Detransition, Baby: Criticism
I’ll admit it: I teared up the first time I held a copy of Detransition, Baby in my hands. At nearly 400 pages, the thing is a tome. How many tomes about trans people have been published, like, ever? And from Random House, no less? A little paper block of history. The sweet fruit of our Transgender Tipping Point. I allowed myself a few seconds to marvel at the book as political object, thought all the relevant buzzwords—Important! Bold! Necessary! —then I had a sip of water and actually read the book. I’ll invite you, too, to get this moment out of your system. Torrey Peters’ masterwork on contemporary trans life demands more rigorous engagement than a Ryan Murphy show.
“In the future, everyone will be trans,” Lexi announces in Peters’ 2016 self-published novella, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones. She’s about to inject our narrator with a highly contagious virus that forces everyone, cis people included, to be on hormones for life. It’s the beginning of an apocalypse, sure, but apocalypse stories are everywhere. This apocalypse is different; it exploits an ideology so obscure that only trans people will likely recognize it by name, or more specifically, its acronym: t4t.
Peters is sometimes falsely credited with inventing t4t as a concept, but t4t, or trans-for-trans, had been circulating in queer communities for decades prior to her novellas, especially through Craigslist personal ads. It has since evolved from simple dating preference to broad political commitment. “You just promise to love trans girls above all else,” Zoey, another trans woman in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, explains. “The idea—although maybe not the practice—is that a girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire, but if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.”
The preceding quote is perhaps the most often quoted Peters line; rarely is it accompanied with the rest of the dialogue from the surrounding scene. I’ll provide it here:
“That sounds like some kind of trans girl utopia.” I’m so rattled, it’s not even sarcastic.
She laughs. “Please. You’ve met a trans woman before, right? Do you think the words trans women and utopia ever go together in the same sentence? Even when we’re not starved for hormones, we’re still bitches. Crabs in a barrel. Fucking utopia, my ass.” She glances at me. My nervousness must show plainly. I can’t tell if I’m safe or not.
“Here’s what it is,” she says, a little more gently, “We aim high, trying to love each other and then we take what we can get. We settle for looking out for each other. And even if we don’t all love each other, we mostly all respect each other.”
After a pause she says, “I remember how I used to be before the contagion. Embarrassed to be seen with another trans woman, for fear that her transness would reveal my transness and we’d both get clocked. T4T is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that’s better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen.”
Both Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones and Peters’ debut novel, Detransition, Baby have the same project: loving trans women by telling the truth about their lives. The former explores the practice of the t4t ideal when bastardized to horrific conclusions: widespread famine, war, and, ironically, trans women barred from accessing estrogen. In the final pages, we are reminded that it is the narrator’s internalized transphobia projected on to Lexi, calcified over years of ambivalent friendship, that compels Lexi to press the plunger on the syringe that ends the world. Some trans people can afford to read the novel’s premise as hyperbole: when trans people fail each other, it’s not just betrayal, it’s a political disaster. But in many cases, including Lexi’s, t4t community is necessary for survival. The novella imagines Lexi’s death displaced and inflicted on the masses. It is only post-apocalypse that Lexi and the narrator can reconcile and finally approach t4t.
Detransition, Baby is realist, domestic fiction. It’s more optimistic in its imagining of relationships where trans people are getting what they want, but with a diametrically opposed method to an exclusive t4t framework: strategically integrate cis people into trans life. The novel flips assimilation on its head and seeks a sort of solidarity: How can cis people help trans people get what we want, and how can trans people help cis people get what they want? Can we work together to create something new? Detransition, Baby twists and turns as Reese, Ames and Katrina attempt the radical honesty required of such a vision: what turns them on, what doesn’t, what they envy about each other, what they don’t understand. In the context of countless mainstream trans narratives where our desires are glossed over, rationalized, sanitized, and erased, Detransition, Baby rings almost scandalous. It delights in committing a cardinal literary industry sin: depicting trans people as we actually live.
Detransition, Baby begins with a failed t4t romance. It’s been two years since Reese and Ames dissolved their codependent but largely sexless relationship. Reese now fucks a married, undetectable ex-cowboy who HIV seroconverted with the last trans woman he cheated on his wife with; Ames, formerly Amy, hasn’t taken estrogen since breaking up with Reese. He’s living stealth and sleeping with his cis, ostensibly straight boss, Katrina. Reese is respected and beloved by her tight knit trans community, but truly wants to break all their antinormative rules and become a stereotypical white, midwestern mom; Ames wants Katrina to appreciate him as more than just a cis guy. Neither Reese nor Ames’s salvation look like an all-trans world; that’s already failed them both. So when Katrina becomes pregnant, Ames dreams up a last-ditch effort for him and Reese to make it as a family: convince Katrina to commit to a three-parent structure so they can all raise the baby together. Ames thinks Reese’s role in the family will disrupt Katrina’s conception of him as the stereotypical father figure and repair his otherwise-unsalvageable relationship with Reese. Reese thinks pairing up with Ames and Katrina may be her last shot at motherhood, and, by extension, at legitimizing her womanhood.
