Detransition, Baby: A Novel

By Torrey Peters

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time)

“Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle

PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • New York Times Editors’ Choice

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. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jan 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593133392

Torrey Peters

Torrey Peters' first novel, Detransition, Baby won the PEN/ Hemingway Award 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book. A Times Top Ten bestseller, it was longlisted for the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction

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Cover for Detransition, Baby: A Novel, Author, Torrey Peters

Praise for

DETRANSITION, BABY

• Nominated for the Women’s Prize •

• An Nytbr Editor’s Choice •

• Chosen for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club •

• A Marie Claire Book Club pick •

"Detransition, Baby is so good I want to scream."

—Carmen Maria Machado

This book is exhilaratingly good.

—Jia Tolentino

The smartest novel I’ve read in ages. I wish I could figure out how it manages to be utterly savage and lacerating while also conveying endlessly expanding compassion. It’s kind of a miracle.

—Garth Greenwell

So smart, funny & sad about human nature & all our longings, hypocrisy, shame & sweetness. And it’s fearlessly thought-provoking about gender. Such a literary feat & also such a great read.

—Curtis Sittenfeld via Twitter

"With heart and savvy, [Detransition, Baby upends] our traditional, gendered notions of what parenthood can look like…. Reese, Ames and Katrina feel to us more like friends than characters."

—The New York Times Book Review

[An] electrifying debut…In this compassionate, gut-punching story, Peters leans all the way into the tragicomedy of how families and identities are formed, making for a deeply searching novel that resists easy answers.

—Esquire

Peters’s soap opera-meets-modern-cultural-analysis is witty, emotional, and eye-opening.

—People

"[An] emotionally devastating, culturally specific, endlessly intelligent novel [that is] really, really funny."

—Autostraddle

"Dynamic and vibrant, Detransition, Baby…is a fiercely confident novel about aging, about how to make meaning out of one’s life, how to escape the traditional definitions of how one ought to be."

—Oprah Daily

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.

—The New Yorker

"If I had the ability to momentarily wipe my memory, I’d use it to reread Detransition, Baby for the first time."

—Vogue

"Detransition, Baby’s warmth and wit feel both familiar and utterly new: a tale of love, loss, and self-discovery as singular as it is universal, and all the sweeter for it."

—Entertainment Weekly

A visceral, funny exploration of sex and gender.

—Vanity Fair

"Detransition, Baby is, simply put, fantastic. But somehow even the most complimentary adjectives feel insufficient to describe Torrey Peters’ first novel…. Devastating, hilarious, touching, timely…this is an acutely intelligent story about womanhood, parenthood and all the possibilities that lie within."

—Bookpage (starred review)

A world so lovable and complex, it’s hard to let go.

—Publishers Weekly

[Peters] puts the messiness of trans experience on an unprecedented stage…. Setting parenthood and being trans side-by-side leads to such striking insights that get to the very heart of what it means to exist as a gendered being in the world.

—them.

"To summarize the whole plot of Detransition, Baby would really do the book a disservice…. It’s about family, it’s about motherhood, it’s about mothering, but at the molten core of it all, it’s about the way we all present our genders, including cis people."

—The Cut

Funny and gossipy and insightful and cutting and absolutely delicious, all while tackling issues from a lens that has been missing from the literary world for way too long.

—Refinery 29

Welcome to a new kind of novel, one that doesn’t shy away from the complex realities of genders, parenthood, love and relationships. This is a refreshing debut.

—Ms. Magazine

"Torrey Peters explores family dynamics, queer parenting, gender, relationships, and womanhood in this debut novel brimming with humor, warmth, and complexity. Detransition, Baby is a rare book in which the story and writing are equally compelling. But what will stick with readers most are these three flawed, lovable, and deeply one-of-a-kind characters."

—Bust

A raw, honest, and deeply revealing portrait of trans life in America that belongs center stage on your bedside table and beyond.

—Domino

A masterclass in storytelling only Peters could pull off with her wit, humor, and vulnerability. The book epitomizes why trans voices need to be amplified.

—Marie Claire

"Detransition, Baby arrived with a tremendous weight of expectations on it. It lives up to them…. A terrific read, one that looks at the trans experience in modern America unflinchingly."

—Vox

Ambitious, funny, and alive…Peters centers trans women’s voices, and explores, with wit and compassion, the complexities and truths of their lives.

—The Rumpus

A huge, funny, heartbreaking romp of a book.

—Observer

This provocative and modern love story navigates taboos around sex, gender, identity and relationships and is surely one story you won’t want to put down.

—CNN

This conversation-shifting, taboo-busting novel…should be on your reading list.  It’s an exuberant novel of ideas, desire and life’s messy ironies.

