Aaaand the final quote, another Torrey Peters one from Detransition, Baby!
"It helps that I grew up watching trans porn.
I watched way more trans girls getting fucked than cis women, so I think I internalized the idea of trans women with cocks as the hottest, most feminine women out there."
— Torrey Peters
Trans-identifying author
Heh, I can certainly see why the TERFs chose to quote this. It’s such a perfect example of their “pornsick” canard, and here we have an actual trans woman seemingly confirming it! As the idiom goes, straight from the horse’s mouth.
But, as always, let’s look up the context.
We can find it on pages 50 and 51 of this edition of Detransition, Baby. I’ll also add pages 49 and 52 because they’re very much needed to give the context in full. Apologies for the length!
[...] wanted to get rid of it. That’s why I went to that site. I figured anyone calling themselves a sissy or tranny had probably come to terms with her cock.” He broke a piece of bread with his hands and popped it into his mouth.
Reese continued to stare, unable to formulate a response. He said, “Come on, you asked me a blunt question about my sexual past and sexuality. I gave you a blunt answer. It’s your turn. Don’t act demure now. Do you want a vagina?”
He had blue eyes in a big bland face, shaggy hair, and was dressed like he planned to be photographed for a lifestyle magazine for wealthy understated men interested in bird-watching or some other non-vigorous outdoor activity, in a waxed canvas Barbour jacket with many pockets and a heavily cabled turtleneck. When they met on the street, she joked that she was expecting a Wall Street guy in a suit.
“Those are the sellers. The bankers. Guys who want money,” he said dismissively. “I represent the buyers. The guys who already have money. I could show up to work in my swim trunks.” Even Reese knew enough about finance to recognize this as a suspect oversimplification, but it sounded so much like a line from Glengarry Glen Ross that Reese merely said, “Wow.” And even she was unsure if that wow was because he had impressed her with his confidence or because she had never heard such a clichéd performance delivered with so little irony so soon after an introduction.
“I sometimes want bottom surgery,” Reese said. “When I turned eighteen, I got some money that my grandmother left for me. It was about two-thirds of what I needed to go to Thailand and get one. Instead I spent it on a road trip with a boyfriend and moving to New York. I got a job here in a daycare, then as a server, and I figured that it’d be years before I could afford surgery working as a waitress, so I’ve worked to get comfortable with the idea that I have a penis, but that it’s a woman’s penis. I’m pretty much there, mentally. It helps that I grew up watching trans porn. I watched way more trans girls getting fucked than cis women, so I think I internalized the idea of trans women with cocks as the hottest, most feminine women out there.”
“I like that,” Stanley said, and grinned for the first time. “I could see you as a hot Jersey housewife. I want to put you in a pair of yoga pants, tight enough that you can’t hide your cock.”
Reese really liked wearing yoga pants, but his interest in her penis so early in the date meant that she wasn’t yet going to give him the satisfaction of saying so. She wondered if he’d somehow gotten confused. She’d clearly stated that she was a strict bottom on the fetish site. “You know I don’t top, right?”
“What? Of course not. I don’t want that.”
“Okay, well you had so much interest in my junk.”
“I’m interested in everything decorative on a woman.”
Referring to Reese’s genitals as purely decorative was an objectively asshole thing to say. But instead of being offended, she was turned on.
The waiter stopped by the table at this moment to refill Reese’s wineglass, and Reese inadvertently blushed, unsure what he had heard. Meanwhile Stanley was saying, “I like dressing up women. Controlling them. It’s never role-play.” The waiter set down the bottle and departed with a maximum of discretion.
“Wait, what’s not role-play?” Reese asked.
He looked at her sharply. “You need to listen better. The whole dominant thing. That’s just who I naturally am. I don’t need protocols, or bullshit like that. I want the subjugation to be real. But the only politically acceptable way to subjugate women is financially. Because women want that subjugation themselves. One thing I liked about those trans escorts was how easily I bought them.”
She had long since discovered that most talk about owning her turned her stomach liquid with desire. But at that moment, she had four hundred dollars in her bank account—cracks webbed her phone screen, she needed a plane ticket to see her mother, and just as the items she needed weren't sexy, the idea of trading subservience for them wasn’t that sexy either. It wasn’t her fault that people paid finance douches millions and no one wanted to hire an uneducated transsexual. She had a funny-’cause-it’s-true joke that she liked to ask whenever she met a new trans girl. So which of the three transsexual jobs do you do? Computer programmer, aesthetician, or prostitute? Reese always hoped the answer would be prostitute, because prostitutes were the ones with a good sense of humor.
