Alexa, play 3 by Britney Spears
I'll warn you this might not be a title you want to read in light of recent news.
“The question, for Reese: Were married men just desperately attractive to her?”
My timing for this review is terrible for two reasons: 1) It’s already the last week of June and therefore my last week to squeeze out my reviews for Pride and 2) with the recent overturning of Roe v Wade, a novel about three women attempting to navigate motherhood in a strange, poly-esqe relationship might not be what you want to read about right now.
If that is the case, then feel free to skip this email. This review will always be here and you can come back to it whenever you feel more comfortable — hopefully during a time where birthing people are able to exercise autonomy over their own bodies without any kind of government interference. But if you wanted a book where women are able to explore what it means to be just that, then hopefully Detransition, Baby will give you the escapism that you need.
Years after breaking up with her girlfriend, fka Amy, nka Ames, Reese deals with the loss of the life she used to know by sleeping with married men. This is until Ames, returns into her life with an unorthodox proposal. He wants her to raise a baby with him and his boss/partner, Katrina, giving Reese the chance to be the mother she’s always wanted to be.
In conservative circles, it is not uncommon to be challenged on what it means to be a woman; to be honest, as someone with only a vague attachment to my own gender, it’s a question, I’ve never really known how to answer either. Because yes, you don’t need to have a vagina to be considered a woman, and yes, gender is indeed a spectrum. So what does it then mean to be one? What makes someone a woman, other than them identifying as such? In 335 pages, Torrey Peters gives Reese, Ames and Katrina the space to explore their own identities, as complex and problematic as it can be.
And problematic it can get. None of these women are truly likeable characters, which is to say none of them are perfect. Peters is excellent at crafting morally-grey characters; just as you think one of them is blameless, the rug is quickly pulled from under your feet as another piece of the character’s history is revealed. We are given time to see how all of them have made, and continue to make, mistakes as they try to form some kind of family nucleus.
But their moral greyness, their nuance, their humanness is what beats at the heart of this novel. Detransition, Baby asks of us what makes a woman perfect then points out our hypocrisy in expecting more out of trans women than we do for their cis counterparts. Are we disappointed in their actions because they were objectively bad to do? Or have we subconsciously allowed their transness colour how we view them?
At one point, Reese questions why she has to prove she’s worthy to be a mother while cis women never have to; an argument that Katrina immediately pushes back on as a woman of colour. We often paint parenthood as a question of when a family is financially and physically ready; I think we often neglect being emotionally ready as well, not just in the sense of being emotionally ready for the family structure to change, but if we’re emotionally healthy enough to bring a blank canvas in the world. Is a trans woman who is regularly sleeping with married men as a form of gender validation, a trans woman who has detransitioned to live as a man, and a cis woman fresh out of a divorce and who’s just found out her partner is not a cis man as she had thought ready to raise a child together?
There’s a reason why this book was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction when it debuted. Detransition, Baby has occupied my mind long after I had put the book down, and that is an impact I love in my books. If you’ve ever questioned your own gender identity, if you’ve ever considered being a parent with any seriousness, this novel is definitely required reading.
Rating: 5/5
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is published by One World and was released in 2021.