Detransition, Baby
Front Cover
AuthorTorrey Peters
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreLiterary fiction, Transgender literature
Set inBrooklyn
PublisherPenguin Random House
Publication date
January 12, 2021
Media typePrint
ISBN0593133374

Detransition, Baby is a 2021 novel by American author Torrey Peters. It is her debut novel and was published by Penguin Random House. The novel was met with critical success and praise for crafting a tender exploration of gender, parenthood, love, and trans life.[1][2]

Plot

The main characters are Reese, a trans woman and former partner of Amy; Amy, who detransitioned to live as a man and became Ames; and Katrina, a biracial Chinese and Jewish cis woman who is Ames's boss and current lover.[3][4] All three are in their thirties and live in Brooklyn. After the end of their relationship, Reese and Ames have been estranged because of Ames's decision to detransition three years ago.

Katrina discovers that she is pregnant with Ames's child, though Ames was misguided by his doctor, who conveyed to Ames that he would be sterile because of his time on hormone replacement therapy. Ames reveals to Katrina that he spent six years living as an out trans woman before deciding to socially detransition due to associated risks of transphobia; in particular, increased risk of violence. Although he is certain he is not a man, he is still unsure of his gender identity. Because of his complicated relationship with his gender, Ames is hesitant to accept the role of a father to a child in a heterotypical family because of the label's social connotations of masculinity.

Ames reconnects with Reese, who has long wanted to mother a child of her own, believing that the three of them could form an unconventional family to raise the baby together. Reese grapples with the same self-destructive coping mechanisms that soured her old relationship with Amy, including sex with married men and chasers, awhile Ames tries to navigate life as a man again. Katrina attempts to adjust to a different understanding of gender and questions her own queerness, but intends to get an abortion if she cannot be sure she will have a support system. The three question their identities, their relationships with each other, and if they could form a stable family.

The book is separated into sections that move in time from years before the conception of Katrina's child to weeks after conception and explore both the nature of Reese and Amy's relationship and the negotiation of a possible family dynamic for the trio.

Characters

Drawing of Reese, Ames and Katrina

Reese

One of the protagonists and a narrator of some chapters. She is a trans woman, PR executive, and former partner of Amy. She deeply values motherhood as a part of her identity as a woman, and wishes she could have her own child. Because she cannot become pregnant, she instead works in childcare and mentors other young trans women, including Amy when she presented as a trans woman.

Ames

One of the protagonists and a narrator of some chapters. Ames, or Amy before her detransition, was Reese's lover for a period. After their detransition, Ames is still unsure of their identity as a male. Ames works for Katrina and his relationship with her has resulted in the pregnancy that is a focal point for this book.

Katrina

Katrina is a biracial Chinese and Jewish cisgender woman who is Ames's boss and current lover. Before the events of the novel she experienced a miscarriage that led to her divorce with her former husband. Through her relationship with Ames and later Reese,  she begins questioning her own identity as a heterosexual woman and potential mother.

Stanley

Stanley is a cisgender man who had a relationship with Reese prior to Reese and Ames’ relationship. The reignition of Reese and Stanley's relationship culminates in the end of her relationship with Ames.

Garrett (The Cowboy)

Garrett is one of Reese's lovers, whom she refers to as her “cowboy." Garrett is married and previously contracted HIV from another trans woman who he cheated on his wife with. Garrett uses Reese only for sex and keeps his relationship with her and his own family separate.

Background

Peters has stated that the character of Ames is inspired by an experience she had in 2016, when she visited Mexico and wore a suit to pass as male and avoid questions from customs about her male passport.[5] Peters reflected that the novel is written in the genre of a soap opera and that the novel's characters talk "how I talk with my friends."[6][7] In 2021, Peters said that while she was writing the book in 2018, "I was just thinking about what was going to be funny for my friends and what was pertinent to our lives", and "I had the freedom to imagine trans people as just quotidian, boring, flawed people. I wasn't engaging with trans people as an embattled group."[8]

The dedication for Detransition, Baby is addressed to "divorced cis women". Peters' reasoning for this is that "divorced cis women must start over at a point in adulthood when they're supposed to be established", which she compares to what trans women experience.[9]

Detransition, Baby was one of the first novels written by an out trans person to be published by a big-five publishing house.[10]

Major Themes

HIV/Aids Fear

The fear of contracting HIV and AIDS is a shared experience among many people in the Trans community. Trans women living with HIV experience heightened levels of violence due to intersections of stigma, gender expression, and HIV status. Trans women face physical and discursive violence from society, the police, their sexual partners, and healthcare providers due to stigma against their gender identity and HIV status.[11] Throughout the novel, we see Reese's interaction with Stanley who is HIV positive. Reese equates her fear of getting HIV by having unprotected sex with Stanley with the risk of becoming pregnant.

