Reviews
This book is really great. I experienced a full range of emotion in tandem with the characters who felt so real and relatable. So many times I wanted to grab them by the shoulders and shake them and tell them what was glaringly obvious to me, the reader. Peter’s’ writing style is amazing and the decision to split chapters as pre- and post- conception was a) fantastic non-linear storytelling and b) positively gut wrenching at times
3.5 stars. I enjoyed this as a queer character study and for the perspectives on trans womanhood but I struggled with the writing unfortunately.
This was a wild one! I was initially not impressed, but I found myself very invested about three quarters of the way through. I think Ames/Amy is a good emotional cornerstone for the story Peters wanted to tell and she does a great job building tension between the point of view characters in a way that helped me overcome the honestly meh dialogue (very millennial turns of phrase all the time from everyone). The "Sex in the City" motif felt appropriate because really that's what this is--Sex in the City for white transgender women.
I enjoyed this book but also the characters really stressed me out. Cuts close to the bone, so if you're into that, this book is for you.
The title was the best part. You know that tide of books about quirky thirtysomethings who live in New York City, work in advertising, attend random galas while broke, and whose main hobby is having gender-affirming masochistic sex? Yeah, Detransition, Baby is one of those. Except in this one the characters also natter on about how divorce is a transition narrative, and I was like, okay so show me through narrative and they never did and instead they moved on to talking about gentrifying HIV. I'm not trying to be glib; those are the phrases the author uses. I was just so annoyed by the end. It was also a frustrating read for me because there are some good chunks of character writing buried in there. I could almost feel 3-4 good short stories struggling to be liberated from each other and everything else.
Explores the collective and individual experience of queerness, and a story I hadn't heard before.
fantastic
I think a big part of why this book is appealing and noteworthy is because it is unique in what the author sets out to do. She reveals aspects of the darker side of the queer and trans subcultural scene, in ways that I think many trans activists would be unwilling to do for fear of undermining their cause. It was refreshing to me as a queer person who has had bad experiences with other trans and queer people to see truths being told about the negative aspects of this subculture. At the same time, the story was humanizing, especially to one of the three main characters (there were attempts made with the other two, but one of them shone through as most developed in my opinion - perhaps the one the author identified with the most?). In this story, there were no bad people or one dimensional bigots (at least as far as I recall - if there were, they passed through quickly as setting rather than characters). Even characters who might be dismissed as unimportant or antagonistic were given some amount of depth, and various perspectives were given voice. As I write this I think about how authors of certain less common - or less commonly published - identities are at times expected to be the voice for those communities, and I imagine there is that pressure on Torrey Peters, especially with the subject matter she chose. I'm not sure there is any way out of this. What I can say is that despite this novel surely carrying the extra weight of being "representational," and therefore running the risk of tokenization, Peters writes with a unique voice that I was glad to hear. This is especially true for me as someone who once identified as a trans ally, but due to a variety of experiences with trans activism, has become more skeptical and cautious. It was relieving to get some insight into the trans feminine experience that was more vulnerable and three-dimensional, rather than the sound bytes and oversimplification in online tweets and think pieces.
Detransition, Baby was the first book I've read by a trans woman about being a trans woman. The novel is full of messiness, love, pointed observations and realness - I really appreciated all of it. Reese is a trans woman who lives in New York and has sex with married men who fetishize trans women. All Reese has ever wanted is to be a mother; so when she gets a call from Ames, her ex who "detransitioned" from Amy proposing a viable path to motherhood for her, she is intrigued. Enter Katrina, Ames' boss who is pregnant with said baby. Katrina is mixed, half-Chinese half-white and she is decidedly heterosexual. There is a journey throughout this book. It doesn't really feel like a book with a beginning, middle and end. It feels like you're reading about a real thing that happened to real people, and I appreciate that. This is my first foray with Peters' writing, and I enjoyed her writing style. I think she addressed a lot of major points - the difference between being a trans woman and a trans woman of color, the parallels between certain cis women and trans women and the way that straight people often feel they empathize and understand but can rip the rug from right out underneath queer folks. Katrina, as a character, is not my favorite because of the way she conflates her own experiences with being a trans woman - they are not the same, especially because she is white-passing. I think Peters does a great job of writing Reese as a character you sympathize with, while maybe understanding why she can be so self-destructive. I give this novel 4 stars. It loses a star because it was a bit long-winded in some places, and I found myself losing interest here and there. Still, Peters strung together an amazing #OwnVoices story that needed to be told. Thank you very much to NetGalley, Torrey Peters and Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an ARC to review this book. Buy Detransition, Baby now!
just insane but kinda was so important for me in my first year of transition
3.5/5
very important but the third quarter felt a bit weak compared to the rest
I am certainly better for reading this book. It was a deeply honest and unparalleled humorous book that took a look into the culture war that surrounds gender and sexuality. This story is about 2.5 women and a pregnancy, and let me tell you…pearls were clutched! I found myself giggling with the character dialogue, but at the same time heartbroken over the polarizing and layered emotions a transgendered person feels when confronting societal issues that have long been divided by how men versus women confront said issues.
