The New Yorker Radio Hour - “2034,” and Torrey Peters on the Taboo of Detransitioning

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

The retired admiral James Stavridis teamed up with Elliot Ackerman, a journalist and former Marine, to imagine how, in the shadow of an increasingly tense relationship between the U.S. and China, a small incident in contested waters could spiral into catastrophe. The result is “2034: A Novel of the Next World War.” The book is a thriller, and also a cautionary tale about a failure of military planning: “We have plenty of intelligence,” Ackerman says. “What we often lack is imagination.” And Torrey Peters describes how her book “Detransition, Baby”—a dishy novel on a taboo subject—aims to move beyond the marginal spaces in which trans writing has flourished, into mainstream success with a major publisher. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Evan Osnows is a staff writer based in Washington, and he recently covered the endless presidential campaign. And for many years, Evan was based in China. He was the New Yorker's correspondent in Beijing, and he still writes for us about China and Xi Jinping's regime. That made Evan particularly interested in a new book called 2034. It's a work of fiction, a thriller in which an incident between the American and Chinese navies balloons into a catastrophe.

Here's Evan. The U.S. and China are the world's two superpowers, and their relationship has deteriorated quite sharply over the course of the last few years across a whole range of issues around technology and trade and defense and espionage. And whether or not you think one side, is right or wrong, the reality is that the stakes are very, very high. One of the big places where that tension is playing out day to day in ways that Americans frankly don't really see very much is in the South China Sea. China claims almost the entire area and for years has been

militarizing the islands constructing remote outposts. It's a vast piece of the ocean that China claims as its own territory, rich with petroleum and minerals under the sea floor. But other nations, including the United States, contest that claim. A U.S. aircraft carrier group entered the South China Sea. The group led by the USS Theodore Roosevelt will conduct routine operations to ensure freedom of the fees, build partnerships. Admiral James Stavridis is one of the authors of the book 2034, and he's maybe not somebody you'd expect to be writing a gripping novel.

Stavrides is a retired four-star naval officer. He worked as the Supreme Allied commander at NATO. Admiral, how much of what's in this book draws on your own life experience? The other day, Evan, I went back and added up all the days I've spent at sea on the deep ocean, out of sighted land. It's about nine and a half years when you add it all up. So this is my provenance, if you will. And certainly the opening scene of the book on the destroyer where the Commodore, who is in command of these three destroyers, is cutting a big wake, as we would say, drawn a big ocean through the South China Sea. That's quite real.

I've done exactly that. Elliot Ackerman co-wrote the novel. He's a journalist, a novelist, and he was a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well, these Freedom of Navigation Patrols are something that the U.S. Navy actively does through the South China Sea, where there is a bit of a dispute whether or not those are or not international waters. So we fly the flag down there. But in the book, the way, the way that's a bit of we describe it specifically is it's the equivalent of, you know, driving donuts in your neighbor's yard if they move the fence a little bit too close to you. So it's sort of one of these, you know, very, you know, aggressive actions, you know, in its way, depending on what side of the Freedom of

Navigation Patrol you're on. And, you know, at the outset with the book, you know, that was going to be the precipitating incident, something that happens on one of these Freedom of Navigation Patrols. I will tell you it's a pretty realistic opening scene right up to the moment when the ships get torpedoed and go to the bottom of the ocean. Let's hope that doesn't come true. I want to be very clear. This is a work of speculative fiction. It's not real. But for anybody who follows these issues, it's a bit of creepy reading because it's based in the very real tensions between these two countries.

I'm curious about how it was that you disqualify. decided to take a subject as complex, as rich as the South China Sea. Frankly, it's the kind of thing that you see written about in reports in Washington and testimony at the Pentagon. And you decided that this actually should exist as a novel. Elliot, how did this, how did this happen? Well, it was an idea that was originally Jim's. So, you know, he had had this idea of, you know, what if we could contribute to what in the past had been often speculative. of fiction around things like the Third World War. And it was sort of a genre that we hadn't seen a contribution to for a while.

And so the idea of, you know, what if we were to write an speculative novel about what it looked like if the U.S. and China went to war. So he approached his book editor. Scott liked the idea, said, you know, it would be great if you teamed up with a novelist on this. And oh, by the way, aren't you and Elliot friends? It just felt like a very, very natural fit. So I was, you know, very enthusiastic about the project.