—Evening Standard

‘Whip-smart’ is just one of the many flattering adjectives and fawning superlatives people are going to overuse for this wise book by a glamorous, fascinating woman, and who can blame them? Its incisive exploration of chasers, divorce, trauma, queer parenting, and detransition itself is going to play a role in defining the literature of 2021 and beyond.

—The Millions

A tender and bold exploration of gender, parenthood and love.

—TIME

"Irresistible…Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted…although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose…Detransition, Baby insists on the psychic and social commonalities of cis and trans experience."

—The Guardian

For Peters, there’s no safe space from which to judge the foibles of your fellow flawed and screwed-up strivers…. [Her characters] can’t be slotted into a typical happy ever after nor into its opposite. They make their lives from the bits of gender and love and culture they’ve been given, and there’s no place to stand outside that messy process.

—Los Angeles Times

"This is an artful book, and in it, Peters creates a literary style out of the particulars of gendered misunderstanding…. Detransition, Baby sails straight into the pain, to show that sex, death, and reproduction are not made less prone to fictionalization by their physical tangibility, but more so, and that the fight for control over them is the origin rather than the ending-place of lies, stories, prejudices, and misfires. The white-hot and scandalizing effect of Detransition, Baby burns all whose fascination compels them to reach out and touch."

—Bookforum

Smart, funny, and bighearted…. A wonderfully original exploration of desire and the evolving shape of family [and]…a dishy contemporary drama. There’s no question that there will be much that’s new here for a lot of readers, but the insider view Peters offers never feels voyeuristic, and the author does a terrific job of communicating cultural specificity while creating universal sympathy. Trans women will be matching their experiences against Reese’s, but so will cis women—and so will anyone with an interest in the human condition.

—Kirkus (starred review)

"I love Detransition, Baby for its wit, its irreverence. And I love it even more for its reverence—its reverence for the quest for womanhood, motherhood, selfhood. Torrey Peters evokes these characters with such fullness and compassion that they felt like dear friends to me. This is an important book, and I couldn’t put it down."

—Helen Phillips, author of The Need

Writing with alarming insight, Torrey Peters captures the grandiose, heartfelt, and sometimes mangled aspirations of queer and trans people facing an unprecedented array of personal choice. By showing how gender transition (like divorce, or any transformative life event) can be simultaneously destabilizing and liberating, Peters makes trans culture relatable to all. A voraciously knowing, compulsively readable novel.

—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

"Detransition, Baby is emotionally generous, richly textured, and deeply intelligent—a vibrant and kaleidoscopic portrait of complicated women and their colliding lives."

—Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had

"Detransition, Baby updates and transcends the Sex and the City model, while fully delivering its many satisfactions! What an exciting time we are living in, to see our beloved literary forms expanded by so many new perspectives! A noteworthy advance in the history of the novel!"

—Elif Batuman, bestselling author of The Idiot

"This book. This book. Torrey Peters just took everything that couldn’t be done, and did it. Out of the vibrant particulars of trans experience, Detransition, Baby renews a fundamental novelistic ambition: to peel back the skin of social life and illuminate the captivating details of desire and family underneath. Plenty of books are good; this book is alive."

—Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox

"In this riveting, insightful, and very funny debut, Torrey Peters paints an unforgettable portrait of three women, trans and cis, who wrestle with questions of motherhood and family-making. Destined to be a twenty-first-century classic, Detransition, Baby will definitely keep you up late and might destroy your book club, but in a good way."

—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

A landmark piece of trans literature—brutally honest and yet incredibly sensitive about trans living, tremendously funny and sexy as hell.

—Juliet Jacques, author of Trans: A Memoir

Book Title, Detransition, Baby: A Novel, Author, Torrey Peters, Imprint, One World

Detransition, Baby is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2021 by Torrey Peters

Book club guide copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House LLC

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

One World and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Random House Book Club and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2021.

The interview between Torrey Peters and Meredith Talusan originally appeared on Electric Literature (electricliterature.com) on January 15, 2021, in slightly different form and is reprinted by permission of Electric Literature.

Torrey Peters’s Top Ten originally appeared in Artforum, January/February 2021, © Torrey Peters and is reprinted by permission of Artforum.

New York Times cover seal: From The New York Times. © 2024 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. Used under license.

