Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.

Ames has been seeing his boss, Katrina, but he's kept a secret from her: for years he was Amy. Born James, he transitioned after an adolescence of confusion and crossdressing, only to detransition after a brutal beating at the hands of a chaser and bigot. When Katrina becomes pregnant--something he thought his former hormone therapy would prevent--he is thrown for a loop. The possibility of becoming not just a parent but a father is so repulsive, he reaches out to his former girlfriend, a trans woman named Reese, to ask if she wants to raise the baby with them as another mother. This sounds like lunacy, of course, but Reese, who has always wanted to be a mother--a difficult prospect for a trans woman, for reasons as much social and legal as physical--is drawn to the idea, and even Katrina seems to think such an unusual family might be possible.

Detransition, Baby must be the most high-profile fiction work by a trans author and about trans people ever written. It's interesting that it would focus so much on detransition, a phenomenon that is often seized upon by transphobes writing for glossy magazines to delegitimize trans lives. Peters makes it clear that Ames' detransition occurs not because of disenchantment or regret, but because living as a cis man, without the scrutiny and threat of violence, is just easier. It's a sad decision but one the book treats with respect, and in bringing together the three women--cis, detransitioned, trans--Peters examines just some of the many paths available to women and how they intersect. In fact, perhaps one of the most sadly remarkable things about Detransition, Baby is simply that it is a work of popular culture with more than one trans character. These snapshots of diverse experiences are, one hopes, a kind of antidote to the flattening narratives about trans people in America.

At the heart of Detransition, Baby is an old question: is it better to infiltrate heteronormative institutions, or undermine them? At one point, Peters talks briefly about how trans people have always been a part of the "gay" rights movement, though often marginalized and overshadowed, and this question is an endemic one in that movement, answered in different ways by different generations. Is the triad-parent scheme at the heart of Detransition, Baby an infiltration or an undermining? Certainly it's not a version of the family that will past muster with Focus on the Family or Fox News. But Reese's maternal desires are profoundly shaped by her own normie Wisconsin upbringing, and the two mothers-to-be bond over the most normie baby ritual of all: the baby registry. When the characters imagine trans parenthood, it looks a lot like cis parenthood. Of course, parenthood is not quite like marriage--it's a necessity of life and all--but it's certainly institutionalized, and the novel effectively narrativizes the tension created by queer participation in the institution. This tension is at the heart of what works about Detransition, Baby, I think.

However. Though this tension hums at the level of theme and plot, it gets resolved at the level of style. Destransition, Baby is formally straightforward, and its language seems most to resemble those online magazines that balance the language of informed forward-thinkingness with breezy chattiness. It is intensely middlebrow, intensely book-clubbish. In fact, it is a "Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Pick." That is to say that aesthetically, the novel is on the side of the normies, and aesthetically, it really struggles. The best parts of the book are the "flashback" scenes in which we see Reese and Ames/James/Amy in their most formative years, when their gender dysphoria is at its most raw.

But in the "now," when the three women actually get together, the novel becomes poisonously dreary. Their first conversation together, at a GLAAD award ceremony, is so clogged with abstractions about gender, identity, and family, that Ames quips at the end, "Credit to GLAAD... Tonight they have achieved their mission of facilitating another hard-hitting discussion of LGBTQ rights." Detransition, Baby tries very hard to cover every Very Important Trans Topic: suicide, HIV, violence, chasers, hormones, surgery, etc., etc. No doubt each of these things shapes the life of trans people daily, and yet there must be a way to explore them in a story about people, rather than a "hard-hitting discussion of LGBTQ rights."

There is a moment when Katrina steps off the train to visit Reese in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (The book's loveless and sour depiction of my neighborhood is a criticism I'll keep mostly to myself.) Katrina points out the word Tranny on a nearby poster, which repulses and angers Reese, even though it turns out to be an advertisement for the memoir of that name by Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace. Now, I haven't read the memoir, but Brent tells me it depicts the musician at a moment of near-homelessness and extreme precarity. Katrina tells Reese that, as a marketing exec, she wouldn't have chosen that title. ("Can you imagine a trans woman buying that book? I mean, what, is she going to read it on the subway?") This observation supposedly endears Katrina to Reese; for the first time she's able to see Katrina as an ally and a possible partner in motherhood. But I was strongly repelled by this small detail, partly because of the authority rooted in Katrina's job as a marketing executive. Grace's title is provocative--I think the intentions, like it or not, are clear--but is it good branding?

This moment also makes the book's ambitions clear: It's the trans book that a trans woman can read on the subway. It is respectable and palatable. And you know, we probably need books like that. I suspect their power is culturally and politically limited, but what do I know? I recognize that I don't really have any standing to pass judgment in that regard. I can say that I found the book artistically limited for these reasons. I'm a little wary of saying I didn't like it, because it's so important, but I think that really gets to the heart of why I didn't like it: it's too busy being important to be good.