Torrey Peters Goes There

The author’s debut novel, Detransition, Baby, wades into two of the most vulnerable questions for trans women.

- Lila Shapiro

AROUND THE TIME the novelist Torrey Peters transitioned, she was spending more and more time talking to strangers on the internet. She was 32 years old, in an open marriage, and in the midst of a fellowship program in comparative literature at Dartmouth when she realized she no longer wanted to be a professor. She had an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa’s writing workshop, but she didn’t want to be a writer anymore, either. She met a wealthy tech guy on Facebook a while back who wanted to fly her out to Seattle for a long weekend. 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. She bought a wardrobe of sundresses and heels. “It was a wonderful time. It was also the most insecure I’ve been in my life.” The relationship didn’t last (Peters’s marriage collapsed too), and after a year, the trophy­wife fantasy fizzled out. By the time she sat down to write her first novel, in the summer of 2016, she was entertaining a previously unthinkable fantasy: a family, maybe kids. 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.