ISBN 9780593133385

Ebook ISBN 9780593133392

oneworldlit.com

randomhousebooks.com

randomhousebookclub.com

Designed by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Rachel Ake

Cover art: Moopsi/Shutterstock

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Dedication

Acknowledgments

A Book Club Guide

By Torrey Peters

About the Author

_148618113_

Chapter One

One month after conception

The question, for Reese: Were married men just desperately attractive to her? Or was the pool of men who were available to her as a trans woman only those who had already locked down a cis wife and could now explore with her? The easy answer, the one that all her girls advocated, was to call men dogs. But now, here’s Reese—sneaking around with another handsome, charming, motherfucking cheater. Look at her, wearing a black lace dress and sitting in his parked Beamer, waiting while he goes into a Duane Reade to buy condoms. Then she’s going to let him come over to her apartment, avoid the pointed glare of her roommate, Iris, and have him fuck her right on the trite floral bedspread that the last married dude bought her so that her room would seem a little more girly and naughty when he snuck away from his wife.

Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed time to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn’t be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere. To jolt herself back to life, she went on Grindr, or Tinder, or whatever—and administered ten thousand volts to the heart by chasing the most dramatic tachycardia of an affair she could find. Married men were the best for fleeing loneliness, because married men also didn’t know how to be alone. Married men were experts at being together, at not letting go, no matter what, until death do us part. With the pretense of setting the boundaries of just an affair, Reese would swan dive super deep, super hard. By telling herself it would just be a fling, she gave herself permission to fulfill every fetish the guy had ever dreamed of, to unearth his every secret hurt, to debase herself in the most lush, vicious, and unsustainable ways—then collapse into resentment, sadness, and spite that it had been just a fling, because hadn’t she been brave enough and vulnerable enough to dive super deep, super hard?

She saw herself as attractive, round face and full figure, but she didn’t pretend that she stopped traffic; nor did she frequently note people standing around to admire the harvests of her brain. But with the right kind of man, she bore a genius for drama. She could distill it and flame it like jet fuel when solitude chilled her bones.

Her man this time was similar to her others. A handsome, married alpha-type who put her on a leash in the bedroom. Only this one was better, because he was an HIV-positive cowboy-turned-lawyer. He had a thing for trans girls and had seroconverted while cheating on his wife with a trans woman, and the wife had stayed with him, and now he was at it again with Reese. Wheeeee!

Did you bottom or something? Reese had asked on their first date.

Fuck no, he said. My doctors said I had a one in ten thousand chance to contract it from getting head. You figure that at least ten thousand blow jobs are happening every minute, but that one in ten thousand was me. Also, she gave me a lot of blow jobs.

Cool, said Reese, who knew that that explanation wasn’t factual, but had only really agreed to make sure he wasn’t going to try to bottom with her. Within the hour, she had him back in her room and confessing from whom he’d gotten HIV and where. Within two hours, Reese convinced him to talk about his wife’s disappointment, how she was unwilling to let him fuck a child into her even though his HIV had declined to undetectable levels. He described how much his wife hated the IVF treatments, how their clinical nature reminded her over and over what he had done to put her on a cold doctor’s table instead of in their warm marital bed.

You’re getting a lot more candor out of me than I’m used to, her cowboy said, sounding surprised at himself, even as he squeezed Reese’s tits. The power of pussy, I guess.

You might get my pussy, she responded, enjoying herself and aping his cowboy drawl, but a good woman’ll flay your soul.

Ain’t that the truth, he drawled back. He lifted a big paw to the back of her neck and brought her face close to his. She sighed, went limp.

Her eyes glassily held his.

Tell you what, he told her, first I’m going to own your pussy… He paused, and with his hand still on her neck, he slowly, firmly, pushed her face down into a pillow. Then we’ll see about my soul.

---

—

Now he slides back into the car, with a little brown bag full of lube and condoms, and a tickling of anticipation slides across Reese’s stomach. Do we really need these tonight? he asks her, holding up the bag. You know I’m gonna want to knock you up.

This was why she still put up with him: He got it. With him, she’d discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous. Cis women, she supposed, rubbed against a frisson of danger every time they had sex. The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—a single fuck to fuck up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn’t ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. 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.

His viral load was undetectable, he said, but she never asked to see any papers. That would kill the sweetness and danger of it. He liked to play close to the edge too, pushing to knock her up, to impregnate her with a viral seed. Make her the mommy, her body host to new life, part of her but not, just as mothers eternal.

We agreed on condoms always. You said you didn’t want it on your conscience, she said.

Yeah, but that was before you started on your birth control.

She first called her PrEP birth control at a Chinese place in Sunset Park where he felt safe that none of his wife’s friends would possibly run into him. It popped into her head as a joke, but he looked at her and said, Fuck, I just got so hard. He signaled for the check, told her that she wouldn’t get to see a movie that night, and drove her right home to put her facedown on her floral bedspread. In the morning, she sexted him one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-sexual, sexts of her life—a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-of-the-month clamshell cases. From then on, her birth control pills were part of their sex life.

