“Detransition Baby” tells the story of Ames (formerly Amy), his trans ex girlfriend Reese, and current girlfriend Katrina. Together, they make the decision to raise Katrina’s child as a single co-parenting unit. The story is anchored by the moment of conception, with chapters alternating between different timelines entitled “8 weeks before conception,” “12 weeks after conception.”

I realize that my fascination with this book is largely voyeurism: the opportunity as a cis woman to get an intimate and detailed portrait of the lives of trans folks. Peters holds nothing back; we see it all. The plot moves quickly and culminates in a pivotal scene (a doTerra party nonetheless) that had me clutching my Kindle with eyes wide. I didn’t expect to fly so quickly through this, but the combination of plot, characters, and cunning social commentary transformed what I thought would be a stuffy book of literary fiction into a real page turner.

Motherhood, sex, gender identity and family are the overarching themes of Detransition, Baby by transgender author Torrey Peters.

Who says two transgender women and a cis gender woman can’t make a family. When Katrina gets pregnant by Ames, who detransitioned from Amy, Ames sees this as a chance to make a dream come true for his former partner Reese who has always wanted to be a mother.

Delving into the sexual desires of Reese and Amy and how their relationship fell apart, the author examines the micro and macro aggressions around the transgender community. But don’t be mistaken because this community has a family form of its’ own.

Moving back and forth in time measured from the point of conception, Peters deftly pulls the reader into the present and former lives of the characters as they evolve to become their most authentic selves.

Thank you to @netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Add this one to your list!

What a fantastic, funny, and enlightening book. I'm so thankful Torrey Peters pulled back the curtain to a world and experience I wouldn't otherwise be privy to. Thank you NetGalley for giving me access to this book and thank you Roxane Gay for selecting it as a book club pick and putting this important piece of fiction on my radar.

DETRANSITION, BABY is about three women, trans and cis, whose lives become intertwined around an unexpected pregnancy. Reese is a trans woman who desperately wants to be a mother. And Ames, Reese's ex, is a destransitioned trans woman who got her boss, Katrina, pregnant. Longing to make sense of the pregnancy and at a chance of a family, Ames propositions that the three of them raise the baby together.

These characters, especially Reese and Ames, are incredibly complex and through them the author does an excellent job of capturing the fluidity of gender, sexuality and identity with a wit and vulnerability that borders on both hilarity and anguish. Through the lens of a trans woman, my cis woman self related and relearned what womanhood and motherhood meant to me.

My thinking of motherhood has always been from a cis woman perspective. And for a cis woman, pregnancy is a given. Albeit sometimes it is an unwanted expectation, but still it is a given and one that is seen as our inherent right. And I use the term "our" loosely because let's not forget that coerced sterilization of marginalized groups was happening in 32 states throughout the 20th century. So as a cis woman of color, my right to reproduce was/is seen as a liability, a "problem" in this country. But still, I am a cis woman and a liberal one at that, which frames my understanding of reproductive rights and how it is socially framed. Cis women view reproductive rights as their right to choose, but why are these rights not extended to trans women? Don't they have a right to choose to be a mother just like cis women have the right to choose not to?

As the book explores Reese's deep desire to be a mother, I couldn't help examine my own. Like Reese, I knew I've always wanted to be a mother. But unlike Reese, I didn't have to make a case for it. It was a given. And as disappointment came every month, I was solely focused on the unfairness of it all. How easy it was to cast myself as a victim. But I see how silly I have been. And in thinking back to the baby showers and gender reveal parties, I remember basking in the production because I believed that one day I would be at the center of it. Now, I cannot help but cringe at all. that. performance. Not that there is anything wrong with baby showers (I do not agree with gender reveal parties), but the expectations and behavior of socially accepted gender roles are problematic when it alienates trans men and women.

Only if, like the title, gender roles were so definitive. Detransition, Baby. You detransition to your assigned gender and you're socially accepted. You have a baby (as a cis person) and you're socially accepted. But gender like sexuality is fluid and as a cis woman reading this book through the lens of a trans woman, I saw how exhausting, biased and harmful the performance of these gender roles could be.

This book was devastating, funny and smart. It is also raw and unapologetic and vulnerable. It is about trans women written for trans women and dedicated to divorced cis women. Trans, cis, divorced, married or single, I hope every woman, no.. every person reads this.

