User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I have mixed feelings about this novel. It is chaotic, well-written, deeply, gorgeously queer, messy, sexy, and it probes really interesting questions about womanhood, motherhood, fatherhood, queer parenting, the relationships we make and break. Some of the storytelling was too... indulgent is maybe the word I'm looking for, like, when you're in the groove as a writer, loving what you're writing, digging down into it, and you don't know where to stop. But that's okay!
The title is masterful.
This is one of those books I suspect will be polarizing, but I enjoyed it.
Rating: really liked it
Detransition, Baby is, like its title, going to be a polarizing book. There is hardly a page that won't cause somebody, somewhere to clutch their own personal pearls. Torrey has written right into all the hardest, least comfortable, often cruellest parts of the culture war over gender, and nobody comes out looking good. But she does it with such an unparalleled humour, honesty, and grace that one cannot fault her. Discussing the book with a trans friend in her 70s, she described it as "a bit too 'not in front of the cis,' but in a good way."
Detransition, Baby is about two and a half women, a baby, what it means to be a mother, and, ultimately, about the strange paths heartache leads us down. She had me in stitches the whole way through, even as I myself occasionally recoiled from just how much of our collective ass she was putting on display. A truly seismic debut.
Rating: really liked it
Reese wanted to end their games, to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness. After all, Every woman adores a Fascist.No, thanks...
Rating: really liked it
What it has:
Queerness and lots of it. The queerest conversations and situations that I've ever read. It's breathtaking and groundbreaking. I ate it up.
What it doesn't have:
A plot. Or even a real point. An editor. A sense of urgency.
Rating: really liked it
Rarely have I been given the privilege to read such violently mysoginistic crap.
Think the most obviously sexualized and violent description - the one you know could only have been written by a man with the most elementary disdain for women- and then multiply that by ten.
The writing is otherwise pleasant at times, it is what made me get through the novel.
Detransition, Baby wants to be about creating different families and coping with femininity, but it only manages to leave long-lasting impressions of hatred of the female.
No, to be female is not to be penetrated and to be violated and to be brutalized. Anyone fantasizing about such things and calling them the essence of femaleness has serious problems to work upon.
This book has horrible takes about domestic violence, amongst other things, and I recommend others read it - if only the first few chapters, if only to get a good idea of exactly what kind of vile writing penguin publishes and promotes as progressive.
Rating: really liked it
there is no book recommendation quite as exciting as one from someone who never reads.
if my friend who has not finished a book since catcher in the rye tells me they liked one, i am RUNNING to the bookstore. i am getting a boba and taking a long walk to an indie bookstore and i am ACQUIRING.
it rarely leads me astray.
this one is really hard reading. like roxane gay said in her as usual perfect review, it's also sometimes self-indulgent - it seems to have a firm grasp of itself for the first 3/4 and then turn listless, self-questioning, it felt the book itself was as unsure of what it was as the characters were of what they were doing.
all the same, it is fascinating and real and tough and important reading, and everyone should give it a try.
bottom line: yet another point for non readers!
Rating: really liked it
Usually I write a review because I think I have something that I want to say about a book. A book, being either really good or bad, I will review. But this book is nearly impossible to review. It was well written and spoke to the queer aspects of life and parenting. But this book is a chaotic mess of people wallowing in their own misery, purposefully making decisions that they know will make them miserable, because in each character's own way, they feel like they do not deserve love. Thus you read a book where being queer or trans is not remotely life affirming, but a detractor that must be survived because living any other way would be worse. The book was so depressing in its character development that I could not like one person in this story. Everyone hated themselves and/or others to such an extent that there was little to like about them. And then having to read long expository sections of why each one felt that do horribly about themselves. As a trans, queer adult, I can say life is not a looming pit of desperation and self-loathing. Yes, life might be harder than being cis and hetnorm, but there is so much joy to be had. And to read a book that says otherwise is gut wrenching. Finally, to top all this nonsense off, the book doesn't end. It cuts off to leave you stranded in the complexity and horror of these people's lives without an ending. At the peak of the book, the author leaves you quite stranded, feeling bruised and banged up. The end.