There was another reason, beyond the stigma, taboo, and eroticization, that their particular brand of bugchasing had bite for Reese: She really did want to be a mom. She wanted it worse than anything. She had spent her whole adulthood with the queers, ingesting their radical relationships and polyamory and gender roles, but somehow, she still never displaced from the pinnacle of womanhood those nice white Wisconsin moms who had populated her childhood. She never lost that secret fervor to grow up into one of them. In motherhood she could imagine herself apart from her loneliness and neediness, because as a mother, she believed, you were never truly alone. No matter that her own and her trans friends’ actual experiences of unconditional parental love always turned out to be awfully conditional.

Perhaps equally important, as a mother, she saw herself finally granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due. She’d set herself up for it, once. She’d been in a lesbian relationship with a trans woman named Amy—a woman with a good job in tech, and who became so suburban-presentable that when she spoke, you imagined her words in Martha Stewart’s signature typeface. With Amy, Reese had gotten as close to domesticity as she figured possible for a trans girl—the trust and boredom and stability that now had the faded aspect of a dream recalled right after you wake. They even had an apartment by Prospect Park—the kind of bright, airy space that evinced enough good taste and stalwart respectability that the idea of showing adoption agencies where they lived had been one of the lesser obstacles to motherhood.

But now, three years later, as Reese’s odometer clicked up into her midthirties, she began to think about what she called the Sex and the City Problem.

The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. 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. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

Yet, for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s, the Sex and the City Problem was an aspirational problem. Only the rarest, most stealth, most successful of trans women ever had the chance to even confront it. The rest were barred from all four options at the outset. No jobs, no lovers, no babies, and while a trans woman might have been a muse, no one wanted art in which she spoke for herself. And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.

When Reese lived with Amy, she aspired to the Sex and the City Problem herself. It felt radical for her, as a trans woman, to luxuriate in the contemplation of how bourgeois to become. It felt like a success not to have that choice made for her. Then Amy detransitioned and it all fell apart.

Now futurelessness had crept back into view. Now Reese made other women’s prizes her own bliss, and made babies out of viruses.

All right, she says, after they’d been driving for about ten minutes.

All right, what?

All right. Let’s see if you can get me pregnant.

Really?

Yeah. Her cowboy starts to say something, but she cuts him off. Only, if we’re going to do this, you’ve got to start treating me better. You’ve got to treat me like the mother of your child.

He reaches over to pinch her side. Mother of my child? C’mon. You don’t want that. If I put a tadpole in the well, then you’re gonna want to be the knocked-up sixteen-year-old from the bad side of town. You want everyone knowing it’s ’cause you’re an easy slut.

She squirms away from his pinch. I’m serious. Treat me better.

He frowns, but keeps his eyes on the road. Yeah. Okay. I will. Let’s get some food, he says, braking at a red light.

Really? They were driving to her neighborhood, Greenpoint, and he often wouldn’t eat with her in that area. He knew too many people who lived there. Once she forced him to go out to a vegan buffet by her house, and he barely made eye contact the whole time. His gaze instead jerked to the door whenever someone new came into the place. After that, she let him drive her south, or sometimes into Queens. Never Manhattan, never Williamsburg, where his wife made her social life.

But now, she says he can fuck her without a condom and all his rules go out the window. Reese has a moment of satisfaction. Her body is the ultimate trump card.

Yeah, he says, maybe you could run in somewhere and pick up some takeout.

Of course. Takeout. With him waiting in the car. She nods. Sure, what would you like?

---

—

In the Thai restaurant, she doesn’t order anything for herself. He loves curries, spiced to a barely edible Scoville level. She does not. She’ll make herself something at home after he leaves. She’s scrolling through Instagram when her phone rings, and it’s a number she doesn’t recognize, some out-of-state area code. Her cowboy uses Google Voice so her texts don’t show up on his iPad at home, which his wife sometimes borrows, and Google often routes the calls through weird numbers.

She hits the green Answer button and brings the phone to her ear. I got you green curry with beef, five-star spiciness, she says by way of a greeting.

Hey, that’s nice of you, but if you remember, I was always such a wuss about spice. A man’s voice. Warm and smooth, but none of her cowboy’s drawl, which he somehow managed to keep, even through his years in New York.

She lowers the phone, checks the number. Who is this?

The man’s tone changes, not quite apologetic, but inviting. Reese. Hi. Sorry, it’s Ames.

Out in the car she can see her cowboy, the glow of his own phone illuminating the glasses he only wore to read. She turns away, as if he might overhear her through the glass windows of his car, the plate glass of the restaurant, over the clang of the kitchen and the talk of the scattered customers.

Why are you calling, Ames? I didn’t think we were speaking anymore.

I know.

She waits, holds her lips together. She can hear him breathing. She wants to make him talk first.

