Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Detransition, Baby

Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

295 reviews

maeverose's review against another edition

Maybe I’ll revisit this someday?

It just wasn’t really what I was expecting. I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting. The main characters are very messy people who make questionable decisions, which on one hand is nice to see because it allows trans people to be messy and human just like everyone else without the expectation of perfect representation, but on the other hand, I don’t really care to read about Reese’s questionable sex life for a huge chunk of the book (well, the beginning at least). I feel like all I know about her is she’s trans, has terrible taste in men and little self worth. I also (as a childfree person) really didn’t like how the characters were going about the whole parenting thing. I stopped somewhere in the middle of chapter two, but the way Katrina was like ‘I’m only having the baby if I have a co parent’ made me feel like she didn’t actually want a baby and should probably just get the abortion. As well as Ames using the pregnancy seemingly just as an excuse to kind of get back together with Reese in a way. It bothers me so much seeing people become parents for stupid reasons, and the characters in this book were all way too messy to care for a child, and two of them didn’t even seem like they wanted to.

I have no objective issues with the book, it’s just not for me.

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lanid's review against another edition

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emotional reflective

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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mmikenaite's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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sorcha's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful reflective sad

3.75

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effievee's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

While interesting, I really struggled to get into this book. In part, I think it was the way it was written — the back and forth between characters and time periods made the book feel choppy and disconnected. The entire time I was reading, I never fell into the story. It just felt like I was reading — not experiencing it. The insights about being trans were the highlight for me. I felt deep sorrow for the characters who wanted so deeply to be themselves in ways society or biology would not allow.

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bookwormbi's review against another edition

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challenging funny informative reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Whatever I feel about this book, it is a fascinating read. I have a counter argument for every opinion I have about the book, which makes it very difficult to boil down my thoughts into something that makes sense. To me, this book is what happens when a white trans woman is terrified of writing the trans equivalent of Girls, and then, inevitably, writes the trans equivalent of Girls. This is most obvious in the book’s treatment of race and identity politics. It took me a moment to figure out whether Peters was a self aware antiracist white writer writing white characters who were clumsy about race, or if she herself was clumsy about race. (Spoiler alert: it’s the latter.) Katrina is the mouthpiece for the racial considerations that Reese and Ames sidestep, but it just got exhausting to listen to her constantly fighting with clueless white people. To be clear, the concerns Katrina brings up are important and I appreciate Peters’s attempt to bring a different perspective into her chronicle of Ames and Reese’s privileged experience of transness, but as a person of color, it hurt my heart to imagine Katrina having this fight with Ames and Reese for the rest of her life. At no point does the narrative acknowledge the emotional labor Katrina is putting into this whole experience not just as a woman, but as a woman of color. Reese and Ames then marshal their trans experiences against her, and it just turns into this very futile game of oppression Olympics in which Peters, try as she might to detach herself from the outcome, ultimately lands her sympathies with the white women.

I got the impression that much of what I disliked about Detransition, Baby was Peters’s attempt to be write a story that could ostensibly be for all trans women from a very narrow perspective, instead of owning that narrowness. The best parts of the book—the Sex and the City Problem, the juvenile elephants, the journeys of Reese and Ames’s transitions and detransition and the dissolution of their relationship—were the parts where Peters wrote as a white trans woman for white trans women. In the wider book landscape, there are very few trans stories, and even less stories about trans women, and I understand Peters’s desire to try to universalize her experience a little bit. To her credit, she rarely tries to speak for trans women of color (although she certainly speaks for cis women of color via Katrina), and much of the discussion about race and racism seems to be a well-intentioned attempt to telegraph her awareness of her privilege, so people don’t say things like what I’m saying right now. To be frank, I wish this book could be the trans version of one of the thousands of TV shows that centers cishet white men and doesn’t trouble itself to think about anybody else. Peters is not the first queer or trans writer whose anxiety over whether or not Twitter would call them racist I could feel through the page. I’m tired of it, frankly. I am a trans person of color, I know I am exactly who Peters is afraid of, and I understand why. I can see a version of this book that I dislike because there are no people of color in it and the characters’ racial insensitivities go unchallenged. But to be honest? I think I’d respect that version of the book a bit more.

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