At the beginning of “Detransition, Baby,” a dishy, engrossing new novel by Torrey Peters, a trans woman named Reese receives a phone call from her ex, Ames, who has an unusual proposition for her. Their history—which unfurls slowly in the pages that follow, as the story moves seamlessly from present to past—is that Ames once lived as a trans woman, went by Amy, and in that era lived with Reese in an apartment by Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, where they planned to raise a child. But their budding domestic life dissolved before they got that far, when Ames began to detransition—not, the book makes clear, because he had erred in his decision to exist openly as a woman, but because it was too difficult to do so.
Now Ames faces a new predicament: he has been carrying on a secret romance with his boss, Katrina, and she is pregnant. Flinching at the prospect of existing, in any capacity, as a father, but wanting to preserve his relationship with Katrina, Ames has been contemplating how he might queer the arrangement if Katrina decides not to have an abortion. Knowing how badly Reese longs for motherhood, Ames asks her if she would like to join them in raising the child. He suspects that, to Reese, “he would always be a woman. By borrowing her vantage, he could almost see himself as a parent: Perhaps one way to tolerate being a father would be to have her constant presence assuring him that he was actually not one.”
Reese, who is too jaded to indulge in utopian fantasies of a reimagined queer family, initially balks at the suggestion—a reasonable response, given how unwieldy the arrangement could become. But despite her world-weary exterior, her desire for motherhood is too strong for her to say no. “Yes, go ask this other woman, Katrina, to split her unborn child with a transsexual,” she tells Ames. “I fully expect that she will murder you for the suggestion, for which I will take a portion of the credit without having to risk jail.”
The book alternates between Reese’s and Ames’s points of view. And although Ames forges the story’s premise, prickly, funny Reese is the star of the show. Her casually devastating assessments of other characters and her sardonic narration lend the novel its insider chattiness. It’s full of the kind of talk that trans people would normally reserve for one another. (“You were a languid boy, who learned to move like a woman, who then learned to move like a boy again, but without wiping your hard drive each time,” Reese observes of Ames. “You’ve got all these glitches in the way you move. You slither.”) Peters’s invocation of detransition, a relatively rare phenomenon commonly cited to claim that trans people are delusional, has an air of menace to those invested in shifting transphobic attitudes. But, in refusing to avoid the sore spots of trans life, Peters offers a lucidity that would be impossible if her only goal were to inspire sympathy. She is refreshingly uninterested in persuading the public of the bravery and nobility of trans people, and lets them be as dysfunctional as anyone else.
Peters, thirty-nine, has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Vermont. Before she finished “Detransition, Baby,” she found a readership by self-publishing novellas about flawed trans women, selling them through her Web site as inexpensive paperbacks and name-your-own-price PDFs. In the backs of those books, an “About the Author” section stated that Peters had “concluded that the publishing industry doesn’t serve trans women.” The easiest way for a trans person to get a book deal, it is often grumbled among trans writers, is to sell a memoir that traffics in tidy arcs of self-empowerment, the sombre excavation of trauma, or both. The buzzy release of “Detransition, Baby” by a major publisher (Penguin Random House) is a departure from this pattern. Despite its ostensibly niche subject matter, it is, first and foremost, a bourgeois comedy of manners. It addresses its characters’ suffering with a charming mixture of generosity and irony, and it favors matter-of-factness over precious subtlety. In one scene, as Katrina and Ames hesitate to broach the topic at hand, Reese makes a cutting observation that serves as a clue to the book’s stylistic approach. “It was as though they had decided to speak like the couple in that famous Hemingway story,” she thinks, “both much too stoic to ever refer directly to anything but their drinks as their unborn child slowly sucks the air from a room.”
As Reese enters her mid-thirties, she has begun to consider what she calls the “Sex and the City Problem.” According to her theory, as the pleasures of youth dwindle, women find meaning through one of four paths, each embodied by one of the characters on the show: “Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie.” But for trans women, Reese notes, each of these options can seem blocked by insurmountable hurdles. A sense of futurelessness sets in. The spectre of suicide haunts the book—Reese regularly attends the funerals of trans women she knows, which, she opines dryly, “number among the notable social events of a season.” She is drawn to the oblivion of domineering men, who darkly affirm her gender through subjugation, a habit that replaces more sustainable forms of validation. And so motherhood—or the sense of purpose it connotes—presents a tantalizing alternative. As much as Reese would like to be detached, she might just be a Miranda.
Ames, for better or for worse, is more capable of detachment, partly because he’s a master of evasion. But Peters portrays his decisions with sympathy rather than contempt, recognizing that directives to “live authentically” are more difficult for some than for others. When Katrina tells Ames that she’s pregnant, he at first responds blankly—because he has not told her that he used to live as a woman, he can’t begin to convey the real source of his panic at the thought of fatherhood. When he does explain his past to her, she reacts more harshly than she needs to, rushing to the conclusion that he slept with her under false pretenses, as though knowledge of a person’s life story is a prerequisite for consent. She even lashes out, punishing him by jeopardizing his job.
It would have been easy for Peters to make Katrina the villain of the story, an obstacle to queer flourishing, but her project is not to give trans people an undeniable moral high ground. As cruel and offensive as Katrina’s reaction is, there’s a grain of truth in her sense of betrayal; Ames’s failure is not so much one of ethics as one of intimacy. Both Ames and Reese evince their own forms of callousness, and we learn that Katrina’s ordinary façade belies a relationship to womanhood that has its own complexity. She is recently divorced, and early in her affair with Ames, long before she knows that he once lived as a woman, she says that her marriage ended because of “the Ennui of Heterosexuality,” describing her distaste for her role as a wife and her guilt when she felt relief after a miscarriage. That’s why Ames thinks that, as wild as his idea to co-parent the child sounds, there is a chance that she’ll be game.
As it turns out, Ames is right—Katrina agrees to at least explore the idea, because she is both invested in Ames and intrigued by the ways a nontraditional arrangement could ease the burdens of parenthood. When she meets Reese for the first time, their mutual bluntness allows them to establish a shaky rapport. Reese stirs the pot, in her usual manner, and Katrina challenges her. If Katrina were polite and deferential, tiptoeing around her ignorance of trans people for fear of making a mistake, the conversation would likely lead nowhere. But after a quick first impression, Reese feels generous enough to share another piece of her grand theory of women’s lives, one that conveys what she believes she and Katrina have in common:
Like Peters’s invocation of detransition, this description takes a risky trope—the use of transition as a metaphor for some more broadly relatable experience—and injects it with specificity. Rather than water down the varied experiences of trans people by attempting to universalize them, the comparison illuminates both Reese’s and Katrina’s plights. As they continue to discuss their plans, this seed of commonality—the abandonment of a prescribed way of living for the abyss of self-determination—grows into a rich, if volatile, affection. They respect each other enough to argue, and their conversations force them to question their assumptions about what holds a family together. Their deliberations are heavy, and often deeply theoretical, but the texture of their dialogue remains effervescent.
Like Reese, Peters resists the temptation to believe that queerness, in itself, can fix society’s broken promises. One can imagine her writing a different novel, in which, at the beginning, a baby is born, and we watch three characters work through and transcend the challenges of raising a child together. Such a book would reflect on the joy and constraints of family bonds, of a finite path chosen. But Peters is less interested in resolution than in the continual project of reckoning with ourselves. She confronts the unruliness of our desires, and our vitality as we struggle within their limits.
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