I’m not calling to bother you, he presses on. I was hoping for your help.

My help? I didn’t know I had anything left for you to take.

He pauses. Take from you? His bafflement sounds genuine. This was his whole problem. That he couldn’t see what he had led her to lose. Maybe I deserve that. But I promise I’m not calling for that. It’s almost the opposite.

I’m on a date. I’ve got some Thai food coming. She knows it’s vindictive to say. But she can’t help it. He’s thrown her off, and she wants both to return the favor and to prove to him that her life has moved on.

I can call at a different time?

No, you’ve got until my food gets here to explain yourself.

Is there some guy watching us talk?

I’m getting takeout. He’s waiting in the car. A thrum of satisfaction plays in Reese’s chest. Clearly, however Ames had anticipated this conversation going, she has wrested it away from him.

Okay, he says, I’d hoped to explain this at length, but we’ll do it your way. Remember how you always wanted us to have a baby together? That’s what we had planned for?

Something must be off with him that he’d call her about this. He wasn’t the type to hurt people for fun, and he must know such a question, asked so directly, would hurt her. She feels stupid for having told him that she was on a date.

Is that still something you’d want? A baby, I mean? His question ends on an up note, as though he’s slightly afraid of his audacity in having voiced it.

Of course I still fucking want a baby, she snaps.

That’s so good to hear, Reese, he says. His tone is relieved. She knows him so well, she can almost picture the way his body is relaxing. Because something happened. Even after everything, you’re the person I trust most to talk to me about it. For everything we had, please, please, can I see you? I badly need to talk to you.

You’ll have to tell me more than just this, Ames.

He exhales. All right. I got a woman pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.

Reese can’t believe it. She can’t believe that Ames would call her to tell her that he had gotten the thing she so desperately wanted. She closes her eyes, counts to five.

The waitress behind the counter plops down a brown bag, and signals that it’s her order. But Reese doesn’t notice. Her cowboy, his five-star green curry, the birth control pill he’ll feed her later—they’re all lost to her. Somewhere, somehow, Amy did the impossible: She got herself a baby.

---

—

Katrina sits in the roller chair before Ames’s desk. The moment has an air of uncommon inversion. Because she is his boss, Ames nearly always goes to her office and sits in front of her desk. Her office, corresponding to their relative places in the corporate hierarchy, is double the square footage of his, with two full windows looking out on two neighboring buildings, and between them, a sliver of East River view. By contrast, Ames’s office has one window overlooking a small parking lot. Once, in the twilight, he saw a brown creature trotting spritely across the pavement—and has since maintained that it was an urban coyote. One takes one’s excitements where one may.

Katrina rifles through a briefcase, pulls out a manila folder, and plops it on his desk. Her coming to his office makes him tense, like a teenager whose parents have entered his room.

Well, she says. It’s real. This is happening. He reaches for the folder. He has good posture, and gives her an easy smile. The folder opens to reveal printouts from an online patient portal.

My gyno, Katrina says, watching him closely. She followed up with a blood test and a pelvic exam. She confirmed the home test results. Without an ultrasound, she can’t say how far I am, so I had one scheduled for the Thursday after next. I mean, I know you maybe aren’t sure yet how you feel about it, but maybe if you come, that’ll help? If I’m more than four weeks into it, we’ll be able to see the baby—or I guess, embryo?

He is aware that she is scrutinizing him for a reaction. He had been unable to give one after the pregnancy test came back positive. He feels the same numbness that he felt then, only now, he can no longer delay by telling her that he wants to wait for official confirmation to get his emotions involved. Amazing, he says, and tries out a smile that he fears might be coming off as a grimace. I guess it’s real! Especially since we have—he searches briefly for a phrase, and then comes up with one—an entire dossier of evidence.

Katrina shifts to cross her legs. She’s wearing casual wedge heels. He always notices her clothing, half out of admiration, and half out of the habit of noting what’s going on in the field of women’s fashion. Your reaction has been hard to read, she says carefully. I don’t know, I thought maybe if you saw it in black and white, I’d be able to gauge how you were actually feeling. She pauses and swallows. But I still can’t. He sees the effort it costs her to muster this level of assertion.

He stands up, walks around the desk, and half sits against it, just in front of her, so his leg is touching hers.

He rotates the printouts, there’s a list of test results, but he can’t make sense of them. His brain shorts out when he cross-references the data that they clearly show—he is a father-to-be—with the data he stores in his heart: He should not be a father.

---

—

Three years have passed since Ames stopped taking estrogen. He injected his last dose on Reese’s thirty-second birthday. Reese, his ex, still lives in New York. They haven’t spoken in two years, although he sent her a birthday card last year. He received no response. Throughout their relationship, she had always talked assuredly about how she’d have a kid by age thirty-five. As far as he knows, that hasn’t happened.