Rating: really liked it
Reading this felt like being lectured by a disturbingly misogynistic fetishist for 300+ pages. Not my cup of tea, to say the least.
Rating: really liked it
A novel with lots of heart that centers three women navigating queer relationships and parenthood. I appreciated how
Detransition, Baby depicted trans women’s lives in such a three-dimensional way, including moments of transphobic othering and violence as well as experiences of connection, longing, and fulfillment. I felt that Torrey Peters cared about these characters and didn’t write this novel to educate cis readers. The most satisfying part of this the book for me centered on how Peters portrays the potential of queer family and parenthood outside of the heteronormative nuclear family. It’s redeeming and much-too-long-awaited to see a model of parenthood outside of two folks in a romantic relationship raising children. The plot in
Detransition, Baby moves at a fast pace and will keep readers entertained with many dramatic sequences.
Similarly to what Roxane Gay wrote in her review, I found certain sections of the book a tad overwritten. I’m not saying that the characters’ emotions or experiences were blown out of proportion, more so sometimes the way Peters described them pulled me out of the narrative due to the prose feeling a bit forced. For example, after one character betrays another character interpersonally, the betrayed character compares her experience of betrayal to being waterboarded and tortured. While the character has every right to feel that way or make that comparison, just the way those paragraphs were written felt very obvious and ostentatious to me. Also, I do think that toward the middle half of the novel Peters prioritized plot over character development. For example, Reese has a habit of engaging in self-destructive relationships with married and problematic men. While Peters writes about this habit in an authentic way without glorifying it, I felt that the underlying issues motivating that behavior were never fully realized or addressed, perhaps because it was difficult to fit that exploration in with the portrayal of triadic queer parenting.
Overall, a strong debut novel that is unfortunately one of first more popular novels that centers trans women. Hoping this momentum continues and that trans women of color authors get their chance to shine too!
Rating: really liked it
4.5 stars. Often when I'm reading I am already thinking about how a book is making me feel, about how I would describe it to someone. Basically I'm already formulating my review in my head. Then I'll sit down at my computer, as I am right now, to form these thoughts into something fuller and more coherent. But I am not sure I'll be able to do that for this book because eventually I stopped thinking about how to describe it to another reader and just enjoyed it for my own self. So sorry, other readers, all I've got for you today is just how much I fucking loved this book.
I am, I admit, biased. Biased twice over, really. First, I am a divorced cis woman which means this book is dedicated to me. Not me personally, just us as a group. And I get it. I love divorced cis women, not all of them, but there's a definite set of qualities you tend to find in us that I gravitate towards. Divorce isn't the only way to get there, as Peters notes, but it is one of the most common ways in which the entire system you've been operating under disappears and you have to build your own new way of living in the world. Peters sees transition as something similar and I think she's right. I've also found it with other people like me who grew up very religious. There is a certain cynical hardiness we all have that covers a deep awareness of our own vulnerability. When you are this kind of person and you find another one, there is an immediate kinship. And that is how I felt reading this book, too. That I'd found my people in a kind of way.
Second I'm a queer person reading this book, and I would bet an awful lot of money that it will read very differently to straight (by which I mean non-queer) audiences. This is the way we talk to each other. This is the messiness we reveal to each other. These are our fights and philosophical disagreements and tactics. There is no performance of normalcy for straight eyes, no need to put on our best rainbow colors, no need to worry about how we are read by people passing by. Every time I opened this book I relaxed a little. The focus is on white trans women, but any time I see a queer community depicted honestly it is just like seeing another branch of my family tree.
