TORREY. PETERS

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021

Detransition, Baby

Connie Meade

Helen 

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.

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.

Her? She's like Starbucks- any idiot can enjoy her and, two hours later, forget he did. 

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. 

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.

sina (she/her) 

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.

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