Torrey Peters did not write Detransition, Baby so that you or anyone else could better understand trans people or, god forbid, be a better ally. “Those tend to be very shallow readings,” she says, not judgmentally but with regret. She does not want readers missing out on a deeper experience by earnestly approaching her debut novel – about relationships and the lies told to sustain them – as a 101: Intro to Trans course.
Yes, two of her main characters are trans. And yes, it is hard to see trans people as anything other than an “issue” these days. But her protagonists are also a single, directionless Brooklynite in her late 30s, a Chinese–American professional who becomes unexpectedly pregnant, and a messy man with a so-weird-it-just-might-work plan to unite them.
Peters, who was raised in Chicago by her lawyer mother and professor father but now lives in New York, points to the recent spate of “suggested reading” lists aimed at white people eager to understand systemic and institutional racism. The danger, she says, lies in readers approaching literature as homework, with the well-meaning yet superficial goals of grasping concepts and burnishing credentials. “The idea that you would read Jesmyn Ward for credentials is, like, you’ve missed the point of the beauty of her writing – because you think it’s for education. It’s not. It’s to see yourself in these characters, to identify, to have an experience of melding with another mind.”
It is not simply that Peters, who turned 40 in July, is uncomfortable with the idea of her novel as “essentially a complicated etiquette guide”. The truth is, back in 2018, she did not write Detransition, Baby with much awareness, let alone consideration, of “the trans debate” being stoked in very different ways on either side of the Atlantic. “At the time, when I was writing, I didn’t know it would have this kind of response. I was just thinking about what was going to be funny for my friends and what was pertinent to our lives.”
It sounds like a common and reasonable mindset for an author. Yet I, as a trans journalist and writer based in the UK, am taken aback. Is she really telling me there was recently a place and time when trans writers could forget about seeing themselves as politicised and instead operate with total creative freedom, simply as writers?
After months of promoting the book internationally, she recognises my amazement and explains further: “I was really surprised. When I published my book, all these UK people said a book like this couldn’t have been written [there] because of the ways I centred myself and the liberties I took to think that trans people were just kind of ‘every day’. I had the freedom to imagine trans people as just quotidian, boring, flawed people. I wasn’t engaging with trans people as an embattled group.”
The British publication of Detransition, Baby was actually something of a baptism by fire. When it was longlisted for the Women’s prize for fiction, Peters went from being a cool, little-known author in her native US – where she describes trans equality as a wedge issue deployed by “the fringes of the right” during election periods – to a lightning rod for controversy and scrutiny in the UK. As part of the nomination process, Peters was asked to submit “proof” that she is legally a woman, the same request that provoked nonbinary Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi to boycott the prize last year. Peters refused, on the basis that it would set a retrograde and discriminatory precedent and that, given different legal systems in different countries, “none of this is coherent”.
I suggest that Reese, the book’s main protagonist, would have found the outcry over Peters’ inclusion from a minority of cis individuals fairly predictable and boring. “I think that something can be boring and still hurt your pride,” she replies. The media attention and backlash came as a shock and, despite the thick skin most queer people with any kind public profile cultivate, she felt destabilised.
“People who are just rabid in their bigotry can’t actually hurt me because they’re so obviously deranged that they marginalise themselves. But that wasn’t initially clear to me. You know, with the horrible things that were said about me, for about two weeks, I was like, ‘Are people going to believe this? Is this going to fly?’ And then, over time, you realise that the logical flaws, the clear biases and bigotry, are evident to people other than me. It did weigh on me but I think, ultimately, if one wants to be a good artist, one can’t write defensively.”
She came off Twitter for a while and that helped. Yet, even virtually, an ocean away, becoming an unwitting subject in “the trans debate” left its mark. “I’m going to have to work hard to recapture the imaginative space that I worked in, because it has been impinged upon by the UK response to this book.”
There was a silver lining. The lack of a moral panic over trans equality in the US means Peters is just another debut novelist hoping people will read her book. Over here, alongside the “higher level of persecution”, there was also more support and interest: “I saw people were excited about it and wanted to think about gender. They wanted to think about heteronormativity, the family structure. They wanted to question things.” Ultimately, she says: “There was a beautiful sort of flourishing around the Women’s prize that I’m profoundly grateful for – and to some degree, I guess I’m grateful to the bigots.”
When reading Detransition, Baby, a book partly about the joys and complexities of having kids while queer, I was not thinking about any backlash or prizes. As a queer, transgender man who became pregnant to start my family (coincidentally, at the same time this book was taking form), I was excited to read something that might reflect my own experiences and thought processes for the very first time. So precious was the opportunity that I read the book as slowly as possible, over several months, only finishing the day before Peters and I were due to talk. And, thanks to being currently pregnant again, I felt its many emotional highs and lows intensely.
