The first-ever trans nominee for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Torrey Peters explores the ideas of parenthood, grief, and family through conflict of an unwanted pregnancy. Detransition, Baby is a rare book for many reasons.
Peters’s narrator is unreliable. This, perhaps was a purposeful choice, to demonstrate the inevitable unpredictability that defines trans lives and to break away from the fixated storytelling that mirrors cisgender existence. Thus, the everyday hazards of being fiercely oneself in the structurally unviable, exclusionary space that we call society get verbalised in this book. Peters weaves the narrative in a way that moves trans politics to the forefront without being preachy.
The trans triangle
Revolving around the life of two transgender people – Reese, and Amy/Ames – and one cisgender woman, Katrina, the book opens with the narrator verbalising Reese’s self-doubt: “Were married men just desperately attractive to her? Or was the pool of men who were available to her as a transwoman only those who had already locked down a cis wife and could now ‘explore’ with her?”
Reese seems to have never learnt from hooking up with cismen. Though she has acquired the comforts of a middle-class living by getting a job, having been left by Amy, whom she loved and with whom she came “as close to domesticity as she figured possible for a trans girl,” she craves to exercise her womanhood.
Amy, who has now detransitioned to become Ames, works in a corporate setup; however, he hasn’t come out to anyone in the office about his transsexual past. Even though he carefully navigated his relationship with Katrina, his boss, who is an Asian, she shocks him one day by announcing that she is pregnant with his child.
Ames tells her “that he was sterile – not that he’d been a transsexual woman with atrophied balls.” Unable to fathom the situation at hand, and thinking it of as a chance to bring Reese back into his life, Ames calls Reese to ask if she is willing to co-parent his and Katrina’s baby, without consulting Katrina, who after several miscarriages in the past is determined to have this child.
Narratives and critiques
Reese’s dilemma – whether to accept this offer from her ex, who cheated on her, or not – drives the plot. Later, her acceptance of Katrina and Ames’s situation makes her part of the process of conception, as she finds the trans way of getting pregnant. But, as a transwoman, she’s sure that even though she will have a child, womanhood will not come to her as it does to ciswomen.
Katrina takes this as an opportunity to cis-plain to Reese her validity and authenticity as a woman, so what she is trans. To which Reese replies: “Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It’s assumed why. The question ciswomen get asked is: Why don’t you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn’t have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I’m not cis. I’m trans.”
The novel is as much a work of fiction as it is a fierce critique of armchair activism. Peters, through her story, takes a dig at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), too: “...like most of the big gay orgs, focused on messaging and lobbying; the money was not for trans people, it was to facilitate proper discussion about such topics as trans people.”
She doesn’t spare the “loudest” mainstream voices either that try to ‘educate’ people about transness in a few simple steps and generalise it. Lambasting people who proffer guidebooks and cheat sheets to navigate a conversation with a trans person, “to avoid offending them,” she writes: “This is what happens when the only trans voices out there are the loudest, shrillest trans girls constantly publishing dogmatic Trans 101 hot takes to rebuke the larger cis public.”
At this juncture, it’s useful to circle back to the recent feud between Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Akwaeke Emezi to understand and appreciate what Emezi meant by Ngozi Adichie’s comment “transwomen are transwomen” is an erasure of trans, that it invites violence on them.
It’s worth noting how Peters’s nomination attracted an open letter, in which signatories called out the Women’s Prize for Fiction for including “male authors” and suggested that it makes them “unworthy of their own prize.” It’s not only ridiculous to misgender an author and deny her dignity, it clearly shows that the signatories, among whom were dead writers, are yet to embrace the growing definition of feminism, leave alone understand how trans people are disenfranchised from writing their own narratives directly or indirectly by the publishing world.
Peters’s Detransition, Baby appears combatant against both heteronormative storytelling and choice feminists’ templatised writing. Her ideas and humorous critique of everyday living and diversity within queer contours make for a joyous read. In a way, her writing exhibits her own desire to not “put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans.”
Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters, Serpent’s Tail.