I wrote at length about Peter Darling in this essay: https://xanwest.wordpress.com/2017/03... 
 I'm going to quote it here, but I rec reading it in context, as it will make more sense that way: 
 "Peter Darling by Austin Chant is a trans Peter Pan retelling, where Peter is trans and has a romance with Hook, who is cis. One of the things I loved about the story was the way Peter was unabashedly in his desires, all of them, recklessly at times, insistently pretty much always, driving so much of the story. His will, his choices, what he needs and wants, are deeply centered in this story. Chant discusses this in an interview, centering both the character's agency and his mistakes, saying: 
 'I wanted him to lash out and fuck up as Pan would, rather than being a martyr. We all deserve happy endings, and we ought to be allowed to struggle and make mistakes, especially when we're dealing with intense pain and distress.' 
 "Peter is a deeply flawed, and completely loveable and infuriating tyrant for a good chunk of the beginning of the story. Then the book turns, and begins to unpack the ways he has internalized toxic masculinity, shows him growing to allow himself to be more complex, to have desires that seemed unfathomable before. There is so much to adore about this story but one of my most favorite things is that it's a book in which the trans main character takes action for himself, over and over, goes after what he wants, thinks about what he wants, doesn't move from a place of scarcity around what he wants. Oh, Peter is arrogant, and kind of a jerk sometimes, but he gets to have will, and subjectivity, and desire, and fully embody them, live into them. 
 "The author wrote a blog post about his decision to not include a conversation where Peter discloses that he is trans to Hook. He made that choice precisely because that kind of scene is built on the assumption that such conversations almost inevitably lead to rejection. He talks about how he tried to write them, and ultimately decided to cut all of the drafts, saying 'maybe the coming out scenes I kept writing were uncomfortable because cramming them in only served to entertain the idea of Hook rejecting Peter.' 
 "And why should a romance novel entertain the idea of a cis character rejecting a trans character because he is trans? Why do we even need to invoke that possibility at all? As Chant says: 
 'why should we not assume, in the context of a romance novel, that a trans person's love interest is going to accept and adore them for who they are? Do we always need to see acceptance on the page to know it's there? Why not have it be the expectation, the default?' 
 "This approach rejects the cis gaze, and rejects cisnormativity. It sets up a universe where we are not going in with the assumption of rejection as likely. Sure, the reader may go in with their own assumptions, but they are not answered by the text, not engaged. This is one of the core ways that Peter Darling presents a possibility of a romance with a trans main character that doesn't center the cis gaze in its framework, doesn't center cis readers and their desires in how it is written. 
 "We also have no sense of Peter's body, his transition, which I absolutely love. We do know his deadname (a common cis question about trans characters), but this is one of the few stories where that really worked for me, narratively. It didn't feel like that was written for cis readers, but to honor the trans reality of Peters life, which includes the pain of being deadnamed and misgendered by his family. It was hard to read those passages, I'm not going to lie, but they didn't feel like they were for the titillation of cis readers, and that made them work in the story, I think. A good portion about why they worked was due to when they happen in the story. Stories that start with the trans character being deadnamed and misgendered feel very much like they are for cis readers. Placing these passages later on gave them a different context and meaning. They worked differently."