The book shifts between present-day and flashback, a gesture towards (de)transition itself, the obsessive rehashing of how we got from Gender A to Gender B, poring over the past for proof we chose correctly. Look at those cargo shorts I had in middle school! They should have dumped hormones in my Fruit Loops! Peters argues that detransition, too, is made of the same stuff of transition: using our bodies to get what we want. The tragedy of Ames’ arc is that Ames is a trans woman who gives up trans life in service of something else: safety, numbness, to get left alone. “I got sick of living as trans,” Ames tells Katrina after she outs him at a business meeting as ‘used to be a fucking transsexual.’ “I got to a point where I thought I didn’t need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.” In large part, it is Ames’s self-described autogynephilia that prevents him from investing in seeing himself as a woman. Ames grappling with his first forays into lesbianism are some of the most compelling moments in the book, as it roots his transition in desire, rather than tired, essentialist rhetoric that robs trans people of their agency. We are given an intimate, rare look into Ames’ messy self-determining. There are so many sharp insights into how gender works that, had I read this book back when I was ruining my own life with should-I-transition ruminating, I would have probably started hormones at least a year sooner.
Particularly exciting are the ways Peters’ characters craft familiar access points into each other’s lives. In the first few pages, Reese teases her ex-cowboy by calling her PrEP “birth control.” She later offers to let him fuck her without a condom; together they imagine Reese contracting HIV as a form of pregnancy. “Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. His cock could obliterate her… Make her the mommy, her body host to new life, part of her but not, just as mothers eternal.” Of course, the dream comes crashing down when Reese insists this means the cowboy must treat her better. He agrees and drives them to a restaurant in Greenpoint—so public! —then tells Reese to run in for take-out alone while he waits for her in his car. Later, in a touching monologue, she invites Katrina into something like transness: “Divorce is a transition story… I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who knows there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.” Peters’ is walking a fine line—maintaining a trans-centric narrative while frankly assessing how we can authentically connect with cis people—but she does it with consistent style and grace.
Despite Detransition, Baby’s length, my attention rarely wandered while reading, though I was occasionally distracted by choices that felt jarringly safe in this otherwise audacious opus. The book’s close third-person point of view limits itself to Ames and Reese, and I often found myself wishing for more of Katrina’s perspective. As she tries to decide whether to raise a child with Ames and Reese, Katrina swings haphazardly from baby-queer optimisim and cissexist skepticism; she delights in lesbian-coded moments with Reese at the baby store, then pulls the natal mom card when they disagree about whether to buy a crib. She also struggles to navigate Reese’s and Ame’s ignorance around race with her own around transness. Notably, Katrina is the only protagonist of color, and while Peters’ gestures towards the racial dynamics at play between the three characters, they aren’t interrogated nearly as aggressively as the gender dynamics, which flattens some of the confrontations that arise, particularly between Katrina and Reese around their shared status as, according to Reese, “almost cis white ladies.” Racial tensions are regularly acknowledged, but not often plumbed for peak emotional resonance. Ultimately, Reese accuses Katrina of “gentrifying queerness,” which Katrina balks at (“Which of them had grown up eating her mother’s Chinese food and which of them had grown up eating fried bread in Wisconsin?”), but this jab comes late in the novel and functions almost as an aside, rather than a boiling point for a central tension that simmers throughout the book. Deeper engagement with Katrina’s arc would have made for an even longer book, which I’d welcome readily: Peters’ has created a world readers won’t want to leave.
I read Detransition, Baby for the first time during November 2020, months into the pandemic, a few weeks into my first semester of graduate school and half a country away from Seattle’s queer community, where I had made my home for the past ten years. Months later, I am still rereading the chapters where Amy and Reese are still together or hanging out with other trans people. There’s Thalia’s weekly set at queer dive bar Dynamite, a motorcycle fixing session with hunky masc Ricky, Amy and Reese’s meet-cute at the trans girl picnic, Amy’s joyful and harrowing trips to Glamour Boutique, Tammi’s funeral (or, as Reese calls it, a “notable social event of [the] season”) and an absurd afternoon at Riis Beach. This year, I have missed sharing space with other trans people unlike I’ve missed anything else. Peters’ loving rendering of these moments are alive, as inhabitable as rooms. It is an incredible gift that I can open Detransition, Baby and close the door behind me any time I want; I expect countless other trans readers will feel the same way. For a novel so focused on how we might live harmoniously with cis people, this book is functionally, foundationally, fiercely t4t.
Max Delsohn is a writer from Seattle, Washington. Their work has been published in The Rumpus, CutBank, Sonora Review and Autostraddle. They are currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University. Find them on twitter @fakejewishboy.