We sat down. We said, let's see if we can write. the first chapter, which is very much the chapter that's in the book right now, and we did, and it was a really fun collaboration. I say the book is fun. I mean, we very much had the goal of wanting to make a readable character-driven novel. Because, again, another point, you know, we were very aligned on in creating these characters where the villain in the book is war.

This is, the characters are coming at this conflict from a variety of point of views. All of them we aspire to tell sympathetically. Let me just add to that if I can. What I had in mind when I initially came up with the idea, it was films like Dr. Strangelove, books like the Bedford Incident, the Third World War by Sir John Hackett. These are not so much, in my view, speculative fiction as cautionary fiction. Think on the beach by Neville Schutt. And I think that part of the reason we avoided destroying the world in a Cold War was that we imagined our way to how terrible it could become.

And that was something Elliot and I both agree on, I know, is that we're pretty good at intelligence. We need to get better at imagining if we could have imagined the World Trade Towers going down. If we could have imagined a 20-year war in Afghanistan. maybe we could have reverse engineered it and killed it before it came to be true. That's kind of the fundamental point from my perspective about 2034. Staying on that theme of imagining how things could go very wrong, one of the most chilling scenes in the book is when it becomes clear that China has developed cyber weapons that are way beyond anything the U.S. has.

Could one of you read this scene? Does one of you have more high school acting experience than the other? I think anyone who could see this visually and see the five-foot, five-inch, balding early 60s admiral or just turned for the former skateboarding champion, Elliot Ackman, is going to go for door number two. So, Elliot, over to you. Can we make sure that doesn't get cut in the final? No, that's going in.

That's going in. So, Elliot, page 39, if you will, please. And just to set it up, this is a scene near the beginning of the book, when the security officials in Washington are just discovering what's happening in the South China Sea, they're sort of panicking and trying to figure out how they can get the upper hand. And at that moment, they get a phone call from a Chinese official named Lin Bao. Hello, said Chowdhury, and to the speaker? Yes, I'm here.

came the otherworldly echo of Lin Bao's voice on the line. He sounded impatient as though he were being forced to continue a conversation he'd tired of long ago. Let me repeat your position to assure that I understand it. For decades, your Navy has sailed through our territorial waters. It has flown through our allies' airspace, and today it has seized one of our vessels. But you maintain that you are the aggrieved party, and we are the ones who must appease you? The room became so quiet that for the first time Chowdry noticed the slight buzzing of the halogen light bulbs overhead.

That is the position of this administration, answered Chowdry, needing to swallow once to get the words out. However, if you have a counterproposal, we would, of course, take it into consideration. More silence. Then Lin Bauer's exasperated voice. We do have a counterpresent. proposal. Good, injected Chowdhury, but Lin Bao ignored him, continuing on. If you check, you'll see that it's been sent to your computer. Then the power went out. It was only a moment, a flash of darkness. The lights immediately came back on. And when they did,

Lin Bao wasn't on the line anymore. There was only an empty dial tone. You could imagine as we enter this first chapter and there's this altercation in the South China's and it's looking like it could become increasingly kinetic, that the crescendo at the end of that chapter might be some, you know, explosive incident, but it's not. The lights just go out. The Chinese, in effect, blink the entire East Coast. And so just from a creative standpoint, it was how do we show the reader what this looks like?

How do we make them feel how chilling this is? Elliot says it exactly right. we are reaching for ways that people can understand the seriousness of the concerns here, simply because that vulnerability is explosively expanding for two very quick reasons. One is the expansion of the threat surface. Ten years ago, there were seven billion people on the planet and seven billion devices connected to the internet. Today, there are still roughly seven billion people on the planet and 40, four zero

billion devices. That is an enormous threat service. And secondly, it is China's ability to move at speed in this world. They are accelerating rapidly. You know, the spirit of this book is, as we've said, very much the idea that imagining can become a deterrent. You know, as Jim said, we, we know, we have plenty of intelligence. We have plenty of hardware. But what we often lack is imagination. And then also the imagination that as you enter one of these high-tech wars, perhaps without giving too much away, you realize that many of your low-tech capabilities that you've allowed to atrophy actually become the essential capability that you need to win the war. You've both described this extraordinary, what feels to me like a very fragile combination of people

and events and decisions that can lead us either in the desperately wrong direction or one hopes in the right direction. We've talked a lot about what could go wrong in this relationship between the U.S. and China. What could go right? Help us see that path of it. I'd love to. And, you know, I want to say that the book is not good guy, U.S., bad guy, China. It's not the theme of the work here.

