✨MINI REVIEW✨ [ @oneworldbooks #partner ]
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. But then her girlfriend detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby, Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family? (via Goodreads) 📚
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📚 This book is messy, beautiful and thoughtful. It's a deep exploration of the thousands of tiny things that add up to make gender, and what happens when your understanding of those building blocks shifts.
📚 It really showcases how fluid gender and sexuality are and the joy that can bring, but doesn't shy away from exactly how mentally and physically hard it can be to exist publicly as a trans person.
📚 I honestly can't think of one aspect of the idea of womanhood or the margins of queerness this book doesn't touch on - it has so much packed in and yet it remains compellingly readable.
📚 Also, it covers all this heavy, complicated stuff and is still very funny!
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📚 I am almost certain DETRANSITION, BABY will be polarizing. On the surface, before reading it, it seems to be endorsing the idea of detransitioning and that transness is a choice - much like the idea of being an ex-gay. Keep in mind that I am a cis person, but I don't think it's doing that at all. The central tension of Ames' story is that he detransitioned but can never not be trans, even if it doesn't show outwardly. Please read it if you're in a place to do so - it's a wonderfully nuanced portrait of the complexity of trans life.
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Content warnings: biphobia, body shaming, child abuse, deadnaming, death, domestic abuse, drug use, emotional abuse, grief, hate crime, homophobia, infertility, infidelity, miscarriage , misogyny, physical abuse, self harm, sexism, sexual content, sexual violence, suicidal thoughts, suicide, toxic relationship, transphobia, and violence.

Thank you Random House Publishing Group and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Raw & radiant, Detransition, Baby will be the talk of the town next year. Torrey Peters has spelled the tea for all the cis to see and it is uncomfortable and liberatory all at once. It's so important for conversations about motherhood and reproductive justice to be nuanced and center trans people. This book is as timely difficult as it is difficult and it will reward your full attention.

I was immediately interested in this book because it portrays detransitioning, which I rarely see discussed. I am not trans and the extent of my trans knowledge comes from film/tv and youtubers, so it was eye-opening to look at detransitioning in an intimate way through this novel.

Detransition, Baby follows three women: two transgender (Reese and Amy) and one cisgender (Katrina). Amy detransitions, becoming Ames, and goes from dating Reese to dating Katrina. Their lives are intertwined when Katrina becomes pregnant and Ames suggests involving Reese in the parenting. Through this unconventional family model that is proposed, the book explores motherhood in a unique way and how motherhood can affect your identity as a trans woman. The characters are very open in how they reflect about their desires - sexual desires and other life ideals. These wants are at odds with expectations for progressive women and healthy relationships, and I think the way these vulnerable, flawed women were written was amazing.

With these honest perspectives, also come transphobic situations. Although this book was emotionally heavy for me at times, the book's mood steers away from depressing tragedy. Instead, it focuses on the everyday lives of these characters. Less "Boys Don't Cry" and more "Tangerine" is the best way my cis ass can describe it. I learned a lot from spending time with these characters and I was really struck with how different their lives and dispositions were from anything I've read. I'm grateful for this book's existence and very excited about its upcoming release! 🥰✨

Like nothing I’ve ever read- in a very good way. This is an extremely exciting look into a world I don’t know a ton about but was thrilled to learn about, chapter by chapter.

Hell yeah, sending 2020 out with a bang. Thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy of this book, which I was super excited to read.

It would be difficult to list out every topic addressed here, and plenty of critical analyses will do that anyway so whatever. What I can say is that Detransition, Baby exists in that special space where a book articulates a piece of specific experience so well that you are left with both more clarity about the experience and that universal set of book feelings that transcends any one life. This book 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. But it's also about being alive, being hurt, and being needed, and how stupidly complex those things are, and no matter how few experiences you share with Reese or Ames or Katrina, those feelings at the heart of it are easy to access.

I hope the buzz and wide potential audience of this book touches those who need it the most. I hope someone who never expected to have their own experience represented in something tagged not "lgbtq+" but (deservedly!) "literary fiction" is wrapped up and comforted by the messy, painful kinship that this book describes so adeptly. I hope someone who picked up this book just because it was acclaimed literary fiction found something there that they didn't know they needed.

(SPOILER) It was perfect to end the book on a note of ambiguity.

Imagine, thinking you are going to Paris to see the Eiffel Tower and taste delicious macaron’s and ending up in Papua New Guinea in a tribe that you had never heard of. That is how it felt reading this book. I had no idea what it was about when I opened it, and I was surprised and delighted when finding out that I was reading a book about the white trans culture. I apologize in advance if I say anything incorrectly, but this is a whole new world for me!