The first half of this I didn't like at all and I thought I would give up. Multiple people recommended this to me and so I thought I'd try a little bit more to get into it. I ended up getting sort of into it halfway through and then it continued to drag on and I powered through to the disappointing lackluster end
The audiobook is so good !
(3.5) i unfortunately struggled to fully connect with the writing and structure of this book, especially with the way flashbacks and timeline jumps were integrated into the narrative. also i wish we had gotten more of katrina’s perspective and history. appreciated its unapologetic queerness and specifically the focus on the experience and lives of trans women and its examination of family, family structures and motherhood/parenting.
** spoiler alert ** Beautifully honest story. My immediate reaction was to disagree with a lot of the negative reviews on this one. I think there is something to be said about brutally honest accounts of life that push beyond societal rules and labels. Reese’s realization of her own shortcomings/judgmental tendencies helped me look inward at my own as a queer woman.
this was definitely not what I thought I was getting myself into but it was ... good? Like, good but also this was a lot and I don't think I was prepared for that much graphic sexual violence. So, yeah. 3 stars.
Incredibly written, engrossing story and characters, will not stop thinking about this for a long time coming
4,5 stars
My first time reading any material that is this entrenched in the trans experience! Admittedly, it starts off quite slow, complementing layers of context with the most colorful prose I’ve encountered in recent memory. I was actually getting scared that it was going to pull a If I Had Your Face and start lecturing me on the complexities of sexuality until it felt forced, therefore diluting the impact of its message. But Torrey Peters draws you in by laying everything on the table and painting her main triad of characters in the worst possible light, allowing their controversial choices to pose the most provocative questions surrounding gender, parenthood, and purpose. From the get-go, I could tell the myriad of ways that Reese, Ames, and Katrina's plan to assemble a family outside of our society's heteronormative standards could go wrong. In spite of this, I rooted for them fiercely all throughout, learned so much more than I intended and expected, and now feel this strange heartbreak for something I will never fully be able to comprehend myself. I'm confident you will, too. Also, if you point out a redundancy/grammatical error in this review, I will slap you it's literally 6am and I haven't slept and it's all because of this book!!!!!
i am simply never going to stop thinking about this book.
I found some of the parts of the plot to be dragging, however this novel is so messy, raw, and real. I thought it had some great representation and I loved the aspect of challenging the nuclear family model.
Highlights
Your roommate wants you to do the dishes? Okay, but doesn't your roommate understand that your mom once worked as a domestic maid (for three months while on a break from college), and, actually, this demand to do dishes is a traumatic attack on your class status and upward generational mobility?
Funerals remind Reese not to kill herself. Not because she so badly wants to live, but because suicide as a trans girl leads to a mortifying posthumous stripping of all that you cherished by friends and strangers alike. If you are not there to stop them, the loudest, brashest, and clumsiest of your semi-acquaintances will scoop up all that was once you and simmer it down to a single mawkish narrative, plucking out all that is inconveniently irreducible, and inserting in its place all that is trite and politically serviceable.
*Yes." Reese nods. "I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. 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 know 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.”
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. Those older generations of trans women died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives - and that's if they were lucky enough to be white.
But in finding meaning, Rese 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.
But what if it was never about politics? Maybe she just always wanted what she wanted: hormones then and a baby now. A nimble mind can always uncover the politics to justify its own selfishness.
Reese's sense of her own gender does not allow her to make sports analogies, but like, Katrina is doing the thing where the guy who throws the ball does so with no spin whatsoever.
Her? She's like Starbucks- any idiot can enjoy her and, two hours later, forget he did.
Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won't correspond n the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so it is meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual's lifeline as though they were horses on the same racetrack, released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for your run-of-the- mill queer. Now imagine that you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said. you should have saved two years' income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the formn of old MAC lipstick shades they' d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occa- sionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.
"Girl, you wish."
It's like coming home, that quick "girl." Something warmer and sweeter than the spring sun heating his neck and the ice cream lin- gering on his tongue. It's scary-seductive, emphasis on scary. Start looking for that kind of comfort and he's bound to make a fool of himself.
As far as I can tell, at least from the outside, motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.
GLAAD, like most of the big gay orgs, focused on messaging and lobbying; the money was not for trans people, it was to facilitate proper discussion about such topics as trans people.
It hurts to remember that first day. It hurts to remember hope like that. It hurts to think that such hope was the naïveté and stupidity of youth, of a person she would never be again.
In matters of the heart, Reese had one firm maxim: You don’t get to choose who you fuck, you get to choose from among those who want to fuck you.