And my own strategy for dealing with China, if I boiled it down to a couple of words, would be confront where we must, but cooperate wherever we can. We must confront China on the claims of the South China Sea. And we must confront China, my view, on gross human rights violations, for example, Wiggers and China. We must confront on that. But there are so many places we can cooperate. One is climate. We're not going to solve the environmental challenges we have, which are immense, unless the U.S. and China can cooperate together. second would be the pandemic. And I'm not talking about the current pandemic. I'm talking about the next pandemic and news flash. There will be another pandemic. And then third and finally, I would say

humanitarian work, medical diplomacy, both nations operate hospitalships. Think of the power of putting the capabilities of the U.S. and China together to do that. And that sounds perhaps to some kind of Pollyanna-ish, except two years ago, the U.S. Navy ship, Mercy, our big, beautiful West Coast hospital ship, operated right alongside China's hospital ship. We can do this. And so confront where we must, but try and find those zones of cooperation. I think that's crucial if we're going to avoid the scenario we lay out in 2034. Thank you to you both, Admiral James DeBritus, Elliot Ackerman. It's been a pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you, Evan.

You can read Evan Osnos' work on politics, China, and many other subjects on New Yorker.com. He spoke with retired Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackerman. Their new book is called 2034. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. So if you look at the way trans stories show up in mainstream media, you start to notice that the narratives fall into certain categories. Trans writers sometimes complain that the easiest way to get a book deal or sell a memoir is to tell a story about your journey of self-empowerment or your feel-good coming-out story or your struggle with the trauma of being trans. Detransition Baby is different from that. Detransition Baby. It's a new novel that's been featured in O Magazine.

It's on Roxanne Gay's book club list and it's being adapted for television. Part of the talk about the book is that Tori Peters' novel represents something really new. One of the very first novels by a trans woman put out by a major publishing house, in this case, Penguin Random House. Crispin Long wrote for the New Yorker about Tori Peters and Detransitioned Baby. And here's Crispin. The characters are not always self-empowered. They don't always make good choices. They can be mean.

They can be catty. They can be sloppy. it's a dishy gossipy kind of novel. It reads almost like a soap opera, a very complicated soap opera. Detransition Baby is the story of three characters. Reese, Amy. Sorry, can I start over again? This is like, my own book is confusing.

Yeah, it's not super easy to summarize. I'll say it. You don't have to. I did a bad job. It's really hard to summer. It took me like forever to write the paragraph that just like describes what the book is about. All right.

This is good that this is not live. Totally understand. Okay. So it's the story of three characters, Ames, Reese, and Katrina. It starts with Reese, who's a trans woman. And you can think of her as sort of flea bag, but trans. And in Brooklyn, her life's a little bit of a mess. She's sleeping with married men.

She's not sure about her job. And she's always wanted a baby. Her ex-girlfriend, Amy, who detransitioned to become Ames, is sleeping with his boss, Katrina, and gets Katrina pregnant. Knowing that Reese has always wanted a baby, Ames comes back to Reese and proposes that they all raise the family together. Yeah, that was good. So how did you come up with the idea for how these three people would maybe fit together or relate to each other? like how did their relationships sort of start to take shape in your mind?

A lot of it was that I was looking for ways to ask questions that were that were bothering me in my 30s as a trans woman. And I was looking for models of basically how to find meaning. The book starts out with something I call the Sex and the City problem, which is the models that looked available to me were embodied sort of by the sex in the city. characters. You can have a baby, you can have a career, you can get married, or you can kind of find meaning through art. But the problem is that for trans women, there's a way in which these solutions are still a little bit aspirational. So, and the most difficult, I think, for trans women

right now is motherhood. I don't know very many trans women who have children who didn't have children before they transitioned. So I wanted to go right at this baby question. And then the other questions that were sort of troubling me in my 30s began to work their way in through other characters. So ideas of divorce, ideas of the temptation to detransition. And after that, it was just a simple question of, you know, classic protagonist-antagonist situation where there's one baby

and three different people who have all. sorts of different ideas about it and everybody can't get what they want. Yeah. I mean, I thought the title was incredibly clever. It's sort of cheekly literal because we have a person who detransitioned, you know, someone who transitioned and then decide to revert back to living as a gender they were assigned at birth. And then we have the prospect of like an actual literal baby. Why is detransitioned such a complicated subject in trans communities. I think that detransition has been weaponized, and it's been weaponized in particular way where people say that, oh, you detransitioned because you were wrong about being trans,

and you sort of give evidence to this idea that basically trans people shouldn't exist, that it's a mental illness or that it's, you know, in some ways. So it's a very loaded thing. The reality is that amongst trans people, I think most trans people I know know detransitioners. I know detransitioners. And the reasons that they detransition tend to be less about the ways that it gets talked about publicly or gets weaponized, but they detransition because life was just really hard as a trans woman or a trans guy. And the reality is that oftentimes there are regrets, right? But the regrets aren't aren't like, oh, I wasn't trans. The regrets are like, my family doesn't talk to me anymore.

