Photo: Dawit N.M. 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.
Peters, now 39, lounged back against a snowbank. Barefaced save for a hint of eyeliner, she wore a long black vintage fur coat made from nutria . Confident and charismatic, Peters is the kind of woman who can inspire despair in others. Walker’s first thought on meeting her was “She’s so hot I want to jump off a cliff.” In New York, she has cycled through various phases: trans separatist, queer party girl, proud owner of a hot-pink motorcycle, cozy domestic.
Peters sent the essay to an agent she had met at Iowa, who thought it could be expanded into a book. When she handed in a few chapters, the agent’s assistant said they didn’t see it reaching a mainstream audience. “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.
Peters and Léger 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. The scene was punk and a little nerdy — leather jackets, Old Crow whiskey, arguing about Stone Butch Blues. Cis people were rarely present. Her new friends partied together and wrote for one another. Peters felt creatively reinvigorated.
In 2016, Peters took a trip to Guadalajara to help a friend who was getting facial-feminization surgery. Without thinking too much about it, she pulled an old suit out of the back of her closet to wear on the plane — a remnant of her life before transition. Her ex-wife had recently visited New York, and she was reminded of how much easier things had been back then. “I had all the advantages of being perceived as a decent-looking, fairly smart white man in America,” she said. Now she was broke.
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