It is only now, three years after their breakup, that Ames is able to talk about Reese casually, calling her my ex and moving the conversation along without dwelling. Because in truth, he still misses her in a way that talking about her, thinking about her, remains dangerous to indulge in—as an alcoholic can’t think too much about how much she’d really like just one drink. When Ames thinks hard about Reese, he feels abandoned and grows angry, morose, and worst of all, ashamed. Because he has trouble explaining exactly what he still wants from her. For a while he thought it was romance, but his desire has lost any kind of sexual edge. Instead, he misses her in a familial way, in the way he missed and felt betrayed by his birth family when they cut off contact in the early years of his transition. His sense of abandonment plucked at a nerve deeper, more adolescent than that of jilted adult romantic love. Reese hadn’t just been his lover, she’d been something like his mother. She had taught him to be a woman…or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d molded him to her tastes. And now she was gone, but the imprint of her hands remained, so that he could never forget her.

He hadn’t understood how little sense he made as a person without Reese until after she began to detach from him, until the lack of her became so painful that he started to once again want the armor of masculinity and, somewhat haphazardly, detransitioned to fully suit up in it.

So now, three years have passed living once again in a testosterone-dependent body. Yet even without the shots or pills, Ames had believed that he’d been on androgen-blockers long enough to have atrophied his testicles into permanent sterility. That’s what he told Katrina when they hooked up the first time, the night of the agency’s annual Easter Keg Hunt. He told her that he was sterile—not that he’d been a transsexual woman with atrophied balls.

---

—

Ames sifts through the papers in the manila folder Katrina has brought. Beneath the printouts from her doctor are more printouts, from what look like Reddit forums. What are these?

She drops her hand to her stomach. It’s flat, no baby bump, but she’s already holding herself

Reviews for Detransition, Baby

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Life is so messy -- for everyone. It doesn't matter who you are, life hits us with unexpected BS that rocks us, changes us, and forces us to do/be better or not because we still have the ability to choose, you know? This book is a story of how messy lives can get when unexpected BS gets very real and how past decisions impact who we are. The characters are complicated, honest, and authentic, I loved their messiness. I love all the paths this book explored and can't wait to read more by Torrey Peters.

I do not like that I don't know what happens next, while I think I know what WILL happen, there's no ACTUAL conclusion and that bums me out.

(Raising a kid with one other adult is hard because he's got opinions and thinks he knows how to do things, I can't imagine having two other adults to correct...just kidding, J is amazing, but seriously, that's gotta be hard and I'd like to read a book about the two couples in the same house with the kids that don't know any other way to exist).

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is a lot going on here, and a lot to learn about the trans experience and community. Knowing nothing about that going in, this was a little overwhelming. I have never been in any of these people's positions, and have not felt the way they felt regarding our few overlapping experiences, so this was a lot of newness in that regard as well. I'm glad I read this, but I don't know that I enjoyed it.

[rosienotrose · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My heart is split in two with this novel. It is amazingly well written, portrays harsh and important realities about what it is to be a woman, what it is to be a mother and gender and gender roles within the straight, queer, cis and trans communities - One quote that stood out for me came from Ames who transitioned to female and then transitioned back. “He’d lived as a trans woman for seven years. But it was too hard. Too hard. He didn’t pass. He wanted to die. He was still a trans woman.” It was a heart-breaking insight into someone who feels they no longer belong to any community - but at the same time I can’t help wonder what was story the novel was trying to get across?

Torrey pulls no punches with her writing. She speaks openly and bluntly on aspects of trans and queer life that are often left unspoken. From Reese’s darkly funny portrayal of her life (and life expectancy) as a trans woman, Ames’ difficulty at figuring out his role post detransition, and Katrina’s shocked response to Ames’ history when she becomes pregnant by him and her blundering attempts to negotiate into the queer world.

The characters here are real and flawed. They do not know the answers and often portray attitudes and opinions that are misogynistic, transphobic, and racist. For me these came across as both a weariness to what they had been subjected to and an attempt to armour themselves against these attitudes in the future.

I felt the story lost its way halfway through, and also seemed to loose the character of Ames for a while as we ping ponged between Reese and Katerina attempting to navigate a new type of shared motherhood. I persevered to an end that offered no real answers or resolutions for the characters, or the questions raised. Perhaps in a world where these characters are constantly side-lined and oppressed there could be no answer, but we are left with the feeling that through the hardships they have encountered a fellowship has been forged with these three and we can only hope that carries them into a better future.

[caedocyon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Feelings book, about divorce and people being bad at relationships, that made me laugh and made me like it. So many highlights. I appreciate that it's not nihilistic about the characters' self-delusions: they fuck up but they try and are sometimes generous to each other and they get to change and grow. Will be buying a copy, because I need to reread and underline and comment.

