Edit 6.6.21:
I couldn't help but notice this 1-star review that misleadingly quotes a passage of the book. The quote appears to attribute the line, "Every woman adores a fascist" to Torrey Peters. In fact, Peters is quoting Sylvia Plath's poem "Daddy."

Look, if you're the kind of reader who can't handle any book that doesn't serve as a how-to guide for good, clean, unproblematic living, and if you need Woke God to descend on a cloud to tell character and reader alike when someone has done a no-no, I cannot help you.

But if you're going to get mad at an author for that line (not that I think we need to do so at all), get mad at the right one. In this case, the cis woman poet beloved of feminists the internet over. Not the trans woman you're wrongly accusing of misogyny.


I approached Detransition, Baby with dread. How real would it feel to me, and how much would it hurt? But then it was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and the resulting TERF rancor inflamed my spite and gave me the motivation to dig into it. If called to discuss it--either by people who know my life circumstances, or by some Twitter wasp nest I might be tempted to prod--I needed to be informed.

Within the first few pages, my reticence melted away. Torrey Peters writes with an intoxicating authenticity and blend of cynicism and humor. It's a queer voice, a queer recognition of laughing about something because, well, what else are you going to do? And her skill shines in these moments, when she sets up a laugh and then follows it up with an image of pain. It doesn't undercut the humor; it sharpens it into something more knowing and wry. It's a voice similar to what I'm used to hearing on YouTube and from my girlfriend, and the fact that it's coming out of a buzzy book from one of the big five kept surprising me in a wow, I hope tons of people read this, I want Reese Witherspoon to pick it for her book club, I want it to win prizes so cishet people are forced to talk about it way.

This is a character-driven book, so readers drawn in by the unconventional family dynamics in the synopsis and eager for a saga might be disappointed. The baby brings the three characters--Reese, Ames, and Katrina--into proximity with one another, but much more time is spent on their pasts and their relationships to each other, to gender, to sexuality, and to motherhood. The characters are flawed and make various bad decisions, some of which feel redeemed by the end, and some not. Peters writes like someone unafraid to dwell in ambiguity, to present her characters' tangled motivations and unflattering angles. That's not an approach that works for all readers, but it works for me.

Maybe this is a book that works uncommonly well for me, and I should throw in some kind of caveat. An, "Oh hey, if you're not queer and don't have trans people in your life, maybe this won't hit you as hard or even make much sense to you, idk." There might be some barrier to entry here. What would it be like to have this book be the first time you hear about chasers, for instance? Of course, there are worse places to learn about them than here, even if it feels like you've stumbled into an upper-division course without the prereqs.

And I don't want to throw in caveats. I want to throw this book at people and make them read it. Which is probably a selfish impulse: I'm going to have these characters in my mind for a long time, and maybe I just don't want to be alone in that.