When I meet Torrey Peters – a writer I have long admired – in the green room of Sydney Writers’ Festival to interview her for today’s blog post, we are meeting in the wake of a new bill that has just passed through the House of Representatives in her home country, the USA. The bill would ban access to gender-affirming care for transgender people on Medicaid and the health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act.
Initially, the piece of legislation was intended to ban gender-affirming care for people younger than 18, but in the final hours before the bill was passed, an amendment was enacted to strike out the phrase ‘for minors’ so that the legislation would now apply to all transgender people.
President Donald Trump is referring to the legislation as “One, big, beautiful bill.”
I haven’t yet read about this bill passing through the House when I meet Torrey, so I don’t actually know what she’s referring to when she describes the highly political and impassioned post-script, which she’s just written to conclude her Queerstories piece for tonight’s performance. It’s therefore not until I am sitting in Bay 17 two hours later, listening to her post-script that I understand the gravity of what this bill is, and what it means.
I think of the words, One Big Beautiful Bill, and think of how many people will die because of it.
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As I said, however, when I sit down to interview Torrey, I don’t yet know what she’s referring to when she tells me about the post-script and how angry she is.
I want to ask Torrey about time in her work, because I know my own experience of time has been altered since I started injecting testosterone.
I tell Torrey about how as my body began to change in new and unfamiliar ways, I was surprised to find each shift somehow innately familiar, like a bodily homecoming, some truth I’d long forgotten, now returned to me. Like when I noticed my body odour had changed, a smell that was so completely different to anything I’d ever smelt on my skin, I cried because I realised, I recognise myself.
I tell Torrey, I swear I’m the least woo woo person you’ll meet, but being on T has felt uncanny, like déjà vu, where I was convinced initially that I was recognising myself from a past life, before realising that in truth, I was recognising myself in a memory from the future.
I then ask Torrey to please share her own thoughts about time.
It’s interesting you say this, because early on, not only my writing, but also my transition, I was less interested in the uncanny, than I was in the fantastic.
And I like the fantastic as a certain mood, a moment of hesitation.
Like, the fantastic is not in your head …
Like, something is strange. Something is inexplicable. And if it’s uncanny, something is strange in your head, but it’s actually explicable – the laws of science apply in some sort of subjective sense.
And then on the other side of that, there’s the supernatural, where the laws of science or reason don’t apply and the only understanding is that something supernatural has happened.
And the fantastic is the moment of hesitation between those two things.
There’s a French story – I can’t remember the author – but this guy takes home a woman, and most of the story, he’s trying to figure out if the woman is actually the devil. And so, on one hand, he’s just paranoid and he thinks she’s the devil, and on the other hand, she might be the devil. And the second that you resolve it, it falls into one of the two things, and the moment of hesitation disappears. But the longer you can keep the hesitation going … she might be the devil … I might be crazy … then you have this period of the fantastic, and it’s a real mood.
And for me, there was something about the fantastic that seemed to mirror my transition. Maybe I’m a girl, and I’ve always been a girl. Or maybe this is just something that is conditional in this circumstance. And the second you start saying, “no, my brain is a girl’s brain,” you fall on that side … Or you say, “actually, no, this is a cultural condition that’s born out of my particular moment in time, my access to hormones, etc.” then you fall on the other side. Or you say, “no, I actually have the soul of a woman,” and you fall into the supernatural, and some sort of belief system.
For me, a lot of my early transition was a fantastic hesitation between those things.
That was something that really interested me early on, but ultimately was something that I stopped thinking about so much, because I got preoccupied with a secondary and more immediate question, which was – never mind why, let me just focus on the how.
Not why am I alive? But, how to live?
Literally, how to live as a trans woman?
And I think that most of the stories I’ve written, especially Detransition, Baby are entirely about how can you live? How can you set up a family? It doesn’t have answers, but it’s asking the questions of how do you live?
And I think that something like Stag Dance is dealing with the question of how do you live in a body that doesn’t lend itself to transition?
As I’m transcribing this interview, now, I feel my heart snag on the last of these questions. Because if Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill is enacted, thousands of transgender people in America who are relying on Medicaid and the health care exchanges under the Affordable Care Act to access gender-affirming care, will no longer be able to afford them.
It begs the question; how do you live in a body when the State denies you your choice to transition?
I am a writer interested in the writerly instincts and impulses that emerge from my body. When I wrote, A Language of Limbs, my motto was ‘think less, feel more,’ because I wanted to follow those instincts and play out those impulses, trusting that whatever arose would speak implicitly to my transness, by virtue of those instincts and impulses emerging from my own corporeal rubbish. I think of how my will to not overthink it resisted the why that Torrey spoke about, suspending my writing in that moment of hesitation she described to me – the mood of the fantastic.
But now, writing this for you with tears in my eyes and my gravel in my throat, I ask myself, what does it mean to write from the body and bodily instinct when policy makers can write and enact legislation that physically alters our bodies for us, and without our consent?
We’re already seeing this happening here too, on this continent. Only a few months ago, the Queensland Government issued a health service directive, in which public clinics have been banned statewide from prescribing stage 1 and stage 2 treatment to trans people under the age of 18 until an independent review into their use is conducted.1
In Torrey’s Queerstories piece, as she read her post-script written just two hours before, she cried and called upon the 850 people in the audience to resist. And I cried with her.
I think of how we spoke for 20 minutes about craft, and I only transcribed the first four minutes. How Torrey Peters is one of the most incredible voices of my generation, a literary powerhouse, and yet I’m not able to tell you all of the incredible things she said about her craft, or the technical choices she made when writing Stag Dance, because I’ve been swallowed by One, Big, Beautiful Bill.
And while I’d like to end on the ways in which trans and gender people insist on living, the truth is we are facing people who insist not only on our expulsion from public life, but also from the public imagination – writing policies that will bring about the conditions that make living impossible.
It is a privilege to ask, why am I alive? And not, how to be alive?
And I don’t have the answers, only my own knowing of what it means to live in the fantastic.
– Dylin Hardcastle
1 Queensland Government Health Service Directives, ‘Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Children.’ 2025, https://www.health.qld.gov.au/system-governance/policies-standards/health-service-directives/treatment-of-gender-dysphoria-in-children.