“Subjugation is fun in bed,” Reese snapped back at Stanley. “Women don’t want that anywhere else, especially not poor trans girls who don’t have any choice.” He darkened and told her to sit up straight, that she had bad posture. She did as he said, feeling self-conscious and humiliated—but not in a fun way—and resolved to order only a salad, since this date would clearly be their last. She couldn’t afford to split the meal, but she wanted to make a show of non-obligation.
When the food came, he criticized her use of utensils. “You don’t come to a nice restaurant and then eat like a slob. Didn’t anyone teach you?” He held his fork in his left hand tines down. “See? Like this.”
“I know how to eat. I work as a waitress.”
“Nowhere I’d want to eat.”
She glared at him. But when she tried to use her fork tines down, she couldn’t manage it. Not because she couldn’t eat that way, but because he had intended to humiliate her, and had succeeded, which threw off her coordination. In trying to pick up a piece of flaking salmon from her salad, she shredded it into tiny bits too small to be speared on the tines. She blushed, set down the utensils, and took a sip of water. “Oh, just eat your normal way. This is embarrassing to watch,” Stanley said. “But you need to practice your etiquette. Unless you want me to cut your food for you and you can use a spoon?” Having sufficiently humbled her, he grew friendlier, conspicuously popping chunks of steak into his mouth, speared tines down.
On the way out, he wrapped a sudden arm around her and gave the side of her face a bizarre kiss, closer to a nuzzle than anything[…]
By the way, I also recommend reading a couple pages before and after what I posted above.
Well then. What do we have here?
Do we have a problematic situation? Absolutely. We have a trans woman character who has… questionable standards, and a guy who very clearly reads like an abusive creep. And indeed, in a few pages later, we find out that he sure did end up getting physically abusive.
But, a few things need to be noted now.
One, that this is, again, a fictional novel. Reese is a character, she’s not Torrey Peters in the flesh. And the way it is written, as well as the things that are noted, make it pretty clear that Peters is aware of how fucked up some of the things she describes are. She also makes it very, very clear that Reese suffers from the shitty societal standards that are put upon women — both trans and cis. In fact, Reese’s thoughts explicitly acknowledge that her willingness to put up with abuse isn’t merely BDSM-related, but an actual application of the trope that ‘women are passive and willing to put up with abuse’ to herself. She puts up with it, because she learned from the culture around her that this is what women do.
And this, my dear TERFs, is a clear acknowledgement of society’s shitty treatment of women and the problematic raising and conditioning they undergo. If you look at the discussion of dating that happens before the part of the text that I gave above, you’ll also see that it goes into how difficult, humiliating and hopeless it is to find a decent man on dating sites. Not just for trans women, but for cis women as well.
Torrey Peters doesn’t lionize Reese or imply that she’s a paragon of how things should be done or what views people should have. Reese is a problematic person with problematic views and difficulties in life that she doesn’t always address in a healthy way… and this is, again, clearly acknowledged if you read with understanding, rather than just look for a useful soundbite for your bigoted ideological crusade.
Peters isn’t advocating abuse of women, or writing a porn story, or flaunting her autogynephilia in your scrunched-up faces. She’s deconstructing shitty societal standards regarding women, through an interesting story. It’s almost as if… oh… she’s doing a feminism, heh.
To sum up: yep, we have a quote-mine situation again. And an inability to distinguish between fictional writing and characters, vs. the author herself and her views.
Another day, another bullshit mountain in TERFland.
God, this whole Twitter thread was such a mess. A few somewhat problematic things mixed in with blatant hatchet jobs of unproblematic and even feminist quotes, some of those quote butcherings being downright obviously malicious and conducted deliberately with a manipulative intent.
And of course, all of the TERFs that have seen this bought it hook, line and sinker without having checked the sources and context of anything. Which, given my general experiences with their kind so far… isn’t a surprise at all. The only time it seems these people do any research is if they’re faced with something that disagrees with their views. But if it validates them? Then just eat it up, no questions asked! More outrage for the hate machine!
Ughh.
Well, that’s all, folks! I hope you found this deep-dive I did into the quotes from that TERF Twitter thread useful.
Remember kids, context matters and it’s always good to check for it! Especially when dealing with groups like this that have a habit of being disingenuous.
P.S. While I’m not sure I’ll do it in the end, reading this actually made me consider buying something Torrey Peters wrote and reading it sometime. Thanks, TERFs! I guess you ended up being useful for something after all, as I’d never have known about Peters without you :D
