Book Talk

Did I lie when I said that every day is either someone’s birthday or book launch? On that latter front, I was thrilled to have the chance to serve as interlocutor at two separate launch events over the past week and a half, first at Rose Dommu’s launch for Best Woman at the Strand and then at Zefyr Lisowki’s for Uncanny Valley Girls at Books Are Magic. (People are raving about my dual performances in a supporting role, I’m certain.) Another new release I want to mention is Grace Byron’s Herculine because I wrote about it for The Cut as part of a broader look at how three different trans women authors have explored separatist politics in their fiction this year. (You can read it right here if you’d like.) In it, I also get into Torrey Peters’s 2016 novella, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, as it was republished alongside her new novel, Stag Dance, earlier this year and therefore is technically “new.” I’ve been reading and rereading Torrey’s novellas (Infect, The Masker, and Glamour Boutique, a standalone excerpt for her later debut novel Detransition, Baby) for close to a decade and ended up writing way more than expected and had to cut out a ton just to get the final piece to orbit the wordcount I’d agreed to. Below are those uncut thoughts. I could have chosen a different adjective but didn’t!

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If Herculine’s narrator was susceptible to harm, vulnerable to further predation, the unnamed protagonist of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, the story that opens Peters’ Stag Dance collection, published in March, is hardened to a fault. Her ex, Lexi, is also trying to get her to join a separatist trans girl collective, one that then morphs into a full-blown commune after Lexi unleashes a devastating viral contagion that strips the world’s population of the ability to self-produce hormones. “In the future, everyone will be trans,” Lexi says, explaining her reason for wanting to make hormones a constant, active choice for every person on earth. Her sidekick, Rayleen, backs her up: “I want to live in a world where everyone will have to choose their gender.” Beyond that, though, Lexi’s similarities to Herculine’s Ash are largely superficial. She’s not abusive or manipulative, cloaking her harm in a radical vernacular. Her biggest crime, to the narrator at least, is that she’s unassimilable. She’s loud. She’s brash. She doesn’t pass. And worse: She doesn’t care to. She’s cringe, to put it bluntly, in the sense that Charlie Markbreiter, scholar and author of Gossip Girl Fanfic Novella, unspooled in an essay on cringe and trans assimilation for The New Inquiry in 2022. “We cringe at others when they remind us of what we hate in ourselves,” he wrote. As such, “trans people cringe at each other constantly,” a Pavlovian repulsion that “has been weaponized by the right as a form of social control.” (See the rising number of pick-me TikTok creators, pathetically attempting to monetize their own self-hatred in vain.) The “cis state,” as the historian Jules Gill Peterson wrote in a 2021 Substack missive on authoritarianism and state violence, doesn’t just stop at social conditioning, however; it makes “cisness a prerequisite to be a participant in public and political life,” stripping us of civil rights and blocking our access to welfare should we fail or refuse to meet this demand. So when the narrator of Infect puzzles over Lexi, she sees a piece that won’t fit. That obviously doesn’t mean that Lexi’s at fault. If anyone is, it’s the narrator. She yearns for a bourgeois existence: the full housewife fantasy, complete with midcentury furniture and vintage Baccarat vases, with all of her needs to be met by a man, even one who despises her. Lexi, by merely existing, threatens to ruin that fantasy for her, and so the narrator rebuffs her time and again, and by proxy her whole local scene. After society falls apart, though, and the life she’d once yearned for with it, her choices dwindle: the commune or misery. Lexi is all that she’s got.

Peters originally published Infect as a stand-alone novella in 2016, shortly after doing the same with The Masker, the story that closes Stag Dance’s quartet. (Five years before Detransition, Baby turned her into a best-selling novelist, she was a cult favorite author with a small but devoted, mostly trans readership who adored her self-published novellas.) ( Hello, it’s me from a decade a girl, screaming the dated refrain “it me.”) The story as a whole functions as a kind of narrativized Socratic dialogue between rival proximate others, something that has since become a hallmark of Peters’s storytelling, and an effective one at that. On one side, we have our narrator, respectability politics incarnate, a woman whose continued comfort and security is fueled by a mix of internalized transphobia and fear of downward mobility. On the other, the bane of assimilation with her unironed trans flag in tow, a woman you’ve no doubt long since muted for never shutting up about “CIS SCUM” in all caps. Will these women ever learn to love each other? That’s kind of beside the point. Infect is about solidarity and what it actually means to be in community with others, even if—perhaps especially if—you really don’t get along. “A girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire,” one of the trans women from Lexi’s separatist commune explains to the narrator. “But if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.” There are details in the story that betray its true age; a trans guy, for example, dismisses Lexi’s anarchist crew as “a coven of trans women polyamorously fucking…to the soundtrack of Skyrim on PS3.” But as the tides of fascism continue to rise, pushing us towards further division, the questions it poses remain just as relevant as they were when Peters first wrote it.