Detransition, Baby

A Novel

hardcover, 352 pages

Published Jan. 12, 2021 by One World.

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (7 reviews)

A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese--and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. …

2 editions

this book is so trans!

4 stars

This book actually consists of many little stories, and all of them are so trans, i feel seen. One of the stories is in the foreground, stretched over the entire book, while the others are told as anecdotes from the characters' past. I liked many things in the book. But it is a slow read, nothing to consume in one weekend.

one of the best this year

5 stars

Torrey Peters is clearly a super talent, and the way this book weaves between cute & sexual, introspection & snappy conversation, etc is a fantastic accomplishment. The ideas around unscrewing and redefining families give the reader a lot to think about. As a divorced cis woman who has never had any inclination towards having children but has grappled with my own existence in the gray area of masculine & feminine, I felt some validation in my own lack of cleaving to whatever the social expectations are (and I love the idea of not getting burned out in the future because of past relationship nonsense). I really enjoyed this one.

Yes.

5 stars

I am still processing this book and probably will be thinking about it for a while still. I really enjoyed it—even reading late at night and in various states of lack of focus, it made me read slowly and thoughtfully. The complexities of gender and bodies and desire are more complex here than I’ve seen in other novels and it’s powerful for that. And the complexities of the main characters!! Their assumptions about cis straight women are laughably simplistic, which is the point. As a cis queer mother it was a bit weird to read with one foot in and one foot out of the assumed viewpoints of the book, in a way that is a lot different than reading the simplistic assumptions about women in cis men’s books (hi, trained as a Shakespeare scholar, have so much experience with handling that sort of disassociation). I should look around for …

Provocative, Indulgent, & Revealing...

5 stars

...Torrey Peters provides an emotionally charged whirlwind to her readers through flawed yet ceaselessly lovable characters. This groundbreaking piece on the transgender experience follows Reese - a transgender woman who longs to be a mother - and Ames – who detransitioned from a women and abruptly learns that he is an expecting father. This storyline unfolds hard, over three hundred pages that make you grimace, laugh, cry, and ponder over the conflicts of gender identity.

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5 stars