I can't make any money. You know, I have regrets. And the other thing is that, like, I also just want to own detransition as a trans woman. Instead of letting you be weaponized, you know, by anti-trans or activists, I was kind of like, I'm going to own it. I'm going to talk about it how trans, you know, trans people talk about it amongst ourselves. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's funny.

There's kind of a fixation on, like, you know, trans suffering and I think kind of shedding light on this version of detransition. It just makes it more specific. Like the suffering is related to people's reaction to it. It's not intrinsic to the experience of being trans. So the book moves back and forth in time. And there are scenes where we see Ames in the past when he was living as a trans woman and going by Amy. And in one of these scenes, Amy, she's at a queer dance party with some other trans women in Reese.

And they encounter someone named William, an old acquaintance of Amy's friends who was also detransitioned. And Amy strikes up a conversation with him. So could you read the passage where she interacts with William? Yeah. William was quite drunk, too drunk to speak in grammatical sentences. But his face lit up at her attention in a way that hurt Amy to examine directly. She watched his cigarette instead of his face, tried not to notice the soft and pupil quality to his body. Here's what Amy got from the conversation.

He'd lived as a trans woman for seven years, but it was too hard, too hard. He didn't pass. He wanted to die. He was still a trans woman. Everybody saw it, no matter what he did. But since he wouldn't say so, they couldn't either. He had a good job now. Medical supply distribution.

He lived on Staten Island with those two young girls. He drove them to the party tonight and helped them get dressed. He didn't touch them, don't worry. He just liked being one of the girls. The cigarette looped in his hands, inscribing arcs of red in the night as he talked. Amy focused on the tip as if it were writing secret messages just for her. The more he spoke, the more Amy understood the polite, unsettling disdain the other trans women had shown him. She wanted to be anywhere but standing there listening to him.

Pity teetered on the precipice of disgust. When Amy detransitioned herself, she promised never to let anyone see her as she had seen William that night. Never to pant for inclusion from translemen. Ames wanted no pity and rejected their disgust. But despite Ames' rigid need for dignity, for all the careful lines he drew to respect the differences in how he lived and how translemen lived, they called to him in a siren song.

So you also get a sense in the scene of Ames' kind of strong longing to be part of this group again. And like there's something kind of intractable about his transness. So what makes it worth it to him do you think to detransition? I mean, I don't know. Like I know as an author why I think, and part of it is extrapolating from my own. own kind of yearnings. Occasionally I've had like times in my life where things have been really hard and I've wanted to detransition.

There was a time about three years after transition where, you know, I had been divorced. I couldn't get work. I was like living in a strange roommate situation. And I was like, how did my life end up this way where I'm estranged from all these people I cared about? And so the reasons I wanted to detransition were basically, like, if I could just figure out how to live as a guy, maybe I could get that stuff back. And then eventually I was like, no, actually that stuff is gone. And it's time to move on.

And I think that Ames' reasons for detransitioning are somewhat similar, that, like, it just got to be too much. The other thing I think that I was trying to do here is that in a lot of ways, transition narratives are really overly determined. Like we've seen, like, I think a lot of people have seen enough transition about, like, memoirs or narratives or stories, that we have like an arc of what a transition should look like. For me, what was interesting was that de-transition is actually that same arc in reverse. And so it's like, you know, suddenly it's trans people who were, you know, resentful that this person has abandoned. their gender and things like that. And so it was a way to kind of explore in ways that aren't so

overdetermined. A lot of the feelings that people have around transition. De-transition was a way to take it out of that kind of context where you're supposed to be like, oh, I support anybody who transitions. Whereas, like, detransition, there's no narrative about supporting detransitioners. So you could actually talk about this stuff in like a new way. So when I think about Ames' yearning to be around trans women after after he detransitioned. A lot of that was me thinking about before I transitioned, my yearning to be around trans women. And then after I detransitioned, after I transitioned, someone gets confusing when I talk about it this way. After I transitioned, my yearning to then be around like mild friends. So detransition was a way to, was like a key into

talking about transition in a way where everybody didn't feel like they already knew the narrative. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So I'm also curious about sort of the previous era of writing you did when you were involved with Topside Press, the literary scene of trans writers. Could you tell me a little bit about Topside? What was it trying to do and how did you get involved? Sure. So the Topside era, I guess you could say, was around 2012 to maybe 2015. The Topside Press was run by Riley McLeod.