Romanticizing Violence

Reese experiences sexual relationships (i.e. with Stanley and The Cowboy) that are consistent with hegemonic forms of femininity and masculinity as a liberating way to make her feel feminine and confirm her gender identity as a trans woman. Reese identifies as a trans woman and generally adheres to submissive roles, perhaps based upon gendered-socialization that frames women as submissive to men.[12] With this in mind, as stated by Anzani et al. (2021), “...it is important to stress that the line between attraction and fetishization can be blurred in some cases, thus underlying the importance of putting the personal experiences of [transgender nonbinary people] at the center.”[13]

LGBT Parenting

Each character has different desires in terms of becoming a parent or not. Ames’ gender identity complicates his desire to become a parent because he cannot see himself playing the stereotypical father role. Ames’ experience mirrors the real experiences of gender non-conforming parents, who according to research by Pfeffer and Jones may face discomfort in their families and identities by having their non-traditional parental roles questioned by both their children and observers.[14] Katrina, on the other hand, while she initially embraced the queer family dynamic, inevitably wanted a heteronormative family structure with Ames as the father after finding out that Reese was dating The Cowboy. Reese's want to be a mother highlights the shared desire of many trans people to become parents. In a study conducted in Germany, over 50% of trans women and trans men interviewed imagine having children in the future, whether they had gone under gender-affirming treatment or not.[15] LGBT parenthood displayed in this book shows the importance of representation for parents who do not fit in the binary of heterosexual or “same-sex” couples.[16] Through Reese, Ames, and Katrina's relationship we can see how many different forms of family are often invisible in the media. In addition, it is important to note that gender non-conforming people are rendered invisible in many types of research.[17]  Detransition, Baby offers an important image of what a different family structure could look like outside of this binary.

Reception

Kirkus called Detransition, Baby "a wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family.[18] Writing for The New Yorker, Crispin Long identifies the novel as "a bourgeois comedy of manners" and notes that Peters is "refreshingly uninterested in persuading the public of the bravery and nobility of trans people, and lets them be as dysfunctional as anyone else."[19] In a review for Vox, Emily St. James praised the depiction of Ames as someone "just trying to fumble his way through a life that has afforded him very few good options."[20]

Detransition, Baby was nominated for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction, making Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award.[21] The longlisting of Peters was met with some controversy from those who did not consider her to be a woman. A letter argued that she is male and therefore should not be eligible for the prize.[22] Its list of signatories included atheist writer Ophelia Benson and environmentalist Rebecca Lush, as well as long-dead writers such as Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather.[23] Authors including Melinda Salisbury, Joanne Harris, and Naoise Dolan—another nominee for the 2021 prize—condemned the letter and expressed their support for Peters. The organisers of the prize released a statement condemning the letter and defending the decision to nominate Peters' book.[22][24]

In early 2021, a TV adaptation of Detransition, Baby was announced. Grey's Anatomy writer-producers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan are the showrunners for the drama/comedy television adaptation.[10]

