Detransition, Baby: A Novel

i’ve never felt more annoyed while attempting to like a character. this book is generally about three people: a trans woman, a destransitioned man, and the cis woman carrying that man’s child. i thought this book could show something beautiful in the nontraditional creation of a family, but this book is not that optimistic. (i later found out that that was NOT the intended purpose of this book. my bad! those were just my feelings when i started reading it)

let’s talk about those characters i mentioned.

the detransitioned man, ames, was the most likable character. he struggles with his identity and how he wants to be viewed, and his struggle between what he feels he could be in an ideal society vs what he has to be to be comfortable in the society he lives in was sad and real. i was worried that the topic of detransition wouldn’t be handled well, but it actually felt okay to me (a not trans but queer person). he was the best part of this book.

katrina, the cis woman, was a bit obnoxious. she gets REALLY upset that ames never told her he used to live as a woman. and without spoiling the book, i didn’t like how she handled this at ALL even after she had time to get over the shock of it. also she kind of gets obsessed with using buzzwords to make her sound more queer. i think this was supposed to be a critique…. so maybe that’s okay. but she was SO annoying it’s hard for me to even care.

and then REESE! the trans woman and arguably the main character is so annoying to me. she tries to pass off cheating as a queer or trans thing! she’s obsessed with using her identity to win arguments! like okay i didn’t agree with all her choices which was fine, but if she were a real person, i’d be so mad at the way she honestly makes the rest of us look bad. there’s a part in the book where some other people at the trans picnic warn ames about reese and say she’s toxic and manipulative (or something to that effect) and honestly i would have loved to read a book from them instead.

okay so all that aside, what was the point of this book? peters says “I just wanted to write something funny for my friends” and rejects that this should be read in any way as an education manual on trans people. ok, fair. well i’m glad i’m not your friend because it wasn’t funny. so

Emotionally complex LGBTQ+ novel with in-depth characters. Really excellent read.

I'm an adult, and yet, I don't feel I'll ever be mature enough to have any thoughts about this book. Not when I'm 40, 50, 80 or even dead.
It's a masterpiece.

Honestly, if it wasn't for my book club, I'd have dropped this one. I'm not a fan of non linear story telling and I hate that every time I would get interested in a plot line, the author would cut away to a different plot line. I didn't really like the characters much, Katrina is ALL about herself. So she's announced her pregnancy to her friends, including one who is having trouble conceiving, but now she's going to abort it? I'm totally in agreeance that it is her body, her choice, but it's still a colossal dick move. Ames felt like the only character fully fleshed out, Reese was just a collection of attitudes and postures. And boy howdy was it misogynistic in places. Made my skin crawl a couple times.

Both loved and struggled with this one. What I enjoyed: intriguing, layered characters, some snappy prose and pointed observations of several NYC social scenes, very frank (why is this so unusual?) discussion of sex, exploration of so many themes - what it means to be a mother, a woman, class themes, the nature of desire, and of course what it’s like to exist as a trans woman today. What I struggled with: the premise (and therefore most of the plot). Ames to me was less developed among the main characters and I never felt like his need to have Reese as a co-parent was fully fleshed out. It felt to me like a forced device to bring these three characters together. And then because this novel is ambitious, and I’d venture in part because trans voices are so underrepresented, this novel had a lot of telling rather than showing. Portions were slow for me to get through, weighted by the explication. Ultimately really glad to have read this - and we had a fantastic discussion at my book club. As a half-Asian woman in business myself I was pleasantly surprised to see myself represented in Katrina, so I can only imagine how important this is as a small step towards trans representation (albeit within a specific subset)