Detransition, Baby

dorian@cutebook.club reviewed Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

My review of 'Detransition Baby'

5 stars

Another just stellar book! 2020 was a great year for some phenomenal fiction that I know I'll be returning to. Aimes as a character really spoke to me personally. His journey of detransition and return to masculinity was a window for me to consider my tenuous relationship with it. As a nonbinary folk I haven't attempted to sever my connection to it as fully as Aimes did during the transition to Amy (at least, not externally/publically). But I recognized a lot of myself in him. The ways in which transition demands authenticity, and how absolutely terrifying that is. And especially how much masculinity in our current society offers the emotional shield of never having to be authentic.

This book is a must read in my opinion. Whether your are cis or trans, and especially if you love someone who falls into one of those boxes which you do not.

sarah reviewed Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Yes.

5 stars

I am still processing this book and probably will be thinking about it for a while still. I really enjoyed it—even reading late at night and in various states of lack of focus, it made me read slowly and thoughtfully. The complexities of gender and bodies and desire are more complex here than I’ve seen in other novels and it’s powerful for that. And the complexities of the main characters!! Their assumptions about cis straight women are laughably simplistic, which is the point. As a cis queer mother it was a bit weird to read with one foot in and one foot out of the assumed viewpoints of the book, in a way that is a lot different than reading the simplistic assumptions about women in cis men’s books (hi, trained as a Shakespeare scholar, have so much experience with handling that sort of disassociation). I should look around for …

I am still processing this book and probably will be thinking about it for a while still. I really enjoyed it—even reading late at night and in various states of lack of focus, it made me read slowly and thoughtfully. The complexities of gender and bodies and desire are more complex here than I’ve seen in other novels and it’s powerful for that. And the complexities of the main characters!! Their assumptions about cis straight women are laughably simplistic, which is the point. As a cis queer mother it was a bit weird to read with one foot in and one foot out of the assumed viewpoints of the book, in a way that is a lot different than reading the simplistic assumptions about women in cis men’s books (hi, trained as a Shakespeare scholar, have so much experience with handling that sort of disassociation). I should look around for trans women’s reviews of this. But I thought it was great.

Ell

rated it

Sept. 20, 2022

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