References

  1. ↑ Epstein, Rachel (2020-11-16). "Pre-Order These Highly-Anticipated 2021 Book Releases". Marie Claire. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  2. ↑ Berlatsky, Noah (2021-01-06). "Review: A social comedy on 'detransitioning' asks: Who is anyone to judge?". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2021-01-06.
  3. ↑ "Alma's Favorite Books for Winter 2021". Alma. 2020-11-24. Retrieved 2020-11-24.
  4. ↑ "Serpent's Tail to publish 'uniquely trans take on love and parenting' by Torrey Peters | The Bookseller". www.thebookseller.com. Retrieved 2020-11-23.
  5. ↑ Butter, Susannah (2021-04-07). "Trans writer Torrey Peters: 'I have a lot of empathy for JK Rowling'". www.standard.co.uk. Retrieved 2021-06-18.
  6. ↑ "Writing for a Trans Audience: Talking with Torrey Peters". The Rumpus.net. 2021-01-18. Retrieved 2021-03-06.
  7. ↑ Lowder, Christina Cauterucci, J. Bryan (2021-01-21). "What Stories of Transition and Divorce Have in Common". Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2021-03-06.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ↑ "'I just wanted to write something funny for my friends': Torrey Peters on Detransition, Baby". the Guardian. 2021-10-07. Retrieved 2021-11-16.
  9. ↑ "Torrey Peters". www.artforum.com. Retrieved 2021-01-06.
  10. 1 2 Curto, Justin (2021-03-04). "Move Over, Sex and the City Reboot, a Detransition, Baby Series Is on the Way". Vulture. Retrieved 2021-04-16.
  11. ↑ Duncan and Olawale, Ashley and Ronke (March 2022). "Context, Types, and Consequences of Violence Across the Life Course: A Qualitative Study of the Lived Experiences of Transgender Women Living with HIV". National Library of Medicine – via PubMed.
  12. ↑ Martinez, Katherine (2018-08-24). "BDSM Role Fluidity: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Investigating Switches Within Dominant/Submissive Binaries". Journal of Homosexuality. 65 (10): 1299–1324. doi:10.1080/00918369.2017.1374062. ISSN 0091-8369.
  13. ↑ Anzani, Annalisa; Lindley, Louis; Tognasso, Giacomo; Galupo, M. Paz; Prunas, Antonio (2021-04-01). ""Being Talked to Like I Was a Sex Toy, Like Being Transgender Was Simply for the Enjoyment of Someone Else": Fetishization and Sexualization of Transgender and Nonbinary Individuals". Archives of Sexual Behavior. 50 (3): 897–911. doi:10.1007/s10508-021-01935-8. ISSN 1573-2800. PMC 8035091. PMID 33763803.
  14. ↑ Pfeffer, Carla A.; Jones, Kierra B. (2020), Goldberg, Abbie E.; Allen, Katherine R. (eds.), "Transgender-Parent Families", LGBTQ-Parent Families: Innovations in Research and Implications for Practice, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 199–214, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35610-1_12, ISBN 978-3-030-35610-1, retrieved 2023-11-29
  15. ↑ Matthias, Auer. "Desire to Have Children Among Transgender People in Germany: A Cross-Sectional Mutli-Center Study". academic.oup.com. doi:10.1016/j.jsxm.2018.03.083. Retrieved 2023-11-29.
  16. ↑ Reed, Elizabeth (2018). "The Heterogeneity of Family: Responses to Representational Invisibility by LGBTQ Parents". Journal of Family Issues. 39 (18): 4204–4225. doi:10.1177/0192513X18810952. ISSN 0192-513X.
  17. ↑ Combs, Ryan; Wendel, Monica; Gonzales, T. (2018-08-14). "Considering transgender and gender nonconforming people in health communication campaigns". Palgrave Communications. 4 (1): 1–6. doi:10.1057/s41599-018-0155-z. ISSN 2055-1045.
  18. ↑ "Detransition, Baby". Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus. 12 January 2021. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  19. ↑ Long, Crispin (31 January 2021). "The Insider Insights of "Detransition, Baby"". The New Yorker. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  20. ↑ St. James, Emily (18 January 2021). "One Good Thing: Groundbreaking new novel Detransition, Baby lays bare the innermost thoughts of trans women". Vox. Vox Media. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  21. ↑ Zhan, Jennifer (2021-04-07). "Torrey Peters Addresses Transphobic Backlash Over Women's Prize Nomination". Vulture. Retrieved 2021-04-16.
  22. 1 2 "Women's prize condemns online attack on trans nominee Torrey Peters". the Guardian. 2021-04-07. Retrieved 2021-06-18.
  23. ↑ "Open letter to the Women's Prize". Wild Woman Writing Club. 2021-04-06. Retrieved 2021-06-18.
  24. ↑ "Women's Prize stands by its nomination of trans author Torrey Peters after open letter". Los Angeles Times. 2021-04-07. Retrieved 2021-10-04.
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