Torrey Peters is a magnificent writer. She is honest and funny and boy does she know how to craft an engaging story. I don’t think that I, a cis white woman, was her target audience and I often had to look up words and phrases and theories to keep up. But I learned so much and my eyes were pried wide open. I don’t know if this book is for everyone, but I really appreciated hearing the variety of trans voices, their fantasies and insecurities, their traumas and their triumphs. The characters of Reese and Ames will stay with me for a very long time.

I hesitate to say too much, as I hope other readers will be open minded and transported in the way that I was. I hope there is another novel on the way – perhaps continuing with Reese, Ames and Katrina’s journey. In the meantime, I’m so glad that I took that unintentional detour and I think I loved it even more than a trip Paris!

My thanks to NetGalley for an Advanced Readers Copy of this book. All opinions are my own and not biased in any way.

This book sets out to cover a LOT of ground storywise - and I think it mostly does a good job of that. Maybe it feels a little overstuffed at times, like the author just had so much she wanted to accomplish with this story (which she did!), so towards the end it did feel kind of unfocused. But so much here is thoughtful and funny and entertaining, and overall I had a good time. Slightest of spoilers but there is a very minor Werner Herzog bedbug infestation subplot that I think warrants at least 100 pages as its own standalone novella. Also not that it matters but the color scheme on this cover is.........sublime.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
★★★★☆

Thank you to Netgalley, Random House, and One World for providing me with a digital arc in exchange for an honest review.

“Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it’s to always stand in good lighting.”

Detransition, Baby novel that gives readers a lot to chew on. It’s messy in good ways and bad. It’s characters are complicated and frustrating. And it’s philosophies are going to challenge what most non-trans readers have been taught about being “a good ally.” Peters has written a trans novel with a truly unique and valuable perspective. Where this is going to fall short for a lot of people is that it is just a single trans narrative and not meant to be a stand in for the trans experience as a whole. Which is the unfortunate task that is usually placed upon works coming from marginalized communities. They are expected to be for everyone, and Detransition, Baby is absolutely not. And when I say it’s not for everyone, I mean that I was a full 60% into the book before I decided it was actually for me.

This is not a plot heavy book. If you’ve read the cover copy, you know exactly what is going on. It can basically be summed up as the set up for a joke. “Two transsexuals and a pregnant woman walk into an OBGYN office.…” Basically, three very different people agree to raise a baby together. And this is the least interesting thing about Detransition, Baby. I went into this book expecting a more straight-forward exploration of people navigating a non-traditional family structure ala Kevil Wilson’s Perfect Little World. This is not that. The plot is something that happens in the background. What actually makes this novel interesting is the cast of characters Peters has created as well as the way it engages with and challenges modern trans discourse.

The main cast of the novel is made up of three of the most frustrating human beings imaginable. Ames/Amy is a detransitioned, or “former,” trans woman. And, in a way, this is their* story. The timeline is nonlinear, jumping between past and present with each chapter identified by its position in time before and after the conception of the titular “baby.” And a lot of the flashbacks revolve around Ames/Amy and their transition in relation to other characters. And, despite how his actions are what primarily drives the plot, his character feels the least fleshed out of the three. I go back and forth on whether or not I think this was an intentional decision. Given the unstable nature of their identity, it makes sense that most of what we learn about this character, internally, comes from the perspective of those around them. Our second character is Katrina, Ames’ boss and sexual partner. We learn a little about Katrina’s history, like her divorce and miscarriage that inform a lot of her decisions throughout the story. But, for the most part, Katrina’s position in the story seems to be a (mostly) heterosexual who engages with and learns about queerness. She brings the outsider perspective to a very insider novel. Finally, Reese. Reese is a trans woman, Amy’s ex-girlfriend, and a little bit of a mess of a person. We learn the most about Reese both internally and as she is perceived by others. This is a character that I think a lot of people, particularly people who only engage with queerness through the lens of glossy internet discourse are going to have a difficult time wrapping their heads around. Personally, I found her fascinating and at the same time infuriating. Of the three, Reese is the most “real.” Reese is a person I know and have interacted with.

What the book does best is shoving these three characters together and pulling them apart in new and interesting ways. They all do appalling things to one another and to themselves throughout their attempt to put together something resembling a family unit.

Where Peters is either going to win you over or lose you completely is in the engagement with how trans lives are perceived by people outside of the community. This is not a book that speaks to a monolithic trans experience--nor is it trying to be. The text is, more than once, careful to point out that this is a story told from the perspective of white trans women living in New York City with access to a trans community. Peters is not attempting to speak for trans women of color, rural and isolated trans people, non-binary trans people, trans men, etc. But what it does, to interesting effect, is try to challenge the perception of trans people held by those outside of the community.