Brilliant on every level. I could not put this book down; it spoke directly to my heart. Peters had done something extraordinary; this is a novel that captures the beating heart of queer and trans life in all its messy glory.

Detransition, Baby is a book everyone should read. It's a much-needed addition to the small literary canon of books about trans women. This book is one that could only have been written by a trans woman, and Torrey Peters knocks it out of the park. Although I did not agree with everything plot-wise, the characters and discussions of family and womanhood more than made up for it. 4/5 stars for me personally, although this is a book that everyone could benefit from reading from and discussing. An excellent, much-needed book.

A raw, somewhat chaotic, book about transgender women, DETRANSITION, BABY is set to be a contemporary classic. Peters is so insightful and cutting that her writing will leave you breathless. It's like opening a door to a world I have never been fore, and I am grateful to be given that opportunity. I can't wait to see more from her in the future.

Thank you @netgalley and @penguinrandomhouse for an e-arc of #detransitionbaby

Happy pub day to Torrey Peters!

“Detransition, Baby” is the story of three people, Katrina a cis woman who is pregnant, Reese a trans woman, and Ames who’s gender identity is complicated. Ames and Reese have history as they were partners when Ames was Amy (a trans woman), but that became rocky when Ames made the decision to detransition and live life as a male again. Now Ames is with Katrina, who just found out she’s pregnant, and let me tell you...Ames has a wild idea.

This book is unabashedly queer and touches on so many different aspects of queer lifestyles and the culture surrounding them. The sex scenes are some of the most honest I’ve seen on page and don’t shy away from how uncomfortable and lacking in romance sex can be. Peters humor shines as she expertly balances the humor along with serious commentary. If my first reads of 2021 are any indication I’m excited for this year!

Thanks to the publisher for the early copy of this one.

This book was very in depth and I just wasn’t interested after about 20%. I wish the story wouldn’t have dragged so much. I appreciate the story and I learned a few things but it just dragged on too much for me.

Not my usual pick of a story since I've been reading mostly YA and cis hetero romance but I'm glad I did! Learning to be a better advocate for my besties daughter.

A beautiful story of a trans woman, her detransitioned ex-girlfriend Ames (Amy) and his new pregnant cis girlfriend. The anecdotes, tragedies, conversations, vulnerabilities of women. Women in all its definitions, in so many of it's difficulties and hardships. The beautiful and messy.

Now, gender is a social construct. Don't fight me on this. There can be variants and degrees to every other human aspect and experience except gender? Ridiculousness. Trying to stuff humans into two boxes is probably why we are all so messed up as it is.
I'm sure all of the boxes the LGBTQIA+ has established is just scratching the surface of the degrees of gender experienced but hidden from society. It's a shame and whose business is it again?! Let's still clutch our pearls, no thanks. I want to know everyone's truth, please tell me all your stories. Like I've said we are all waves in the ocean unique and all different but all from the same source. I wish we could see the beauty in eachother.

Also, any person with a heart and soul regardless of what they identify as, should be able to adopt and raise a child. I have cis hetero friends who can't even adopt. How many kids age out of the system with no family? My soul is torrential downpour.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

Thank you @netgalley and @oneworld for my honest and voluntary review!

#detransitionbaby #translivesmatter #bookreview #bookstagram

I have had this ARC for awhile, and until the past week, have not heard much press about this. This is a book you will want to read with no distraction, as there is just so much to take in.

Reese is transgender and longs for a child of her own. Ames, formally Amy, is with Katrina. When Katrina let’s Ames know she is pregnant, the story takes flight.

This story navigates years before this announcements and the weeks after. The author Torrey Peters gives us this rich story about motherhood and queer woman and can they make this work for the sake of a child.

This is a story you will want to savor. I read this slowly, at points re-reading passages. I am not going to lie there are some complicated story lines, especially in the beginning, however we get a beautiful story, that I predict will be nominated for many book awards.

If you are looking for a cut and dry ending to a story, than this is not the book for you. However, if you don’t mind being left reeling and questioning, but feeling so satisfied, this is right up your alley. Highly recommend this for books clubs, as there is so much to discuss.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This story follows the lives of Reese and Amy/Ames. It explores the topics of motherhood, fatherhood and trans relationships. While they explore the possibility of having a baby, they must deal first with the nature of their relationship as well as their past histories.