There is one fleeting reference to a birthing trans man in the book; he and his trans wife have a baby of their own. I know through my own community that this kind of family structure is increasingly common – on the relatively tiny scale of the trans population overall – but Peters frames it in quasi-mythical terms. Is this genuinely how she, as a writer and as a trans person, views such family-making options? Not at all, comes the reply. “I wrote like 50 pages of [Reese] going down to Florida and hanging out with this couple in the swamps of Florida. I really loved those characters.” But it came towards the end of the story, which is no time to introduce new characters, so they were cut. Instead, they serve briefly to illustrate Reese’s self-destructive tendency to assume that such things are “for other people”, not her.
There is not much trans male experience reflected in Detransition, Baby, but it does not lack for it. Instead, Peters paints much-needed perspectives on family and, with poignant specificity, motherhood, from a rich cast of trans and cis women. In trying to pose a question tactfully, I ramble about the difficulties of trans parenthood, both within and outside our communities: I may know why and how I started my family but this gives me zero insight about the experiences of trans women. Peters cuts to the heart of it with queer, New York candor: “Motherhood is the hardest thing for a trans woman to get, if she didn’t have a family when she transitioned.”
Trans women, she says, can find jobs, have sex and, increasingly, be creatively expressive on their own terms, but a family unit, and motherhood specifically, often remain out of reach. In the book, this is one iteration of “the Sex and the City problem”. All women face it in their own way, Peters says, and collectively they create different responses to it generation after generation. The “problem” is the desire for all the core elements of a fulfilling, adult life. Each of Sex and the City’s four main characters predominantly represent one element and none attains them all: Carrie is free to be creative, Samantha has unlimited, satisfying sex, Miranda has a fulfilling career and Charlotte has a stable, longterm relationship. In the show, the desire for motherhood is less discussed and less well-defined; even for cis women these days, it seems like the trickiest kind of fulfilment to attain. That is something Peters, and by extension her characters, can relate to.
Throughout the book, Reese grapples with the idea of parenting a child alongside her ex-partner Ames and his current girlfriend Katrina. The thing is that Reese, a self-assured trans woman, dated Ames when he was living as a decidedly un-self-assured trans woman called Amy. Katrina, a Chinese-Jewish American, is straight and cis. So Ames represents the “detransition” of the title, though his identity remains an engaging, non-judgmental open question throughout.
These are the primary ingredients. Philosophically though, the book seems less concerned with “queer parenthood” than one might expect. This is partly because Peters is much more interested in real people, queer or otherwise, than she is queer theory, fictional or otherwise. At the end of the book, Reese, Ames and Katrina’s nebulous idea of a family is still just that: “The difference between the beginning and the end isn’t that they’ve made all these decisions. It’s that the ways that they lie to each other, that they lie to themselves, have been stripped away.”
When it comes to actually developing ideas of family, Peters is primarily focused on trans motherhood, which is fitting for the charmingly self-absorbed Reese, but also has layers beyond plain old biological parenthood. The difficulty of motherhood for trans women, as Peters explores so deftly, is not just what is wanted but what is at risk of being left behind: “There’s a fear that all of this culture that the older generation have built in terms of taking care of younger trans women, in terms of resources and ways of behaving around each other, that that will be lost. That basically people will say, ‘Oh, what matters most is biological motherhood.’”
I ask if she thinks older trans women also feel resentment about having had fewer options? This is something I have heard expressed by older trans men. Perhaps having been lied to about or socially stifled in their reproductive options, a small number of my elders express their justifiable anger and grief in the form of judgment of younger trans men who now dare contemplate pregnancy as a route to fatherhood. But, just as trans men do not have a community culture or history directly analogous to trans women, Peters sees a difference between the judgment I have encountered and the fear her book explores: “The institution of trans motherhood and the traditions of that won’t matter the second that people can have families and children. It’s less resentment so much as it is fear that an entire way of living – that older generations have put so much thought and love and sweat and tears into – will disappear in favour of having children in a biological way, and sort of assimilating.”
Above all, however, Peters wondered: “Why?” Why does motherhood, in the sense of parenthood, elude trans women? Or more to the point: “Why can’t trans women have a desire to be a mother that isn’t wildly theoretical, based on all sorts of ethical considerations? What if you just think that being a mom would be meaningful and satisfying?” If she went “right at it”, maybe she would find some answers. “And so [this book is] an intellectual project but what actually drove me to do that work was a feeling of an emotional lack in my life, a thing that was missing. I was looking for ways to feel less desperate, to feel safe, to feel cared for in the ways that many other women around me seem to also be moving towards.”
