Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters (born July 1981) Her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, has received mainstream and critical success. The novel was nominated for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction and won the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award.

Her second book, Stag Dance, was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize. Her father was a professor and her mother was a lawyer. During her young adulthood, she traveled to the Dominican Republic as an exchange student, and later lived in Cameroon and Uganda. and from Dartmouth College with an MA in Comparative Literature.

Career

Early writing and self-publishing In 2012, when Peters was at the University of Iowa, she published a biographical essay for Gawker called "The Crossdressing Room". Peters had not yet transitioned and later regarded this piece as dishonest, more interested in hunting for acceptance from her audience rather than seeking out truths.

Peters wanted to promote a wider trans literary scene by encouraging writers to self-publish novellas using shared classes and resources. She spent half a year setting up and sharing her methods, and began publishing her first two novellas this way. She shared them widely for free download from her website and online trans communities, or for variable prices in small-run print editions. Her novellas eventually built a cult following and sold in the thousands, but she was disappointed when nobody else joined her in the project. Later, she reflected that more authors were following this method, but it had just taken five years.

Peters has written reviews for a breadth of transgender and gender non-conforming authors, such as Janet Mock, Akwaeke Emezi, and Casey Plett, who have published books through Arsenal Pulp Press, Metonymy, and Topside Press.

Novellas Peters's first two self-published novellas, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, were published online in 2016 and reviewed by writer Harron Walker for them.

Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones is set in a dystopian future where bioterrorism has destroyed the body's ability to produce sex hormones and follows Patient Zero and her cat-and-mouse relationship with Lexi, a working-class, gun-obsessed trans girl.

Glamour Boutique, Peters's third novella, explores a casual Craigslist encounter at a crossdressers' boutique store. This novella explores the differences between dissociation and fantasy, and was excerpted from Peters' larger work, Detransition, Baby. Emily Zhou credited Peters' novellas as inspirations for her 2023 short story collection Girlfriends.

Detransition, Baby

Peters' debut novel, Detransition, Baby, published by Penguin Random House Profile Books in 2021, was met with critical success and praise for crafting an exploration of gender, parenthood, and love. The main characters are Reese, a trans woman working in PR and former partner of Amy; Amy, who detransitions and becomes Ames; and Katrina, a Chinese Jewish woman who is Ames' boss and pregnant with his child.

This book was the first time Peters published with a mainstream publisher, and it was also one of the first times that a "big five" publisher would release a novel by an out trans author. Peters previously had ignored mainstream publishing, asserting that these companies chose not to support trans women. She says that they only wanted "trans 101" primers for cisgender audiences, rather than real trans literature, and that this was a strict limit until the mid-2010s, and continued to be a heavy barrier until at least 2021. The dedicated following of her self-published novellas gave some editors an interest in buying her upcoming book, and she included a two page letter to publishers explaining that they could market her book similarly to how they had always marketed women's fiction, and they did not need to "freak out" over publishing an explicitly trans story.

Detransition, Baby was nominated for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, making Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award. Its list of signatories included atheist writer Ophelia Benson and environmentalist Rebecca Lush, but as a rhetorical strategy the letter also included long-dead writers such as Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather. Authors including Melinda Salisbury, Joanne Harris, and Naoise Dolan—another nominee for the 2021 prize—condemned the letter and expressed their support for Peters. The organisers of the prize released a statement condemning the letter and defending the decision to nominate Peters' book. Stag Dance In 2025, Stag Dance, a collection containing a novel and three short stories by Peters, was published by Penguin Random House. It was a finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize.

Personal life Peters came out as transgender at age 26, and began taking hormones to physically transition at age 30. Peters and Minor divorced in 2015 but remained close friends. Peters then briefly dated Tom Léger, the editor of Topside Press.

Awards

2017

Gotham Book Prize Fiction