He rejects grown-up interference in his life he rules over a world in which freedom, self-fulfillment, and imagination are paramount and builds a community with other abandoned children. Firstly, Peter isn’t just forever young in the sense that he doesn’t age, but in the sense that he’s defiant of adulthood and all it entails. However, I think the metaphor goes deeper than that. Not shockingly, I know a lot of trans men who, as boys who can never seem to grow up, relate to Peter Pan on at least a superficial level. The androgyny of youth makes “boy” an easier, safer space to inhabit - but we also get stuck there, often whether we like it or not. As a result, I think many of us internalize a sense of being forever cut off from adult masculinity. This is a problem I’ve frequently noticed affecting trans men as well, particularly those who don’t pass and/or haven’t undergone medical transition: we’re seen as “boys” much more readily than “men”, regardless of our actual ages.

The panel host, who was nonbinary, recounted being treated as if they were younger and less experienced than their coworkers of the same age their androgyny was seen as “immaturity”. I once attended a panel about the unique ways that trans people experience age discrimination.

It was only while I was wrestling with the second draft of Peter Darling that I started to puzzle out why Peter Pan is such an especially queer-resonant text. (In all honesty, it captured my imagination because the 2003 live-action Peter Pan stars Jason Isaacs as an outrageously handsome Captain Hook. Peter Pan rose quickly to the top of my list, though not necessarily because I recognized it as a particularly interesting trans metaphor. A little while ago, I decided I wanted to write a trans fairytale, so I jotted down a list of my favorite classics and started daydreaming about injecting them with queer content.

Peter darling austin chant