[aywebster · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book was a bit of a miserable read and it did not seem like it would ever end. Before I was halfway through, I thought about making it a DNF, but I wanted to try and persevere instead. Then, another 5 or 10% later, I decided to check some reviews to see if any of my feelings about this were shared by others, and they were. Maybe this book just isn't for me, but I didn't find myself the least bit affected or captivated by the stories being told. Give it a try if you want, but I found this book to be a big disappointment after hearing a lot of hype.

[purplepaste-311796 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

In order to enjoy this book, I think you need to first accept that it isn’t fiction and that the characters don’t matter. Rather, it is a position argument in which the author assumes you have nothing of value to offer to the discussion and that they already understand everything you would say. It’s a math problem that asks readers to carefully tally for pages before ending by multiplying by zero.

[ccayne_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I chose this book for a library book discussion I lead and after reading it, I was nervous. I chose it because although it may be an uncomfortable read (it was for me), it increased understanding of a culture I am unlikely to be exposed to. Comments from transgender people said her descriptions of the culture were spot on. I an interview, Peters said that she didn't want this to be transgender 101. Instead, she said it was about secrets in relationships. For me it was both.

[thewestwing-864351 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Picked this up to read because I saw it being featured in the media so much. Not my usual read but I enjoyed it. The writing is very good. The plot has many layers and at times there was a lot going on. I think it’s a book that I’ll ponder about in the weeks to come.

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book does offer interesting information and perspective, but I can't say I liked it. Then again, I'm sure I'm not the intended audience. I don't know if human brains are capable of sorting through so many choices every day: Do I want to be male or female? Do I want monogamy or polyamory? Do I want to be a slut or a nice girl? Do I want to be humiliated or respected by my partner? Do I want to reproduce or not? Do I want to have a baby or not? Do I still want to think of AIDS as a terrible disease to be avoided at all costs or is it just an inconvenience? There are way too many options presented, I think people need a little more grounding to make it through life in a healthy way. Probably my biggest objection to the book is the sexist idea the M to F characters have about women, that they are delicate and need to be protected or subjugated. It seems to be very superficial, but then, they're NYC people who are different from the rest of us.

[rtflynn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Peters's work made me think through questions about gender and sexuality that I didn't even know I had. She writes gorgeously and empathetically. The story was made a bit more complicated than necessary by its nonchronological presentation. But, that is a small criticism for a book that made me laugh, cringe, and wonder. I highly recommend it.

[akbouterse · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was such an interesting read. This is a five star read where I wasn't necessarily enjoying myself but it gave me so much to think about it and when I finished I just emotionally felt like I had to give it five stars.

As I've been reading more literary fiction one thing I really appreciate about it as a genre is that it gives me a glimpse into a fictional persons messy life. This book really pulls that off well. These characters but especially Reese were so fully realized and interesting and messy and that's what really pulled me into this story. I think this is the only book I've read that had the experience of being transgender as its center unfortunately but I really liked getting into the headspace of people trying to understand what their gender means to them.

The writing of this book creates a bit of a chaotic tone. There are a lot of asides and flashbacks to the point that it almost feels like stream of consciousness writing at times. I liked this because I think it connected really well to the lives and emotions of the characters but it did take me a good amount of the book to get used to how the writing was making me feel and how it read. So if you're going to pick up this book, I would recommend giving yourself some time to get used to the writing.

The relationships between the characters is really what drove this book forward but it was really the individual characterization and each characters thought process that is what I really enjoyed. If you're looking for answers about why characters make certain choices, you might not always be satisfied with the answer but that was done in a way that seems very realistic. Going in, I wasn't sure if I would like this at all because the summary said this was about pregnancy and motherhood and I am so adverse to pregnancy that sometimes I have trouble reading about it but the commentary on those topics was so interesting that I didn't mind reading about pregnancy. In concert with how it related to being trans it made for a very interesting topic to read about.

This is definitely a recommendation from me. Probably one of the most compelling and fascinating books I've read this year and I hope many more people will read and enjoy this as much as I did.

[kayanelson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book was eye opening to me as a cis gender heterosexual female. I learned a lot about transgender from this book and all that information was buried in a unique and interesting plot. I don’t necessarily understand everything I read. I liked the structure of the book as it went back and forth between the past and the current time. But sometimes the book did get bogged down in thoughts and this slowed me down a bit. The ending leaves one with uncertainty but how perfect is that. Life is full of uncertainties.

