Detransition, Baby
I sat down to read this book and legitimately — I am not being hyperbolic here! — did not look up until I was done. Detransition, Baby is Torrey Peters’ debut novel, and it is a masterpiece. At its heart, it’s the story of three women: Reese, a trans woman who desperately wants to be a mother and self-sabotages by sleeping with married men; Ames, who was Amy, who detransitioned from living as a trans woman; and Katrina, a Chinese Jewish woman who is pregnant with Ames’s baby. Ames proposes that Katrina let Reese raise the baby with them, because he will be unable to fully be present as a parent. Why? “After all the lessons of transition and detransition, fatherhood remained the one affront to his gender that he still couldn’t stomach without a creeping sense of humor.” What results is a moving look at the lives of these three woman — though we get to know Ames and Reese much more than Katrina — and how they come together to possibly co-parent a child. Throughout the book, Peters reflects movingly on how trans women are a “lost generation” because of the lack of elders and stable groups. It’s funny and smart and the characters feel so real you can easily imagine their lives moving forward long after you finish the last page. Can you tell I loved it?
In a convo with Britni de La Cretaz in Refinery 29, Torrey Peters explained she wrote this book “to figure out what mattered to me and how to find meaning. I looked around and saw the way other women were finding meaning — family and career and long-term partnership — and I didn't know if any of those things would apply to me as a trans woman.”
She continues, “One of the great things about fiction is that you can create a test case for yourself. You can create some characters and wind them up, put them in motion, and see how you feel about the options that are out there. In this case, what I was looking at was: Why was I drawn to the idea of motherhood? Was it for my own identity [as a woman]? Was it for the sake of a child? Was it validation? Was it because I actually have a maternal instinct? All those questions were muddled up in my head, but this book was a way to begin exploring them. From there, that leads really easily into family and stability. Did I really want those things? Or was it the culture around me that made me think that I needed them? How could I refashion them to suit me? Because I think one of the things that the book talks about is that we have a lot of ideas about family, or especially nuclear family, and what happens to those ideas when you have a trans woman at the center of them.”
And she explores them in a novel I’m sure we’ll be talking about for a long, long time.
Rating: ★★★★★
