the past, it’s a story of timber pirates. The leader of the pack, Daglish, is organising a stag dance, wherein few of these brawny, muscular men dress up as women for a night of drinking, dancing and debauchery. One of the beefy guys, Babe, fancies Daglish, while Daglish is already having a clandestine sexual relationship with another guy Lisen. The days leading upto the dance sees a rise in the sexual tensions between the trio. In the meantime, there occurs a slip up and betrayal from both Babe and Lisen respectively towards Daglish when they are assigned a task. As we approach the apogee of the novella, we find the three characters trying to decipher their ambivalent and ambiguous sexuality in this hyper masculine and chauvinistic setting. The novella is tedious, underwhelming and the usage of rural western American lexicon makes it dreary.

Stag Dance, the book, seems like a missed opportunity. I did say in the beginning that there wasn’t an obvious theme connecting the stories, but on examining carefully, all the stories carry the underlying subtext of shame and bullying. There are a lot of bullies in the book and they seem to have the most prominent voice. Rationality and nuance get lost in the overbearing attack by prejudice and stereotypes, which is what majorly happens in the real world too. Probably, Peters deliberately wanted to portray this dichotomy of existence between what is seen and unseen, felt and unfelt. Though the author’s intentions are brave and righteous, they get muddled in the irreverent and irrational script. I understand, it’s a tough act to follow something as groundbreaking as Detransition, Baby. While Detransition, Baby was a uniquely liberating singular voice that stood out in the queer and trans literature landscape; Stag Dance feels like a cacophony of many confusing and confining voices. It does come across as an experimental piece of writing, but was this risky experiment necessary?

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🫣

Wild Geese, written by trans writer, Soula Emmanuel; the 2024 Lambda Literary Awards winner for Transgender Fiction; is a vivid exploration of the complexities of human existence, especially when people refuse to conform to their societal perceptions. Phoebe Forde, is a thirty year old Irish trans woman, three years into her transition, pursuing her PhD from a Swedish University and living in Copenhagen, Denmark. She leaves Ireland to chart a new life for her as a trans woman, and to escape from a life that was no longer serving her. She is living a pretty nondescript life in Copenhagen with her dog, when suddenly one day, her ex girlfriend Grace, shows up at her doorstep.

The book is essentially what happens between Phoebe and Grace over one weekend. Their past lives, their individual and shared traumas, their anger and insecurities, their contemplations about a blurry future get sometimes muddled, sometimes real and many times jarring in the present, as they speak unfiltered, not shying from the awkwardness of each other’s presence, yet getting caught in the awkwardness of their truth and lies, things said and unsaid, emotions discerned and disregarded, leading to an incongruence of expectations and a cacophony of explicit suppositions often blanketed by a symphony of territorial understanding.

Phoebe comes across as a very real person having the rightful fears and anxieties about her existence so much so that, she prefers anonymity. The author sensitively and sensibly portrays her experience as a trans woman without making it a spectacle ever. Phoebe isn’t out there to challenge people’s beliefs and wage a war against transphobia, rather through her confusions and complications, shows her authenticity, vulnerability and reality. Even when Grace, with her preconceived notions provokes Phoebe, she prefers to remain calm and engages her in an esoteric debate over bodies, minds and belongingness.

The writer, Soula Emmanuel, an Irish trans woman, whose debut work is Wild Geese, has used the book as a meditative consideration on a trans person’s lived experience. It is quiet, benevolent and benign. Soula tactfully never tries to answer all the questions that readers may have about Phoebe. Through her nuanced writing, she emphatically states that trans lives are not for scrutiny and examination. The dreamy Copenhagen forms the perfect backdrop to stage Phoebe and Grace’s chance rendezvous. However, there were times, wherein I felt, the prose to be too metaphorical and the language difficult. The conversations between Phoebe and Grace are easy to read, but Phoebe’s internal monologue seems demanding in terms of the language. My pedantic views shouldn’t really stop anyone from picking this profoundly glorious book. An astute, unambiguous, unapologetic and forthright voice in Trans literature. Bravo Soula!

~ JUST A GAY BOY. 🏳️‍⚧️