“2034,” and Torrey Peters on the Taboo of Detransitioning

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.5	Evan Osnose is a staff writer based in Washington, and he recently covered the endless presidential campaign.
0:21.2	And for many years, Evan was based in China.
0:23.8	He was the New Yorker's correspondent in Beijing, and he still writes for us about China and
0:28.5	Xi Jinping's regime.
0:30.5	That made Evan particularly interested in a new book called 2034.
0:35.7	It's a work of fiction, a thriller in which an incident between the American and
0:40.0	Chinese navies balloons into a catastrophe. Here's Evan. The U.S. and China are the world's two
0:48.2	superpowers, and their relationship has deteriorated quite sharply over the course of the last few years across a whole
0:56.1	range of issues around technology and trade and defense and espionage. And whether or not you
1:04.7	think one side is right or wrong, the reality is that the stakes are very, very high.
1:12.5	One of the big places where that tension is playing out day-to-day,
1:16.7	in ways that Americans frankly don't really see very much,
1:20.1	is in the South China Sea.
1:22.0	China claims almost the entire area,
1:24.6	and for years has been militarizing the islands,
1:26.9	constructing remote outposts.
1:28.8	It's a vast piece of the ocean that China claims as its own territory, rich with petroleum
1:34.6	and minerals under the sea floor. But other nations, including the United States, contest that claim.
1:40.4	A U.S. aircraft carrier group entered the South China Sea. The group led by the USS
1:46.1	Theodore Roosevelt will conduct routine operations to ensure freedom of the fees, build partnerships.
	...

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