When Torrey Peters began work on her debut novel five years ago, its premise was not yet the political hot-button it is today. Detransition, Baby tells the story of an interconnected trio in New York: Reese, a transgender woman who wants a baby; her ex-girlfriend Amy, who detransitioned and now lives as Ames; and Katrina, Ames’s boss and pregnant partner, as they consider raising the child together as an unlikely triad.
“It was a different political moment. That was before a lot of the ways that detransition has been weaponised,” Peters (39) says on a Zoom call from Brooklyn.
In the intervening years, the relatively rare phenomenon was brought to mainstream attention firstly by a controversial 2018 cover story in The Atlantic magazine, then by the Bell v Tavistock case, which resulted in a ruling that under-16s in England and Wales need the approval of a court to be prescribed puberty blockers.
“Those sensationalised things, that stuff hadn’t happened [when I wrote Detransition, Baby], but people were definitely anxious that it made it seem like ‘if you transition, you might have regret, so never transition’,” says Peters, who started transitioning at 30.
“What I wanted was to talk about the conversation as I see it exists, without the politics. Why can’t we talk about regret when it comes to transition in the same way that we talk about regret with everything else? People move across the country all the time for new jobs. Sometimes it doesn’t work out, which doesn’t mean that you were bad at the job. It also doesn’t mean that nobody else should ever move across the country for a new job.”
Yet Detransition, Baby, which was published in January, arrived at a moment when trans people’s very existence has become highly politicised. Debate about the book erupted last month after Peters was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and subsequently targeted in an open letter by the Wild Women Writing Club that called her nomination an “insult”. The Women’s Prize later issued a statement condemning the online abuse levelled at Peters.
“People in Ireland and the UK had told me that it was different there, and I didn’t really believe them,” she says. “I was like, ‘yeah, OK, I’ve seen transphobia before’. Then when it happened, I was like, ‘Oh, this is what people have been trying to tell me’.”
“The intent to destroy, I guess I’ll say, is of a quality that I’ve never encountered prior to this, and not in the United States — and there’s definitely transphobia in the United States. That was quite new to me, and it really took me aback. In some ways, it staggered me.”
The news that Detransition, Baby reached Number 5 on The Times’ bestseller list last week was, she says, “so gratifying”, as though readers were sending her a message: “Don’t let that small ugliness overshadow all this other stuff.”
“I’ve been lucky that, partly because it was so loud and in some ways so stupid, people noticed, and they rallied. And I hope that the next time it happens, they do it for girls in the UK and in Ireland, because ultimately, there’s an ocean between me and that noise. If it’s going to happen first to somebody, I’m glad it happened to me.”
Peters previously self-published two novellas, after approaching publishers and finding they were only interested in a “trans 101 for cis[gender] readership”. In the US, the publication of Detransition, Baby by Random House, one of the “big five” publishers, marked a milestone for trans authors.
Peters is “hopeful” about the industry opening up to more diverse voices, pointing out that change is coming not out of guilt or an obligation to rectify the past, but because such authors produce “wildly successful books”.
“It wasn’t because they’re like, ‘Oh, we need a trans author to round out our list’. They’re like, ‘We have a good book that’s gonna make us money,’” she says, adding that she didn’t set out to write for a cisgender audience.
“Cis women want to know what trans women know. And they don’t want the dumbed-down version of it — the same way that I don’t want some primer to race, I want to read James Baldwin, I want to read Toni Morrison. I want to read people who are running at a sprint. The appeal of all these different voices is precisely because they don’t slow down.”
One of the first things Peters came up with was the title, which she jokingly refers to as “a very abbreviated plot summary” — there’s a detransition, there’s a baby — but also a neat way of describing the options she felt were available to her as a trans woman. “I could fall in one of two directions: if I can figure out how to live in my previous gender in a way that felt OK to me, or if I could fall into motherhood — and I think society gives a real legitimacy to the kind of women who are mothers — I could live. But instead, I was poised on the knife’s edge of the comma, which is lacerating, but unable to fall in either direction.”
While much trans literature focuses on coming out and the early years of transition, Peters wanted to explore what happens next. The start of her transitioning process coincided with the end of her marriage. By her mid-thirties, she was facing what she calls the “Sex and the City problem”, which Reese elucidates in Detransition, Baby.
The problem suggests that women have four paths to find meaning in life, as represented by the characters in the show: “Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie.”
Peters intended the book, in particular the ending, to offer “a challenge to readers” to think about how to solve that problem.
“By the time I was 34, I was on the far side of divorce, I was on the far side of transition,” she says. “I was just like, ‘Okay, now what?’.”
She recalls living in “a dingy apartment with mouldy carpeting”, unlike in her 20s, when she was married with a comfortable home and job. “I had this period where I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t gonna work for me. Maybe I just can’t hack it’. And it wasn’t because I was wrong about my gender — I just didn’t know how to make this work.”
‘Androgynous Reservoir Dog’
She adds: “I think the closest I came was that I went to Guadalajara with a friend who was getting some gender surgeries. I hadn’t been able to change my marker on my passport, and I looked really different, but I just didn’t want to go through customs in Mexico and be like, ‘No, it’s really me’,” she says. She pulled out an old black suit and wore it while flying, only to land and discover the airline had lost her luggage, forcing her to spend two weeks in the one suit.
“I had nothing to do except wander around in this suit, like the lost androgynous Reservoir Dog. I felt so distant from myself, but also, I noticed that people gave me a weird kind of respect and space,” she says. “That character that I became, that was the beginning of Ames.”
Ames makes a careful distinction between “being trans” and “doing trans”: while a person can know that they’re trans, the effort of living as a trans person in a transphobic world can prove too difficult. Peters says that distinction feels “true” to her: “I lived my life in my 20s as a man. I was trans in my 20s, that was a thing I was and that I knew, but I wasn’t willing to do it. I was willing to sort of hedge around the edges, like ‘I’ll be part time’ or ‘I’ll dress up on weekends’, but I wasn’t really ‘doing’ it. I think when you make that distinction between being and doing, there’s a political act in it.”
The novel doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable aspects of trans life, including violence, financial instability and suicide. Yet it is also playful and sexy and laugh-out-loud funny. Peters wanted it to be “soapy and pulpy”. When asked about her use of the word “transexual” rather than “transgender”, she shrugs and says: “I can choose the medicalised, more sanitised word, or I can choose the 70s exploitation word. It’s simply the more fun word. It has sex in it, you know?”
Detransition, Baby is being adapted for television by two former Grey’s Anatomy producers, with a pilot written by Peters. She says the script is even funnier and soapier than the novel, and in a bit of fantasy casting, includes a role for Taylor Swift.
It remains to be seen whether Swift will sign on, but for now, Peters is working on her next novel, “a queer financial thriller” pitched as “Hustlers meets Breaking Bad meets The Great Gatsby”.
And she isn’t shying away from sensitive topics. “Money is a thing that is very, very difficult for people to talk about, especially with transness,” she says. “Who can afford surgeries? Who can pass because they have money? I’m really interested in that because I think it’s, in some ways, one of the most dangerous things to talk about, much more than detransition. It seems, to me, ripe to talk about.”
‘Detransition, Baby’ is out now from Profile Books
