Stag Dance

Torrey Peters published Stag Dance in 2025 through Penguin Random House. It brings together three short stories and a novella, and it grew out of work she had begun in 2016, when she set out to write trans stories in a range of existing genres.

The first story, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, belongs to an apocalyptic near-future Seattle in which a pandemic has stopped human beings from producing sex hormones. The Chaser is a school story, about a boy working out his sexuality during an unhappy relationship with his roommate. The novella that gives the book its title concerns Babe Bunyan, a large and unattractive lumberjack who arrives at the camp's stag dance dressed as a woman and finds himself in competition with a younger, more conventionally feminine rival.

The last of the pieces, The Masker, takes place at a gathering of trans women in Las Vegas, where a character called Krys has to reckon with her own sense of herself when the others turn on a guest who has arrived in a full-body silicone suit.