In 2021, Torrey Peters made history. Her debut novel Detransition, Baby was one of the first by an openly trans author to be published by a major publishing house and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. The story followed three women—cis and trans—living in New York City, grappling with motherhood, family, and love in their thirties. Peters called it “the Sex and the City problem.”
Stag Dance is an unconventional follow-up, in style and structure. It is a collection: a novel and stories.
In the titular novel, a company of lumberjacks struggle through the winter on an illegal logging operation. Skulls are crushed into soup by felled trees and limbs are ripped apart by poorly rigged machinery. To improve morale, the crew’s leader announces a stag dance, promising the timber pirates a night of raucous celebration. Holding a large swatch of brown fabric, he says:
“Any man here that desires to go to the dance as a lady—you just cut yourself off a brown triangle and you pin it right over the fly of your pants, and that’s how the rest of us know you’re looking to be courted.”
The men shriek with laughter, goading one another to don the “ersatz twat.”
It’s lewd. But the lewdness and brutality underscore the near-fantasy world conjured in Stag Dance. The language is thick with early-twentieth century slang, and for any reader unfamiliar with donkey engines, bindlestiffs, and candy timber, it’s an adjustment. Women are not women, but “skooches” and “strumpets.” The men—Runaway Shea, Left-Foot Hank, Stub Nelson—fell larches with reverse Humboldt gap notches. In true tall-tale fashion, the crew remains vigilant of the Agropelter, a mythical, posessed axeman who hunts inattentive jacks.
This violent, tantalizing world is brought to life through our narrator: the burliest logger in the operation. The jacks call him Babe Bunyan—evoking the legendary axeman while actually referring to his ox, a nod to the narrator’s dogged unprettiness. Indeed, despite his oxlike power, Babe Bunyan wrestles with something deeply human: incongruence. He craves to be courted and loved but his pride curdles when confronted with his brutish features. When the stag dance is announced, Babe Bunyan knows he will wear the triangle. The fantasy of attending the dance as a skooch expels all other thoughts. He only worries how best to play off his volunteering as comedy to conceal his earnest desire.
This dissonance is intensified by the presence of Lisen, a young, slim, “gandy dancing flunky.” Lisen is beautiful and already captures interest throughout camp. Unsurprisingly, he too dons the triangle. But while Babe Bunyan faces ridicule, Lisen is pursued, igniting a heated rivalry in which our narrator feels doomed to lose.
Still, it’s those most similar to us who can see us fully—our flaws, hopes, fears, and beauty. Lisen shares makeup advice (charcoal mascara and blood rouge) but also loathes the attention Babe Bunyan later receives from suitors. They scold one another between confessions. As they prepare for the stag dance, Lisen exclaims that they’re sisters. To Babe Bunyan, “the word enter[s] my head like a pin, to burst some terrible balloon that had been there always, obstructing clear passage.”
Peters’ integration of a trans narrative within an American western is masterful. Because of its distance from contemporary politics, the novel eschews pronouns, bathrooms, and other faux manias conjured by conservative politicians. Stag Dance exists far away from “discourse.” Instead, Peters helps us see that a lumberjack deep in the Montana wilderness, a century in the past, may experience something profoundly trans and unmistakably human.
The accompanying stories take the opposite approach. Each balks at the manufactured trans hysterias of today. Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones explores an apocalyptic world where, after a failed HRT experiment, a group of churlish trans women unleash a disease that stops humans from naturally producing sex hormones. In The Masker, a trans woman subsisting off phone sex follows an online community of lingerie-wearing sissies to a fetish convention in Las Vegas. The standout story is The Chaser. Two boys at a Quaker boarding school nurture a sexual relationship until one, unmistakably a future trans woman, betrays the other, casting him out of their tight-knit community. To those claiming hormones are dangerous, transness is a sexual perversion, and that trans women secretly hope to trick and expose men, Peters says, “And what about it?”
Stag Dance is seductive, dazzling, and history-making once again. When American politics most wishes to pigeonhole trans people—as idols or scapegoats or martyrs or villains—Peters writes a trans universe that is infinite and undefinable. Across genre and style, Stag Dance captures the steep cost of excavating your truest self. For Peters, it’s worth every penny.
FICTION
Stag Dance
By Torrey Peters
Random House
Published March 11, 2025