And that is really what I have to say about this book. Because outside of those feelings, I just sat back and relaxed and had fun. For other queer folks, you either immediately read the title as a joke or a threat, which tracks for the book as a whole. It is not afraid to push at these things, it can't be, with a detransitioned person as one of its central characters. If that worries you (it worried me!) don't worry. As we dive into Amy/Ames's detransition it is a sympathetic portrait but one with a very definite point of view. This person is still a trans woman no matter how they present themselves to the world, and the choice to detransition here is how it generally goes in real life, that it happens out of fear rather than a feeling that it was a mistake. This is a book with a strong point of view about queer and trans life, especially how they are for people of a certain age at a certain time. And that point of view includes the messy stuff. The toxic relationships, the mindfuck of gender performance, the creeps and chasers, and the funerals. Peters doesn't hang you out to dry here, she tells you exactly how this works, it is a cultural explainer at times, but it never feels like one. Because you are so deeply attached to Reese and Ames that you welcome the insights they have towards themselves and the world around them. What could be more wonderful than spending time with some queer folks who are self-aware enough to understand how messed up their choices are?
It is wonderful and it's also terrible. I cried a lot, I won't lie. The pain of transition, the many cuts trans women experience every single day both internally and externally, are not the main subject here but Peters makes no attempt to hide them. She integrates them into Reese and Amy's lives because that is simply how it is. She lets them mourn and grieve and suffer because it is impossible not to in this moment in this world. But I wouldn't put this in the pile of books where I generally put in a Queer Suffering warning. I save that for the ones where the suffering is The Point, and that's not it here. Here we are wrapped up in the suffering and the melodrama and the wit and the keen, clawing instinct to survive.
And now I feel silly that it's taken me this many paragraphs to tell you how funny this book is, how much I laughed. Apologies.
Anyway. There are more paragraphs here than I anticipated. But I suspect it is still just a pile of feelings that I've thrown at you and I'm not going to apologize that because I enjoyed it all so very, very much. I suspect reviews will use words like "bold" or "brave" because that is often what happens when marginalized people write honestly about their own experiences. It is certainly a book that is not afraid and it wants you to know that. It looks you right in the eye and dares you to contradict it.
Rating: really liked it
This book didn’t work for me. The whole book read like an excuse for the inclusion of gender studies monologues. I felt like those themes could have been organically explored without talking down to the reader, but since the plot was also all over the place, maybe that wouldn’t have panned out either.
As for characterization, the motivations for Ames made sense (maybe because we get to know his story and the character feels real?). One of the standout scenes of the book for me was a flashback to his first time shopping for women’s clothes - he was so excited and happy until the magic of the moment was disturbed, albeit unintentionally, by a cis woman and her daughter. I understood the character’s complicated feelings towards gender and fatherhood. As the reader, I got to sit in his head for a while and his feelings were messy but felt real.
On the other hand, Reese’s motivations didn’t track at all; they were so rooted in antiquated and/or damaging ideas of what womanhood is and wrapped up with a whole slew of fetishes. We’re told Reese wants to be a mother, but her conception of motherhood has nothing to do with being a parent and seems to be more about the acceptance by/into the world of cis womanhood - a world she expresses contempt for. She says having HIV is basically like being a mother, which...yeesh. Even if you don’t like children, that seems like a stretch as an analogy - and seems like the author is trying too hard to be “edgy.” The only thing Reese seems to like is cheating, because it’s “spicy.” I was confused every time I was in Reese’s head as a reader.
Katrina also made no sense, but mostly because she wasn’t a well defined character. When Ames proposes that they raise their child with Reese, Katrina does a 180 from “are you crazy” to “yes I’ll raise a child with you and your ex WHO I DON’T KNOW AT ALL” after a single conversation with her mother. She outs Ames as detransitioned during a work meeting with a client. She is also Ames’s manager, so she is sleeping with a direct report. But we’re told that she’s good at her job? Huh. Seems like a very bad manager who is an HR nightmare, but whatever.
In short, this book was messy plot-wise and 2 of the 3 main characters made no sense.
Rating: really liked it
I finished
Detransition, Baby a week ago, but I'm still uncomfortable about it. Sure, I was disappointed that I didn't enjoy this much-hyped book. But, more importantly, I was unsettled by how aggressively white it is, how the issue of race and racism in the novel is skirted and toyed with, but ultimately left me feeling a little worse each time. While some would argue that the tone-deaf racial politics of the novel is the point of the story, I want to articulate why this bothers me.
