When I read a big book, I'm often skeptical and probably overly critical and usually disappointed. DT is all it's touted to be and a little more. Seriously, it has my vote for the Great American Novel, at least in the white author category.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the primary protags, Reese and Ames, are ex-girlfriends and Ames is presenting as guy now. In addition to its Greatness, DT is a love story about friendship and romance, that I won't say transcend gender because they're better for the nuanced gendered relationships. As in all the best writing, through specificity, that nuance is accessible regardless of what your first or secondhand knowledge is of trans and queer communities. Peters probably explains more than she would like to, but doesn't present the story as a trans 101 (at least to my cisgender eye).

I observe the same thing about the language. The Ivy League and Iowa Writers Workshop alum is fluent in academese, poetric description, and political analysis, as evidenced by this characterization of Ames's workplace,

The speculation took on a tone both of lurid and compulsory--to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one's precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism's arbitrary mechanics doesn't satisfy--the heart demands a human explanation. Or at least that's what Ames said to justify his initial crush.

but it feels within reach even for someone with a mediocre education like mine.

I'm often frustrated by love interests in novels seeming overly perfect, but every one of the three in the triangle of central characters is complex and flawed, from Reese's attraction to asshole men, Ames's self-centeredness, and the one who joins later in the book, Katrina, who both gets and deeply doesn't get the othered experience Ames had and Reese is still having as a trans woman in a violently hostile society. Ames and Reese are white, and mixed race Chinese Katrina appears white to many in New York. Peters addresses her characters' racial identities and the differences in white trans women's lives as opposed to those of BIPOC trans women in a way that feels (to me, white cis woman) like an acknowledgment rooted in community and not a token gesture. Peters covers a lot of ground in DT, but one novel cannot everything to all people.

"Yeah, I have the bad habit of saying trans women when I mean white trans women, which is how you can tell I was a white trans woman; it's endemic among white trans women.

I highlighted another ten passages, but I'll leave them for you to discover or not on your own if there's anyone left in my communities who hasn't read Detransition Baby yet. I'm looking forward to reading it again in a year or two.