IT’S NEVER BEEN A GOOD TIME to be anything other than a white cis male in this country. From there, we might debate which identities and preferences are the most persecuted but can probably agree that now is an especially terrible time for anything that’s not the muscled, racist, and American brand of, say, Joe Rogan. Our self-described “king” of a president (read: the repulsive tyrant half of us voters elected) has made it a priority to oust trans soldiers from the military at a time when recruitment is at an all-time low. Similarly, he has banned trans women from competing in female sports (this sentence alone is enough of an oxymoron to ridicule the order). No doubt these efforts to purge the culture of its humanness are just the beginning.
So it’s a pretty rage-inducing time to be reading and thinking about Torrey Peters’s new book, Stag Dance,which is about trans women in particular and male sexuality in general—the confused and tortured feelings some men have about their birth bodies and “masculinity.” Stag Dance is good in some ways and downright spectacular in others. It’s a collection of three short stories and a novella, and if the effort here is uneven, no matter: the novella alone is such a beautiful, ridiculous, and painful thing, it more than steals the show. {read}