This book was a very well written and I definitely learned some things I didn't know about the transgender community. However, the way the book was laid out was a bit chaotic. Moving back and forth in time was, at times, a little confusing. I also felt as if some of the backstory wasn't necessarily needed for the story to work. Many parts could have been left out and the story would have still made sense. The ending was a bit disappointing and somewhat unexpected given the character development.

Thank You Random House and NetGalley for the free digital proof.

Detransition, Baby is a story of womanhood, parenthood, identity, and what makes a family. Torrey Peters has created something beautiful that is both educational and enlightening - I will be recommending this to everyone.

Thank you Torrey Peters for writing this book. I feel that the curtain has been pulled back to reveal to all, the varied and complicated life of the trans community. As a straight cis woman, this was a revelation, as I am clueless about this world. Good storytelling and great writing. Thanks to NetGalley for a complimentary copy of the book in exchange for my honest review

A provocative, thought-provoking novel about three people learning how to be a family to each other. It's messy and emotional and touching. The conversations about gender and identity are nuanced and fascinating.

In the interest of transparency, this is the first book I’ve read by a trans author and featuring a trans character, a reality that should not have taken so long to rectify. How stupid of me to assume that I could say “trans lives matter” without reading trans stories and familiarizing myself with trans narratives. BUT THIS REVIEW ISN’T ABOUT ME. Let's talk about the book:⁣
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It is lovely. I laughed along with Reese and her remarkably witty sense of humor, I cringed at Katrina’s words and actions and the way she portrayed perfectly so many cis women, and I, quite honestly, spent a lot of time angry with Ames and how he thought he could manipulate the situation and those around him. Detransition is a story that will have you taking sides and constantly switching allegiances as the story is slowly unraveled before you.⁣
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The timeline in this book alternates between two periods—years before conception and weeks after conception—allowing readers to slowly familiarize themselves with the main characters and their relationships to each other while also figuring out what is going to be done about the pregnancy. This is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to Reese and Ames’s pre-transition pasts, scenes that absolutely broke my heart. Torrey is impeccably talented at writing the emotions in these scenes; Ames, pure in a way that only a child can be, desiring to come up with an excuse to wear a bra, and feeling utter humiliation when getting fitted for a filled one and is interrupted by cis women walking into the store.
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This book is exceptional and deserving of the wide acclaim that I'm sure is to come. I would LOVE to see it optioned as a limited series and I truly hope you all read it.

There were times while reading Detransition, Baby that I felt that I was not the intended audience for this book, and that's ok. I don't think Torrey Peters meant for this to be written for a cis white gay man. I mean, she dedicates her novel to divorced cis women. But what I can say is that this novel exists in that special space where a book articulates a piece of specific experience so well that you are left with more clarity about that experience. This novel could not exist without its unflinching descriptions of trans women's lives and how identity shapes everything that happens to the characters before and after. There are also many aspects of the queer experience, that while not comparable, were in ways relatable.

As you might expect, there is a great deal of discussion on gender in this book. Torrey writes about gender in such a powerful way, examining both the cruelty and freedom of gender and gender expression, not only with regards to trans people, but also cis people. and it is made very plain throughout the book that this is an analysis of the experiences of white trans people in particular. There is also a great deal of discussion surrounding pregnancy, motherhood and loss of a child, alongside the topic of cishet people co-opting queerness, both of which I found very thought-provoking.

While the writing on these themes was strong my issues with the novel is that, to me, the synopsis suggests that this would be the story of the three of them trying to figure out how to be co-parents and raising this child, but I would say a large majority of the book is dedicated to Reese and Ames’ past as lovers. This is, of course, a very important aspect of the story, but the pregnancy in question almost felt, to me, to take a backseat. This choice of narrative structure, of moving backwards and forwards through time, is one that didn't really work for me. I find there are very few authors who are successfully able to pull this off without their timelines becoming confusing. There was too many instances where a chapter would be set at a specific point in the past, but would then move to other periods both forward and backwards in time, before coming back to the initial point in time where the chapter started. These transitions would often be abrupt and hard to follow. The characters also came off a little one dimensional, where they talked about nothing outside gender politics, and never showed any details of their lives outside of these issues. Not once are we told about their hobbies, or interests.