Amy and Reese have two very different perspectives about what it means to be trans and what it means to exist in the trans community. The structure of the conversation around transness is almost divided into three stages. The perception of transness internally, the perception of transness within the trans community, and the perception of transness in the world at large. Reese has a stronger sense of self, and is fairly confident in her position within the community. Her challenge is her transness as a construct in the larger world. Amy, on the other hand, struggles with her ever shifting identity as well as her position within her community. “To say that Amy had never before had sex as a woman was the kind fo thing that trans activists would take issue with. Feel free to peruse the Tumblr-Twitter industrial complex for all the ways that ‘trans women have always been women’--even before they transitioned. But for Amy it was the first time she saw herself fucking as a woman without laying a psychic veil over whatever sexual scene was occurring; the first time it just was rather than something that, with effort, she could manage to see.” This speaks to the impossibility of being a trans person when your perception of yourself doesn’t line up with what both other trans-people and cis people expect of you.

I could pull another forty quotes that I have highlighted that address different aspects of trans womanhood and how the world perceives and interacts with it. I love any novel that can turn what should be a simple book review into a 50 page dissertation and there is so much to unpack here that I definitely see myself returning to this text again in the future. Overall, I think that even though this book falls flat as a story, it succeeds as a character study and a brilliant challenge to “trans discourse” that is largely dominated by cis people telling other cis people the rules of how to interact with and talk about trans people. Torrey Peters is an author I look forward to reading more from in the future.

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*I refer to Ames/Amy as their when speaking about them generally, but he/her when discussing how they are identified at any given point in the text--pronouns are messy sometimes, ya’ll.

A brilliant exploration of trans motherhood, queer family, and womanhoood. I found this book so incredibly revealing, and at times I didn't like/agree with any characters. I respect Torrey Peters so much for these real and hard to look at characters. Although I wasn't fully invested in the beginning, by the end I was hooked surprised at every turn, even though there were hints hidden throughout the prose as to what was coming. I anticipate this novel being somewhat polarizing, but I unabashedly loved it.

This was a really fascinating look at the world of trans and those who choose to detransition (a term I'm sorry to say I was not familiar with). It's the story of Reese, Amy (now Ames), and Katrina and the choices they make in order to feel fulfilled. It's a deeply moving book about motherhood, fatherhood, and the desire to raise a child, and the choice to detransition when that seems a more natural state. It opened my eyes to a world with which I am not very familiar (even after teaching high school for almost 40 years and having many students transition). Like all of us, the characters are flawed but willing to admit that actions have consequences, and like all humans, we seek only to find our place in the world and exist in a state of happiness and contentment.

The gossipy, finely observed, queer, trans, take-no-prisoners update to Mary McCarthy’s The Group I didn’t know I needed. Builds an extremely nuanced social picture with people I've never seen before in fiction. Takes big risks at the macro and micro level. Occasionally it falters by being too intelligent, its prose losing some elegance to make a point. Sometimes novels about marginalized people will turn up the dial on the hatred towards their characters, but this one surprisingly stretches believability by turning up its characters' empathy. It's a novel about people staying patient with each other. It doesn't make a spectacle out of trauma and hate, though it doesn't shy away from reality either. I didn't think people wrote like this anymore--I hope it's not an insult to Peters to say this is almost like a trans Franzen novel--but I'm so glad Peters does.

Ames somehow knocked up his girlfriend Katrina despite his supposed sterility from all the hormones he took during the years he was Amy. Stunned by the prospect of imminent parenthood, he turns to the most fiercely maternal person he knows: his ex, Reese. So keen is her desire for the child her own body cannot produce that Reese agrees to a thoroughly modern coparenting arrangement. But even as the trio hashes out their relationship through a series of raw, insightful conversations about gender, sex, race, and motherhood, their damage threatens their fragile balance. Funny, messy, and devoid of easy answers.

I really like that this book breaks the myth of detransitioners being people who transitioned as a mistake but aren't really trans. I really like the perspective this book gave on many trans issues, especially trans femme.

I did have a hard time though because its hard to sympathize with the main characters. They all suck in their own ways, which is kind of the point. They are real, hurt, flawed people. But I often times was left after a scene wanting to scream because of how frustrating they were. It made it hard to get through at times. Also the end was very dissatisfying for me.

Detransition, Baby is one of my top five favorite books I’ve read in 2020 and I cannot recommend it enough. This story is so unique, witty and heartbreaking and had me hooked from the very beginning. I walked away from this book feeling so many different emotions and I still feel like my words won’t be able to do this book the justice it deserves.

Detransition, Baby is essentially a study of motherhood and three women: Amy/Ames, Katrina and Reese. Ames is a former trans woman who detransitioned from Amy and began dating his cisgender boss, Katrina. When Katrina became pregnant (after Ames was convinced he was sterile due to his 6 years of treatments while he was Amy), he finally came clean to Katrina about his past as a trans woman. Reese, also a trans woman and Amy’s ex girlfriend, wants to be a mother more than anything in this world. After finding out that Katrina is pregnant, Ames comes up with the unconventional idea of proposing to Reese and Katrina that they raise this baby together. The story flips back and forth between pre-conception and post-conception, giving you a detailed view of Amy’s transition, her relationship and life with Reese, the reasons why she ended up detransitioning and how her life led her to Katrina and their current situation.