Detransition, Baby follows Ames, a man who has detransitioned after years of identifying as a trans woman, and the two women, Reese and Katrina, who each find themselves joined with him in the wake an unexpected pregnancy. As Ames wrangles Reese and Katrina into co-parenting his child, so begins my discomfort.
“Do you realize how often I’ve been that? A vessel for someone else’s dreams? Sure, just let the Asian lady carry our baby! You’ll be like all the other nice white couples with your adopted Asian baby.” The accusation takes Reese’s breath away. The unfairness of it. First of all, let’s be honest: Katrina looks white. Second, are they playing Oppression Olympics?There's this weird pattern in
Detransition, Baby: white characters voice racist ideas or commit racist actions and Katrina, the only major BIPOC character in the novel, is the conduit through which these comments are shrugged off, condoned, or basically just given the pass to float along in the ether, unchecked, un-criticized, and apparently unworthy of any real consequence. The specter of Whiteness hovers of this novel from start to finish, beginning with Reese's fetishization of contracting HIV/AIDS, to Iris' desire to
"become a Lana Del Rey song personified" and for a man
"to love [her] so much he murders [her]", to varying assertions that
"Every woman adores a Fascist", and that being beaten by a partner would affirm Reese's womanhood by asserting
"her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness." Peters' novel radiates Whiteness like a toxic waste plant, suggesting that the most enviable womanhood isn't just cis womanhood- but exclusively white cis womanhood. Peters' engagement with gender is constantly presented in the form of an unorthodox and digressive womanhood that desires male violence. But the "taboo" of gender violence necessitates the concept of a form of womanhood that is considered sacred, delicate, and too fragile for anyone to dare raise a hand at a woman. When white men beat white women, the transgression comes from white supremacy's assertion that white women are valuable vessels- White Femininity is an exclusively white supremacist concept affored exclusively to cis women who can offer viable white babies. Reese regurgitates this desire- her strict and cisnormative ideal of a traditional family and having 'real children' through cis pregnancy, coupled with the desire to be "loved so much he murders me," is something only white women get to play with, romanticize and fetishize. For black, brown, and indigenous women, gendered violence isn't a validation of womanhood: its the unrelenting destruction of your whole personhood. Violence is only a shocking transgression against the delicacy and desirability of womanhood when you're a white woman- when you're a BIPOC woman, your death and destruction is seldom cared about, seldom met with justice or dismay or public attention. It isn't revolutionary. It's heartbreakingly banal. In light of stories like those of Breonna Taylor or the knowledge that murder is the 3rd leading cause of death for Indigenous Women,
Detransition, Baby's cast of trans women who seek assimilation into cis womanhood via gendered violence left a bad taste in my mouth.
I'm aware that Peters' characters aren't supposed to be "good" queers: they aren't palatable and noble trans people who are the paradigm of social ethics and neither are the cis characters who surround them. In fact, Katrina is openly transphobic throughout the novel and even goes as far as to out Ames and nearly destroy his livelihood. But it bothers me that these racial blindspots- wether intentional or not- aren't checked more thoroughly, that this novel is in essence a novel about whiteness, for white people, and to white people.
We learn, for example, that Ames and Reese both envy black and brown trans women for the "motherhood" they receive from trans, BIPOC elders, arguing that white trans girls are uniquely cursed with being orphaned:
Katrina laughs. “Wait, I ignored your self-pity about how it sucked to be a woman, but now you’re saying you feel sorry for yourself ’cause you were a white girl?”Ames replies defensively, acknowledging that he navigates his relationship and concept of Katrina as if she were a white woman. But Katrina's response doesn't go quite far enough and Ames denies victimizing himself for his whiteness, but still holds that his jealousy is valid and the novel just carries on. Ames, for his part, offers no sympathy when he learns that Katrina was dehumanized by her ex-husband, who secretly hoarded asian fetish films throughout their marriage:
I dunno,” Ames said. “If I were an Asian woman, and my husband had a collection of Asian porn, maybe I’d be flattered. At least it means he’s attracted to me. Over and over again, Katrina is subjected to these constant berates and, while she often replies or offers a soft rebuttal, these comments are dealt with nonchalantly, as if they're just making comments about something as inoffensive as the weather.