The first thing this book reminded me of is “Todo sobre mi madre” by Almodovar, not just because they both have transgender characters. Both question and redefine what it means to be a mother. This book was also very melodramatic, and my first thought was “these are very real characters in a fake story”. But maybe that’s a good thing. The story is plausible but not likely, and reminds me of those soap opera romantic comedies revolving around family. As the story went on I felt the interactions between the characters was believable, and the main 3 characters were both flawed and dynamic, but they all literally talked about nothing outside gender politics— that was a little unbelievable. Do any of them have hobbies? Katrina and Ames both have extensive backstories too which make them believable, but Reece’s past is left up to the imagination. It’s not that she isn’t a realistic character (in fact she might be the most relatable) but I would have liked to know more about where she was coming from. If she’s a sort of blank slate so the audience has something to project onto though, then I respect that.
At times the third person narration would launch into a soapbox on gender politics in a way that reminded me of “Nevada” by Imogen Binnie. Detrans Baby is leagues beyond Nevada, which I didn’t really like, but the little treatises felt far too didactic to be believable.
Overall the book was a fast read, and the narrative was very tightly structured, Torrey Peters’ prose as usual was light and enjoyable to read, but I didn’t like this as much as “The Masker” (one of my favorite books of all time, which visits a lot of similar themes) on account of her departure from genre fiction. Still, don’t miss this one!

I loved Detransition Baby so, so much. I really commend it for its incredibly complicated and flawed characters who are treated with a great deal of kindness and compassion by the narrative, and its portrayal of real, uncomfortable conflict that is handled very deftly. These are people who fuck up and hurt each other in a multitude of unpleasant ways and are never demonized for it. There's cheating, outing, deception, and weaponized identity politics, all polarizing topics, but we see these conflicts from multiple perspectives, and feel both the pain of the person hurt and sympathize with the person doing the hurting. Honestly, I wasn't expecting this level of emotional realism from a book with the premise "let's raise a baby with my ex" and I was completely blown away by it.

I think part of the raw honesty of Detransition Baby comes from the number of trans women characters throughout the book. None of these women are expected to represent trans womanhood on their own and I think that freedom allows the characters to be genuinely flawed and imperfect and interesting and good, and for that complexity, they feel very real.

I am also just obsessed with the depiction of motherhood and parenthood as a complicated concept that means something different for everyone, but that with a measure of vulnerability, can be built and shared together. This is also one of the most fundamental places where characters' wants and needs conflict against each other and I think the book does a great job of balancing those without saying any one character is fully right or fully wrong. I was particularly struck by Reese's deep yearning for motherhood vs. Katrina's relief at her first miscarriage vs. Ames's distinction between fatherhood and parenthood. There aren't neat, easy answers to the conflicts that come up in their attempts to remake for themselves what family looks like, but I was moved by their attempts to build a functional, livable life without sacrificing happiness for conformity.

For those hesitant because of the entire topic of detransition, I thought the book handled it really well. Detransition is explored without delegitimizing transness in part because Detransition Baby balances one character detransitioning against dozens of other trans women in the book who don't. The book paints Amy's life as a trans woman not as a mistake, and the decision to detransition instead as more akin to going back into the closet, for all the reasons that people do: fear, exhaustion, and how genuinely hard it is to be queer sometimes. Detransition Baby makes it very clear that Amy/Ames is, beneath "living as a man," still a trans woman. To paraphrase, being trans isn't something you stop being.

My major gripes with the book were largely technical. There could have been a much tighter edit, both for simple spelling/continuity mistakes and overall construction-wise. That being said, I don't think those stood in the way of my enjoyment or love for the book.

Wow, what a book! This novel alternates perspectives between two characters - Reese, a trans woman, and Ames, Reese's ex, who used to be trans woman Amy but then de-transitioned back to being man. When the woman Ames is sleeping with, Katrina, accidentally becomes pregnant, Ames is not sure he can see himself as a father, and suggests bringing in Reese, who has always wanted to be a mother. The book then both proceeds from there, along with scenes set in Reese and Amy/Ames' past. I'm a cis gender woman, and while I have read a few novels about trans kids/teens, I don't think I've ever read a book from the perspective of a trans adult, and didn't even know there was such a thing as detransitioning. So the book was very different and eye-opening for me, though sometimes uncomfortable, with an eye opening #ownvoices account of both the unique struggles of being trans along with all the common emotional struggles anyone can go through. The writing was just so sharp and good, really bringing the characters to life, and I couldn't put it down. Think Curtis Sittenfeld/Taffy Brodesser Akner's "Fleishman Is In Trouble," but with a trans spin. 4.5 stars.