Torrey Peters

There are times when I think that trans women have a certain wisdom on gender, and can see the ways it's performed that cis people can't. Then there are other times I think trans women are idiots who are just as confused about gender as everybody else, we're just confused from a slightly different position.

I have a lot of sympathy for people who detransition.

A phrase like 'gender dysphoria,' I hear it, and it's like a granite rock. There's no way to enter any emotion into that phrase, it's just so calcified as political medical nothingness for me.

I was learning to use a chainsaw because I had to cut the trees for firewood and build a bridge on the logs. Nothing super impressive, but I had to be like This is a spruce, this is a balsam fir. We have beech and maple. I learnt all the different trees and what they do.

The ways that I began to relate to other women as a woman wasn't around 'We're so fierce,' or something like that, but around small failures around like, 'I see that you feel like you've had this failure in this way, and I feel like I've had this failure in my way.'

I got super into sauna. I studied Finnish sauna design, then ended up building a wood-fired sauna from scratch in the middle of the woods in Vermont with my partner. It took us two years on the weekends, and it was one of the most satisfying things I've ever done.