Over and over again, character A says something racist to Katrina, Katrina (the token BIPOC) responds: "that's not very woke!" and then the characters move on with no consequence. So the cycle goes. It persists till the very end, when Reese accuses Katrina's emerging concept of her own queerness and
"this whole sharing-a-baby enterprise" as
"nothing but an elaborate exercise in the gentrification of queerness". As always, Katrina takes lite issue with it. It's insensitive. The only BIPOC character is being accused of gentrification by a white person? Oh no! Then everyone all but yawns and moves on. If a white person said that shit to me, that'd be the last words they'd ever say to me. If a white person decided that my womb was fertile ground for their ex's Nuclear Family fantasies, that'd be the last thing they'd ever do. But Katrina? She just takes it and takes it and
takes it and the world carries on as it should.
I just found this novel really harrowing and disappointing in its laziness with race. Yes, Ames and Reese acknowledge that black trans women have it harder- but they say it almost through their teeth, as if everyone hasn't already tokenized Marsha P Johnson, as if it isn't already the Trendy Woke thing to say "Protect Black Trans Women" even if it's all empty talk. Sure, they aren't meant to be role models, but I wanted more pushback, more condemnation of their flaws, something or some character to serve as a foil to suggest: there is something deeply, deeply wrong with how these white trans people engage with race and they have no excuse not to do better.
I can't find myself applauding this novel. I don't find it daring to talk about womanhood validated through violence, I don't find it daring to talk about the fragility of femininity that is only afforded to Lana Del Rey's and Marilyn Monroe's and thin, pretty white girls with bad boy boyfriends who want to strangle them. I'm not interested in the "hard earned" womanhood of white women- trans or not. I'm really fuckin' skeeved out by a novel that centers around two white people using an asian woman's viable womb as the backdrop for their turbulent and dysfunctional relationship. This novel doesn't go far enough to recant these issues- it acknowledges them, but acknowledging that your characters have a racism problem and then proceeding to do nothing about this in your narrative is insanely disappointing. It's wildly tone-deaf that Peters writes Katrina as having an issue with being seen as a "walking uterus" and then hinges the entire novel on just that- whether or not she'll carry the pregnancy to term or betray Ames and Reese both by having an abortion.
Its difficult, as a latina, to read a book about white women who yearn to be abused, dominated, infected with HIV, or literally murdered by their lovers as an entry point into femininity - the destruction of women of color isn’t forbidden erotica, it’s largely our assured destruction. I think instead of what Mitski said once about herself as, like Katrina, a mixed race Asian woman: "I used to rebel by destroying myself, but realized that's awfully convenient to the world. For some of us, our best revolt is self-preservation."
I was sorely disappointed with
Detransition, Baby. But I don't deny we need more novels about trans people, especially written by trans authors and some small part of me wonders why this novel is it, wether or not other cis readers have perked their ears at this book in the midst of the wave of anti-trans legislation and US policies that hinge their bigotry around bad-faith arguments about detransitioning. I want more trans stories- but I want trans stories written by my Latine sisters, written by those who see themselves in Janet Mock, Laverne Cox, and Angela Ross more than they do Sarah Jessica Parker. I want trans novels written by and for BIPOC women and, when they come, I hope we give them just as much energy and praise we've given Torrey Peters.
Rating: really liked it
huge Caleb Gallo energy.
Rating: really liked it
I thought I had seen the worst of what literature had to offer when I forced myself through
A Court of Wings and Ruin, but that was only because
Detransition, Baby! hadn't come out yet.
