Detransition, Baby(One World) is out January 12.
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She had an M.F.A.
from the University of Iowas writing workshop, but she didnt want to be a writer anymore, either.
By the end of that visit, she had settled on a new vision of her future.
I wanted to be a trophy wife, she recalled.
I wanted to take care of a man and have a dog we walked together.
It all seems ridiculous to me now, but at the time I was dead serious.
The tech guy was married, but Peters decided to move to Seattle to become his mistress.
It was also the most insecure Ive been in my life.
The book was an attempt to imagine how that life might be achieved.
It was a thought experiment for how to live as a trans woman, she said.
One of them, Katrina, is cis and unexpectedly pregnant.
Reese, a trans woman who dated Ames pre-detransition, is gripped with longing for a baby.
Because detransitioning is one of the topics transphobic people use against us.
Sometimes I think about detransitioning, but we never talk about it.
Harron Walker, a writer for Jezebel, nodded.
To bear children, Peters said, is to be unquestionably a woman.
I will never have that unquestionableness.
Peters, now 39, lounged back against a snowbank.
Confident and charismatic, Peters is the kind of woman who can inspire despair in others.
Walkers first thought on meeting her was Shes so hot I want to jump off a cliff.
(Shes now engaged to a cis woman, a law professor with a son.)
She had two Facebook pages, one as a boy and one as a girl.
I was so compartmentalized, she said.
She first had sex with a man while dressed as a woman when she was 18.
Similar encounters soon followed.
She told no one about her secret life.
I didnt know the wordtrans.I thought it was a sexual fetish.
I wasnt honest with her.
Peters spun it further in an essay that ran in Gawker in 2012, The Crossdressing Room.
I dont think that Im a woman, she wrote.
I never got better because I never understood what writing was for.
The email was polite, but the inference was that right-thinking non-perverts would not enjoy this.
After that rejection, Peters gave up on writing.
By then, she was studying theory at Dartmouth.
I was always making moderate changes, hoping it would fix things, she said.
But living in New Hampshire in isolation with her wife made everything worse.
They were in their 50s and had been on hormones for six months.
I didnt like these women, she said.
But I was so jealous of them.
And if Im jealous of these women I dont like, what does that say about me?
It was a weird moment of clarity.
It was a Friday night in February.
That Monday, she went to the student health center and began taking hormones.
By June, everything was falling apart, she said.
Not long after, Peters moved to Seattle, where she met a trans man named Tom Leger.
He was the editor at Topside, an early and influential press dedicated to publishing trans writers.
Her approach to writing was a guiding light for Leger and the writers he published.
Once you get rid of that requirement to justify, then people can actually write, she said.
Youll learn something by reading in front of a room of other trans women, Peters recalled him saying.
When she looked out into the room, no one would make eye contact with her.
The other writers invited her out to a bar afterward.
They understood this was part of the initiation, she said.
Peters and Leger began seeing each other, and she fell further into his orbit.
At parties, she met other Topside writers, who cultivated a separatist vision of the world.
Her new friends partied together and wrote for one another.
Peters felt creatively reinvigorated.
You just promise to love trans girls above all else.
Their relationship had always been volatile, and it soon fell apart, as did Topside.
Writers of color criticized it for mostly publishing white women.
It was the only outlet for trans writing, which meant it became a resented gatekeeper, Peters said.
She gave them away for free to any trans woman who wanted to read them.
The novellas quickly caught on.
Peters was dealing with topics that earlier generations of trans writers had often considered taboo.
They were so twisted and sexual and unapologetic, Casey Plett, another Topside writer, told me.
She chooses the abuser.
Peters dedicated the novella to my former self at her most afraid.
In 2016, Peters tooka trip to Guadalajara to help a friend who was getting facial-feminization surgery.
Now she was broke.
The trip was like a test run for detransition I couldnt quite admit I was doing, she said.
When she got back to New York, she was relieved to take the suit off.
The comma is a knifes edge.
The hard part is youre stuck.
That was the split in my psyche for a long time.
In the novel, Reese and Ames represent two visions of the future.
They gravitated toward it for different reasons.
Victory Matsui, the nonbinary editor, was struck by Peterss honesty.
I left feeling disoriented by the gender-performance aspect of the event, she said.
Peters had been aiming for this reaction.
Peterss crossover appeal didnt surprise Schulman.
Shes everything that works, she said.
Shes bold and brash.
She added, There would be no Torrey without Topside.
It always works this way.
Cis people are now becoming interested in trans consciousness because of the work the trans community has done.
This year, several other works by trans writers will be published by big-five houses.
Still, shed enjoyed Peterss book, calling it both unimaginable and entirely inevitable.
Peters envisions a wider audience for her new work, but shes still speaking to trans women.
Id tell them, You have to live your truth.
Your life is a lie, she recalled.
I dont prescribe a dogma anymore, she said.
But she no longer entertains thoughts of detransitioning herself.
Writing the book, she said, gave that fantasy a place to live that wasnt inside of me.
It was just a piece of clothing that no longer suited me, she said.
*An earlier version of this piece misidentified Victory Matsui as trans.
In fact, they are nonbinary.
