Read Yes
Length 337
Feels Complicated yet Positive
Gay Vibes Super Gay
Drink Pairing Wine Flight
⭐⭐⭐⭐
As a woman living in a non-traditional family, Detransition, Baby is an important representation for so many people who have been confronted with the cishet-normative and choose to live the life we want or need. As a queer woman, Detransition, Baby is exceptional for so many reasons. Torrey Peters and Detransition, Baby is one of the first novels ever published by an out-trans woman by a big-five publishing company. Congratulations to One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for using its considerable power and influence to uplift a voice that needs to be heard.
The most exceptional part of Detransition, Baby is in its presentation and acceptance of the mundane and quotidian quality of the lives and struggles of queer and trans people because they are. Peters, as a queer trans-woman writes with the authenticity of lived experience and presents it to her readers with a perfunctory yet humorous: this is life. Queer lives and loves hold all the same ups and downs of cishet loves and lives, we just have the added bonus of prejudice, bigotry, systemic laws, outdated beliefs, ignorance, and hatred cishet people don’t have to deal with. For the LGBTQIA+ community, that is just life and it is mundane and quotidian, albeit painful and frustrating, but to be queer is to look the world in the face and keep living and loving authentically. Peters doesn’t make instances of homophobia or transphobia extraordinary or unique because they are not. They are a part of our lives. We do our best to get through them; educate the people we love so they can better protect us; and we continue on because that is all we can do. Queer people are just trying to pay the bills, feed our pets, have some friends, get a healthy amount of sleep, create families, and enjoy life. Detransition, Baby allows readers into the daily struggle of what that looks like for queer and trans women from the very first page.
Reese is a thirty-something, queer, trans woman living in Brooklyn with a penchant for men who do not treat her well and a deep yearning for a child. Ames, formerly known as Amy, was Reese’s partner for years before detransitioning, losing Reese and their life together. Ames’ lover, Katrina, is a half-Chinese, half-Jewish cis woman. These three thirty-something women’s lives collide in Brooklyn when Katrina finds out she’s pregnant, though Ames believed he was sterile from the years of hormone treatments. Ames creates a plan to bring Reese, Katrina, and himself together to bring this baby into the world in an unconventional yet stable and loving manner. The narrative bounces along a timeline spanning years before the baby’s conception when Amy and Reese were together to weeks after conception as Ames, Reese, and Katrina confront their own self-destructive ways, identity, gender, and what a stable life for a child could and should look like.
Ultimately, Detransition, Baby puts cishet social norms at the forefront of the novel in conjunction with how queer lives, loves, and families are expected to fit within an outdated societal structure, which no longer serves the humans it was built for and around. (Like it ever did…) Yet everyone is impacted by those expectations due to the basic human need to be seen, accepted, and affirmed. Peters, in her debut novel, which garnered her the first nomination ever by a trans woman for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, creates a messy, emotional, and vulnerable deep dive into the meaning of womanhood, queerness, family, relationships, gender, and sex. It speaks so deeply to the queer experience, yet every human who has been met with the opportunity or sought out a new beginning in their thirties, when their lives are expected to be settled. It’s hard. It’s messy. It’s painful. And yet, we come out the otherside more authentically ourselves. It’s no wonder Peters dedicated her novel to “divorced cis women.”
Within Detransition, Baby there is a universal understanding of the human condition told through the lens of a specifically queer story.
Memorable Quotes
“Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.”
“She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure.”
I stopped keeping quotes because there are so many fabulous ones.
bisous un обьятий,
RaeAnna
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Title: Detransition, Baby
Author: Torrey Peters
Publisher: One World
Copyright: 2021
ISBN: 9780593133378