This is a truly terrible book. If this kind of nonsensical, uninspired, and tediously boring misogynistic drivel can be published and attain a 4.01 average rating on Goodreads, I can never feel self-conscious about my own writing again. If one-dimensional irritants such as Ames and Reese can captivate the minds of even one reader, then my writing in today's literary landscape must be like Tolstoy's rebirth. If this kind of aggressive misogynistic writing is lauded by women themselves, we are never making it out of the goddamn patriarchy.
Perhaps it is enough to say that the idiocy of this novel left scars on my brain which will never heal, but even that can't cover the horror I experienced reading it. At one point, our main character says that cis women secretly cherish their reproductive abilities because they are not lining up to get hysterectomies. How dare women who don't want children keep their organs in their bodies! What a goddamn affront to everyone who wants children that these women don't destroy their reproductive systems because they don't want to be pregnant! This isn't a view that's challenged or even discussed—the author uses the characters as talking heads to espouse her own foul views.
In this novel, the bodily autonomy of women is a joke. A man wrangles his boss into coparenting her child with a woman the boss has never met, and any objections the woman might have are over by the end of the chapter (this would inconvenience the man, and as such can't be permitted to happen). The desire of women to be treated kindly by romantic and sexual partners is a front that hides a desire for violence. We are told that transgender people were always girls because they played with dolls (pour one out for misogyny), were attracted to men (homophobia), and hate their genitals (I don't know what to say about this one). All of these lovely ideas are repeated in a singular poorly constructed sentence. I think one would find more intellectual opportunity in conversing with their family pet.
I do not require that everyone in the novels I read be great people. In that case, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed
Wuthering Heights,
Crime and Punishment, or
Madame Bovary. (I feel deeply sorry to mention such brilliant novels in close proximity to the title of this garbage, but such sacrifices are necessary when one seeks to make a point.) However, I do want to be able to understand why characters behave the way they do. Ames and Katrina are wildly inconsistent people from chapter to chapter, and a paper bag would probably beat Reese out for personality. Simply put, they are badly constructed characters who inspire the words that kill every story:
I don't care about these people. On top of this transgression (pun not intended), these characters are so abysmally awful to each other and everyone around them that I couldn't care less about where they ended up. My one desire was for the novel to be over.
Peters' prose is clunky and unoriginal. There isn't a single sentence that stands out in the sense that skill was used to compose it. The reader is abruptly shifted between timelines and viewpoints to enjoy heaping doses of misogyny or racism with little character development. There is no emotion, no clever language, no nuance on any of the issues addressed. I acknowledge the importance in having marginalized voices highlighted, understood, and accepted. I also acknowledge that the fact that this book was written by a trans woman about trans women does not mean I have to enjoy it. It does not, in fact, prevent this book from being a waste of time for anyone with a functional brain.
I hated this book. I will probably mention how much I hated this book in future conversations where I am asked to cite the most mind-numbing, boring, useless piece of literature I've ever forced myself to finish. Instead of reading this book, I would recommend asking your conservative uncle what he thinks of women—the misogynist commentary you are met with might be less appalling than what is contained within these pages.
Rating: really liked it
Now Nominated for the John Leonard Prize 2021It's pretty telling that this is one of the first books written by a trans person that has been published by a major company, and accordingly, the biggest accomplishment of the text is that it refuses to stereotype its protagonists - rather, they're messy and complex, thus: Realistically drawn, three-dimensional people. It's also a fast-paced, slightly convulted, sometimes a little soap-opera-esque story that, at the same time, discusses identity and parenthood. This wild mixture alone makes the novel fresh, intriguing, and well-worth reading.
The text tells the story of Reese, a trans women who dreams of becoming a mother, and Ames who used to be her ex-girlfriend, but detransitioned. Now Ames impregnated his Chinese-American boss and lover, Katrina. As he is hesitant to adopt the role of "father" (as opposed to "parent"), he proposes to queer the relationship and involve Reese as a third parenting party.
This set-up opens the door to the author discussing all kinds of emotional and social questions, and it's not only interesting, but also fun to read. We need more stories like this one.