Tom Legerre and they published a couple of books by trans women that became quite well known in sort of a scene. It was Imogen Benis Nevada, Casey Pletz, A Safe Girl to Love, and Sybil Lambs, I've Got a Time Bomb. But basically the idea of it was that it was this writing for other trans people kind of scene. We thought it would be sort of like the Harlem Renaissance or Paris in the 20s. If you picture sort of like cubism where it was like a bunch of people coming together and like riffing on each other's ideas, that's how like the art in that era accelerated. And we hoped that something similar would happen. And trans writing would sort of take off as a consequence. Unfortunately, it's sort of imploded during the era in the way that like a lot of art scenes implode, especially where people are poor or their scarcity or, you know, they're doing sex work or they're, they're, they're,

you know, there's drinking or whatever. There also the problem was that there was really only topside, this press run by these two guys, these two trans guys. That was like the only game in town. And so when I started self-publishing, it was in reaction to what happened with Topside, that I had this vision that what if I started self-publishing and I taught all these other trans women or trans people

how to self-publish, then there wouldn't be as much scarcity around publishing. And I chose the novella as my form because I was like, well, I can't expect these people who have such instability in their life to be writing novels. It takes three years, but you can write a novella in three months. I talked about very taboo subjects. The masker was the first, and it talked about sort of sissy fetishists in trans community, which was always like sort of a thing that you shouldn't talk about.

And the second one was infect your friends and loved ones, which had a lot to do with like sort of trans separatism and trans anger, which also was a somewhat taboo subject. So they ended up getting passed around as a consequence. They became sort of these a little bit like, they had like sort of cult status that they were passed around Brooklyn, which is how in the end, when Penguin Random House was interested in my work, it was partly out of that cult status. And partly also because I'd done all that work alone, I had a really strong vision for how I wanted the book to work and who I wanted to read it. Yeah, I mean, now that you have had such a different experience with the publishing industry, do you feel like the publishing industry has changed or is changing? Yes. I mean, I think there's ways in which it is and ways in which it isn't. I'm a really particular type of trans women, you know, and I wrote a book that is basically a trans version of what could otherwise be like a dishy, gossipy, you know, women's bestseller. So I think it makes sense that they were like, well, if we're going to take a chance on a trans woman, let's take a trans on this one.

So I'm curious to see what happens with the publishing industry. I'm curious what happens when the novel isn't a woman. a dishy, gossipy, you know, women's novel, what happens when it's a novel by a black trans woman writing about her family or her experience? You know, are people still interested? I think it's possible they might be.

I mean, I just don't know. Yeah, I'm thinking, too, about a profile of you in Vulture. The author, Lila Shapiro, speaks to the legendary queer writer and activist, Sarah Schulman, who's involved with Topside Press, I believe.

And Schulman says something really interesting. The author Asch Schulman, if she thinks the transliterary world, is entering a renaissance. And Schulman says, we might be leaving it. What do you think she meant by that? I think you could read that as sort of shade. You know, where like she's saying Tori sold out. And, you know, fair. but I think actually if you think about like the scenes that I that I compared it to Paris in the 1920s

Paris in the 1920s Paris was cool when everybody was living in Paris and was poor and was like sharing stuff you know there's a way in which the kind of adversity does create it pressurizes those scenes to create incredible work so I think there's there's a precedent for what Sarah's saying Sarah isn't trans and I would say that you know I think that that a lot of the people from the top side scene were like, that scene was very painful. And I don't think, like, let's recreate the privations of the top side scene. I want my book to be successful,

and I don't want poverty or lack of resources to be the reasons why these books don't get written. Tori Peters is the author of Detransition Baby. She spoke with Crispin Long. What's next for you? Are you working on anything new now? I am. I'm working on a queer financial thriller. This is going to sound incredibly grandiose, but it's like Breaking Bad meets the big short meets...

I'm going to go for it. The Great Gatsby. Yeah, I'm pulling for it. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed. performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.