Torrey Peters, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones I

Posted: Wed, Feb 11, 2026

Today

  • Ding’s history story hour (take #2)
  • Introduce Infect
  • Talk through chaps. 1–5

Political love?

Lesbian: woman-loving woman vs. woman-identified woman.

  • Identification-with requires not only erotic attraction but political commitment.
  • Toxic assumption: Woman = safe; man = unsafe.
  • Socrates vs. Alcibiades problem: Love does not listen to reason.

But commitment to solidarity and liberation is hot.

  • Love seems to be political not just in the sense that love raises questions of justice and is subject to normative critique.
  • If love is something that binds us together, that empowers us to become better, then can there be a distinctively political kind of love?
  • Can love free us? Is love necessary for liberatory politics?

Chap. 3: Trauma bounding, winter, New Hampshire, two years to contagion

  • Lexi’s scars and guns: “Why do you need so many?”
  • Narrator (Patient Zero): PhD student from a well-off family who name-drops upscale brands and writes in sometimes infuriatingly elegant prose.
    • Girlfriend of eight years is breaking up with her over transitioning.
  • “Lexi and I share only three points of commonality: we are both trans, we are both newly on hormones, and we are both lonely as fuck.”
    • t4t: Originated as a tag for Craigslist personals.
    • I’m the first visitor to Lexi’s cabin (a self-described “shithole”) since she transitioned eight years ago.
    • Lexi, pre-date: “‘Your girlfriend is really hot,’ she said, and then paused and spun her beer coaster. ‘So, like, I don’t get why you’re here.’”
    • “Why did I want to meet Lexi? The answer is the things I can’t say. That I can barely think.”
  • Sidney: Narrator’s sexting sugar daddy who lives in Seattle.
  • Narrator does not really seem that into Lexi. “I wonder if it snowed more overnight, if I’ll be able to drive home.”

Chap. 5: The fight, summer, Seattle, two years to contagion

  • Narrator drops out of PhD program, becomes alienated from family, and can’t even care about grandfather’s midcentury table.
  • Sidney flies her out to Seattle while his wife is away.
    • Sidney asks narrator to “pretend to be” his wife.
    • “I spent three days sleeping on his wife’s side of the bed, living the life she normally lived—and loving it.”
    • BMW, “lemony Hama Hama oysters,” fancy dresses, etc.
    • “Fuck doctorates, I wanna be a rich dude’s housewife.”
  • Narrator now lives in an apartment of Sidney’s and pays with sex.
    • Lexi tags along. Narrator gives her a bed to sleep in but needs her to be gone tonight.
    • Narrator and Lexi fight. Lexi is drunk and is mad that “she was so stupid as to ruin her life trying to be trans.”
    • Lexi says she “took care of you in New Hampshire! I let you sleep in my bed when your girlfriend wouldn’t let you in hers.”
    • She lashes out at narrator, says she’ll kick Sidney’s ass even though “I know Lexi’s ass-kicking routine is the puffed-up hackles of a dislocated, disoriented, and terrified woman.”
    • Narrator snaps at Lexi: “Jesus, Lexi! I throw you one pity-fuck and now I’m responsible for you forever?!”
  • Lexi leaves narrator, settles in Seattle, and spreads narrative that narrator is “Abusive.”

Chaps. 2 & 4: Seattle, contagion day

  • Lexi’s t4t tattoo: Even if Lexi is still mad at narrator, “I’m t4t for you in the abstract. Trans girls loving trans girls.”
  • Lexi is now the center of the Seattle trans girl scene, and I’m trying to be on her good side because “I want to be included” even if I can’t stand her and is embarrassed about having dated her (“Again! She won’t stop bringing up when we used to sleep together. She does it even more when she has an audience.”)
  • Lexi’s vs. narrator’s politics: “Down With Cis” vs. joining the cis.
  • Lexi takes in homeless trans girls.
  • Lexi’s future:
    • “In the future, everyone will be trans.”
    • “Oh, I don’t mean that everyone will be trans in some squishy philosophical way. I mean that we’re all gonna be on hormones. Even the cis. . . . Especially the cissies.”
    • “You’ll see. When I say the future, I don’t mean some distant era. I mean in about six months.”
    • Narrator: “Lexi, that’s only funny as a fantasy.”
  • Raleen: Scared and traumatized trans girl, PhD student in biology, lost advisor over transition, created a vaccine to stop sex hormone production in the body.
    • The third shot, given by Lexi nonconsexually to narrator, is contagious.
    • Raleen begs narrator not to leave. “I didn’t know she’d start with you. I was picturing—you know—one of the frat-boys who called me faggot.”
    • Why does Lexi choose the narrator as patient zero? Lexi’s messed-up protectiveness & love? [Micaella]
    • “I’d planned to be on hormones the rest of my life, but now I’ve got no choice.”
  • Raleen: “I was thinking that I want to live in a world where everyone has to choose their gender.”
    • Flips two scripts:
      • False “social contagion” conspiracy ⇒ real biological contagion
      • Cisness as a forced imposition on trans people ⇒ Transness as a forced imposition on cis people [Eva: “exposes how much institutional power is required to sustain what we usually think of as ‘normal’ gender”]
    • Which is more free—a world in which everyone is forced to choose, or a world in which only very few even think to choose and most often only after being forced into a wrong choice? [Carlos]
    • Doesn’t everyone already choose their gender? What does Raleen’s virus add? [Inica]
    • Is choice itself the be-all and end-all of freedom? [Madeline]

Chap. 1: Tipton, Iowa, 7 years after contagion

  • We meet a T-slab named “Keith,” whose chest hair screams “I’m so flush with testosterone that I overinject. How about that, you low-count ration-dependent weaklings?”
    • Keith farms genetically-modified pigs for hormones.
    • Lexi and I have a plan to steal some pigs from him and be self-sufficient, so I’m trying to suck up to him and learn from him.
  • Auntie-boys: Cis men on low-quality black-market E because T is unaffordable.
  • High-equality E is controlled and rationed by the state to “women of promising fertility.”
  • Antediluvian trans women “started the contagion. Even if we came out of hiding, there’s no bribe large enough to get us estrogen.”
  • Lexi would have easily “ended his stupid existence.”