Few people understand the many rules, rituals, and paranoias of masculinity better than trans femmes. We come of age in its shadow, trying and often failing to perform an acceptable vision of manhood. Through trial and error, we memorize the necessary survival mechanisms and the gendered borders you should never dare to cross. We watch the way men survey one another for any hint of transgression, and we internalize every violent punishment inflicted on those that dare to skirt the edges of acceptable behavior. To grow up trans femme is to learn to embody the rules of manhood in a world that’s entrenched its nonsensical logic into its culture, its art, and its politics. And even after transition, when we’ve finally crossed the feminine event horizon, we still carry with us the muscle memory and nervous anxieties of a fragmented lifetime spent among men.

The laws of masculinity, and the ways in which they restrict and influence gender, infect every story (and novel) included in Torrey Peters’ collection, Stag Dance. While only one of the four pieces included features a protagonist who openly identifies as a trans woman, they all center characters who explore and experiment with gender and femininity under the surveillance of masculinity. In doing so, Peters tackles not only the cruelty that this encourages from men but also the destructive harm that trans women, and others shirking the defined rules of manhood, inflict on one another in trauma-induced attempts at self-preservation. Stag Dance’s stories star complex, self-immolating, and flawed characters that collide headfirst with the gendered barriers that define their culture, regardless of whether they are women, men, or those whose gender is in flux or undefined.

This is perhaps most immediately apparent in the collection’s fantastic titular novel, “Stag Dance,” which follows a crew of off-the-grid loggers working through a bitter winter. To boost camp morale, team leader, Daglish, proposes that they hold a stag dance, a party in which some of the men will attend as women who will be courted by any interested party from the rest of the crew. The novel’s narrator, the largest and strongest lumberjack most often referred to as “Babe Bunyan” in reference to the mythical giant and his pet ox, shocks the camp by taking up the honorary mantle of “scooch” for the dance. The stag dance offers “Babe” the rare opportunity to act on feelings that he’s long buried due to his burly size and purported ugliness, but this brief euphoria is tainted by a growing rivalry with crewmate, Lisen. Slender, pretty, and embodied by a confident flirtatiousness that beguiles every other jack in camp, Lisen embodies everything that “Babe” finds lacking in himself but somehow appears equally threatened by his plans for the dance. The two recognize something within one another that no other logger can detect and this kickstarts a mutual fascination and infuriation that only grows more complex as the dance grows closer and closer.

“Stag Dance” is a truly stellar novel (novella?) that confidently embodies a creative vision which feels purposeful and confidently executed even as it careens into stranger and more daring narrative swerves. Peters writes “Babe’s” narration with what I can only call a “lumberjack dialect” that’s so thoroughly embodied that even some of the more outlandish or unfamiliar turns of phrase feel organically in-character and often hold surprising beauty. Despite his self-ascribed oafishness, it’s not uncommon for “Babe” to think in unexpected poetry. For example, Peters renders a moment of “Babe’s” drunken confidence by writing, “The social dilemmas that so usually cause me consternation began to touch me soft as the falling flaked, and seemed to resolve themselves with the ease of tiny ice crystals melting on my skin.” “Stag Dance’s” prose feels unique and surprising even as it commits further and further to a voice that in a lesser writer could have quickly felt forced or gimmicky. Peters’s commitment to voice here also further establishes the unique social environment that is created for the men in Daglish’s operation. Expected norms of gender and sexuality are bent and upended by ritual and circumstance, but the potential for patriarchal and masculine violence is never fully cast aside. The stag dance itself offers a sanctuary for testing and exploring gender, but it’s a temporary one with limiting possibilities. When this is combined with “Babe” and Lisen’s increasingly complex rivalry, it’s not hard to understand the trajectory of “Stag Dance’s” conflict. Peters even telegraphs the novel’s conclusion relatively early on, but in doing so, she makes the expected feel mythically inevitable, evolving “Stag Dance” into a canonical work of trans feminine folklore.

Given that the other three stories present in Stag Dance were written and freely available online for upwards of five years prior to the collection’s publication, it wouldn’t have been surprising if the end result felt relatively disjointed and unfocused. This isn’t to say that “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones,” “The Chaser,” and “The Masker” are somehow lesser works. Even if the title story is by and large the collection’s standout, Peters’s older novellas and stories have achieved cult status for a reason and display just how fluid and dynamic her storytelling talents can be. Even still, it would be hard not to see the reprinting/repackaging of these works as extraneous bonus content included to pad out the length of a hardcover release from a major publisher. Perhaps the biggest surprise of Stag Dance though is just how unified and thematically cohesive it proves to be. Like “Stag Dance,” “The Chaser” explores sexuality and gender within the confines of a distinctly masculine space. Both “Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones” and “The Masker” demonstrate how the fear and trauma of a life lived under the thumb of masculinity’s fears and insecurities lingers inside trans women before and after transition and often acts as a catalyst for internalized misogyny.

So while Peters likely didn’t imagine that these three stories would be collected alongside a trans femme lumberjack novel, Stag Dance doesn’t read as a marriage of convenience but instead an insightful window into a single author’s decade long exploration of the messy, complex intersections of trans feminine identity and masculine lived experience. It somehow manages to meet, and arguably exceed, the heights of Peters’ lauded debut novel, Detransition Baby, and further establishes her as one of the most essential contemporary writers of trans fiction.

Stag Dance by Torrey Peters is out now.

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