Writer Torrey Peters Wants a Punk Utopia for Trans Girls and a Cuisinart Mixer
Image: Lia Clay Miller/Torrey Peters, Random House
My friend and colleague Harron Walker once found it difficult to preface the force that is Torrey Peters. Now, here I am, repeating that confusion, at a loss for how to possibly describe a writer who refuses to be pinned down by other’s expectations. Her debut novel,
Detransition, Baby, published in January, has been met with near-universal acclaim.
Advertisement To understate the speed at which her writing bubbled up from the trans underground and onto the front page of the internet would probably be just what she wants. We laugh about as much, reminiscing about our first encounter, over a year ago now, during a (pre-pandemic) New York winter that was unseasonably warm. It was at the book club of a mutual friend, for a book we both hated, and then a subway platform past midnight, where we lingered longer than we should have, two total strangers
When I started transitioning and coming out, in the halcyon days of 2015, I was lucky to do so during the heyday of New York-based indie publisher Topside Press. Topside put out novels written by trans authors, for a largely trans audience. Growing up in the â90s and muddling through my 20s in the 2000s, I found literature about trans people was largely confined to memoir or exploitative fiction written by clueless cisgender people. Neither were particularly helpful for someone like me, who had spent much of my life using literature and art to try to find answers to the question of what, exactly, was my deal.Â
Design by Ingrid Frahm
My phone buzzed relentlessly in the hours after Sophie Xeon’s death. Trans girls from Brooklyn to London, Stockholm to Los Angeles registering our collective shock that our very own Immaterial Girl had gotten free of her body too soon. As we traded earnest sorrows edged with the razor barbs that are the girls’ primary language, it wasn’t lost on any of us that our collective urge to mourn together was hampered not just by the stretch of geography but now by a global pandemic that prevents the world from marking the passing of Sophie, stylized as SOPHIE, in the only way appropriate. Trans theater maker Travis Alabanza
2020 has been a tough year for the arts with cinemas and theatres closed and festivals and gigs cancelled. Despite this there has been an outpouring of creativity much of it inspired by the lockdown and Black Lives Matter. Socialist Review asked 10 of our readers and contributors to pick the culture they have most enjoyed under quarantine.
Schitt’s Creek - Netfliix
There’s nothing ground breaking about the central story line of Canadian comedy Schitt’s Creek (rags to riches in reverse), but one aspect of the approach is certainly refreshing. The show doesn’t get everything right; the only black character is the (fantastically sardonic) town councillor Ronnie, for example. What it does do well, in my opinion, is it’s treatment of the central character’s pan-sexuality. When actor Dan Levy, who co-wrote the show and plays David, was interviewed about it he said they had considered how to deal with David’s sexuality and in the end decided that, as in life, it just shoul