[sammusher · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A little "I did an MFA" for me (no idea if Peters actually did) -- this reads like adult literary fiction, not YA. It is an important perspective I hadn't experienced before, though; I love what Peters is thinking about.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a messy soap opera of a novel. It's wild and full of drama, with conflicts aplenty. Reese is a kind-hearted, funny trans woman who is more than a little self-destructive. One day, her ex gets in touch with an outrageous proposition. He wants her to be a co-parent with his girlfriend who, having discovered that she's pregnant, demands that Ames either step up and be an equal parent or she will end the pregnancy and also the relationship. This is Ames's solid attempt to meet Katrina's need for a full partner even when he doesn't think he can do it. It's a messy, complicated solution, but Ames, for all his reticence, has some complications of his own. He was, after all, until a handful of years ago, not Ames but Amy and only detransitioned after becoming weary of the energy it took to deal with the hostility of every day life as a trans woman. And then there's Katrina, who reacts badly to learning about Ames's past, but finds herself wondering if it might not just work.

There is a lot going on in this novel and Peters never allows her characters to become noble representatives of trans women everywhere. They are simply themselves, and they are a mess. Reese is a fantastic character to read about, always entertaining or doing something to blow up her own life. I was worried that this would be an issue-of-the-moment book, but Peters is having too much fun throwing her characters into uncomfortable situations and celebrating their complexity for that to happen. This also didn't feel like a novel that was designed to educate and make the reader comfortable.

[hccpsk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Detransition, Baby follows three characters and their intertwined relationships back and forth over the course of the past eight years: Reese, a trans woman, Ames/Amy her ex who chose to detransition after they broke up, and Katrina, Ames’ current girlfriend. At times author Torrey Peters’ debut really sparkles with humor, emotion, and excellent commentary on life’s complications. But at times it devolves into a little too much indulgent discourse that causes the book to drag a bit. All in all, though, Detransition, Baby is a solid and interesting novel about what makes a woman, a family, and relationships that could be a real window into non-binaryness for some readers.

[japaul22 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

[Detransition, Baby] is, I believe, the first novel written by a transgender woman to be published by one of the top publishers. It also made the award list for the Women's Prize for Fiction.

This novel is important as it begins a conversation about what it's like to experience life as someone who is transgender. The plot in this novel revolves around a trio of women who contemplate raising a child together. Reese is a transgender woman (though the author uses the term transsexual a lot, which I thought was "out"), Ames/Amy is a man who spent several years as a woman and had a relationship with Reese during that time, and Katrina is a cis woman who had a relationship with Ames as a man that results in a pregnancy. It's all complicated, obviously, and very dramatic. Also, there is so much focus on what it means to "be a woman" and also about dynamics of sexual relationships.

This leads me to one of my observations about trying to understand transgender issues. I feel like there is a large non-binary movement right now that downplays gender and gender roles. But this book was all about gender roles and proving your womanhood or manhood, making gender even more important than I think it is in most heterosexual relationships that I know. That's tough for me. I prefer the thought of lessening the reliance on strong gender behavior expectations that goes along with the nonbinary movement. With a sense of humor, I will also admit that I had a hard time not getting caught up in the mechanics of sex and who had what parts. :-)

While I think it's awesome to have more voices out there and to have mainstream publishing diversifying what is published as normal, this book was not a wow for me in terms of the actual writing. The way it flips back and forth in time was annoying and inconsistent and some of the characters seemed more there to serve the author's desire to explain trans lifestyle and issues than to serve the plot of the novel. Maybe that's to be expected in a break-through novel like this.

I have no idea what a transgender person would think of this novel. It seemed very opinionated to me and I don't know if all of the opinions are currently accepted as the desired message. But overall, I think this is a book lots of people should read. It did open up a new way of thinking about what life is like for people who don't fit in the most typical lifestyles we recognize. And any book that does that is valuable to me.

Original publication date: 2021
Author’s nationality: American
Original language: English
Length: 327 pages
Rating: 3 stars
Format/where I acquired the book: kindle library
Why I read this: buzz

[narshkite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I need more time to think. Incredibly well written, these characters are so well drawn, so real. The book is frank, engrossing, funny, heartbreaking. On the other hand, I am vastly uncomfortable with the drumbeat of "this is what women do." There is no all-purpose way to be a woman, no right way to be a mother, and there is a lot of contrary messaging in this book. There are wrong ways to be a mother though, and Reese is a woman who should never raise a child. She makes endless terrible decisions and has no respect for people she does not know. She is not a bad person, nor a particularly good one, but she is an interesting one. Alas she is an interesting person who makes consistently unsafe and unethical choices. All of her relationships are based on her feeling loved and needed. She is a narcissist on a nearly Trumpian scale. That is not who should be building a human. She will make a great aunt perhaps? Given everything the ending makes sense even if its not soul satisfying.