I was truly blown away by the characters in this book. They are raw, real, complex and leave you with no choice but to be utterly invested in them- I couldn’t get enough of Amy/Ames’s and Reese’s fascinating stories. What I loved the most was how messy and honest these characters are and how eye opening their experiences are. You will not be able to read this without feeling their pain, fear, triumphs, joys, hopes, disappointments, and more.

Torrey Peters is an incredibly talented writer and storyteller and after reading her dedication in the beginning of the book, I need to know more about her personal story and everything that inspired this book. Detransition, Baby is an incredible thought-provoking book that taught me so much about the lives of white trans women. Peters does an incredible job at exploring so many other themes such as divorce, parenthood, womanhood, unconventional family structures, sexuality, gender, mental illness, body dysphoria, friendship and more. The exploration of these themes made for quite a few moments of discomfort throughout the book, but they were absolutely necessary and I loved how thought provoking they were.

This book will make you feel so many different feelings and I encourage you to sit with those feelings afterward. I am so impressed with this compelling story and I truly cannot applaud Peters enough for writing such a fantastic debut novel. I look forward to reading more by her and watching her career grow.

Thank you so much NetGalley, OneWorld and Random House for gifting me this eARC in exchange for my honest review. Review will be posted to Instagram, my blog, Amazon and GoodReads in December.

This story is so unique and the concept is unlike anything I've heard of or read before, and the tongue-and-cheek title is immaculate. In summary: a "former" trans woman (Amy or "Ames") has "detransitioned". Her current partner and boss Katrina-- who doesn't know about her "boyfriend"'s past-- is pregnant with Amy/"Ames"'s child. Amy/"Ames" wants to co-parent with both Katrina and ex-girlfriend Reese: a trans woman who has always longed for a child. The book follows their journeys both before and after conception.

It's raw, it's sad, it's uncomfortable in the best and worst ways, and it really allowed me to learn so much more about the lives and experiences of (white-- an important distinction as pointed out in the novel--) trans women. This book explores themes of love (platonic, romantic, familial), womanhood, motherhood, divorce, unconventional family structures, and queer kinship.

Torrey Perez's writing is so compelling, and she doesn't shy away from the messy parts of what it is to be heterosexual, queer, a trans woman, mentally ill, biracial, in relationships, and so many other aspects of humanity. The ending was not conclusive, but it left me satisfied. This has to be one of my favourite reads of this year, and I strongly recommend kicking off your 2021 reading with this one.

DETRANSITION, BABY by Torrey Peters is seriously SO GOOD! Right after reading chapter one I was immediately hooked to keep reading based on the unique storyline. This debut novel is about Reese, a transgender woman, and her ex, Ames, who detransitioned and his pregnant girlfriend. It’s a complicated love and parenthood triangle revolving around the baby.
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I really liked how throughout the book we would flip back and forth between past and present to learn the whole arc of Reese and Ames’s relationship. There was one point in the book that even made me cry. I loved all the underlying emotion in this book.
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There were definitely a lot of intense parts to read dealing with sexuality and gender but I was completely invested in this story and these characters. This is a stunning book!

This book is well written and has good character development I just couldn’t personally get into the story and found it a little bit of a struggle to keep reading. Either way it just left a little lacking for me personally. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Jumping from acid and witty to heartbreaking and honest, DETRANSITION, BABY is a deep character study of three women, and of womanhood and motherhood itself. The sharp observational style encloses a deeply felt heart. The moments where hope breaks through are all the more affecting because of the book's baseline tendency towards a wry, cynical narrative voice. The victory here is not in the attainment of motherhood and domestic life, but in these characters slowly becoming honest. They're all flawed, messy people, finely drawn and psychologically complex, freed from "likeability" and instead given room to breathe. Ames' emotional distancing/dissociation and its relation to shame particularly stood out to me. An impressive, compelling debut.

The premise of this book was so fascinating to me, and Torrey Peters largely delivered on the promise of an intricate and complex look at gender and how we are all socialized to gender norms. My attention was captured from the beginning, and I felt attached to each of the main characters by the end of the book. Peters created complex and challenging characters that were believable and sympathetic.

I think it's crucial for us to keep telling queer stories, and this one was fantastic.

Yes! All the stars for this own voices novel about three women and motherhood. The three main characters were so rich and complex. I loved the idea of family and community that is highlighted in this novel as well as the very prevalent narrative that the way most folks do things is not the only way. Will be on lots of best of lists for 2021, I am sure.