Has anyone here actually READ Detransition, Baby?
I have; lent by a friend who transitioned MTF in the mid-‘90s. (I mention this because it probably colors my view of the book, and I’ll refer to it where relevant.)
Peters is a competent writer but this book is not objectively great. It meanders and includes all kinds of anecdotes, asides, cultural political commentary, and conversations that don’t advance the plot or develop the characters. Much feels shoehorned in, like the author wanted to include certain items for the sake of it. It reminded me quite a bit of Girls (the Lena Dunham TV series) in that way. I got the feeling that the author might be skilled/experienced in writing short stories or opinion pieces or blog entries, but hasn’t learned how to structure, plot, and prune a novel. I kept wishing for an editor.
The narrative is frustratingly choppy, cutting from one scene to another at the point of greatest tension (end of season television cliffhanger-style) and sometimes missing out the most interesting parts of the story. For example, when one character gets drunk and blurts out something shocking at a business dinner, we cut to another character going out to a comedy club on the same night and chatting and reminiscing for pages. When we finally get back to the action - I want to know how the prospective clients reacted, and also what motivated a seasoned professional to get so drunk in those circumstances in the first place! - nothing. The character is semi-coherent in a taxi on the way back to her hotel. We never find out what happened.
The book is misogynist, no question. To be clear: I am not suggesting that the author has any animosity toward women as a group. Misogynists, unlike sexists, often don’t. Misogynists can love women, misogynists can be women. But what they also characteristically do is accept things and even promote things that hurt women in the world, because they accept and disregard harm done to women as they would not accept and disregard harm done to men, or to people in general. Someone above mentioned Andrea Long Chu and that was my first comparison as well.
The book alternates between the perspectives of Reese and her ex Ames (fka Amy), both told in the first person. The third member of their triangle, Ames’s pregnant boss/girlfriend Katrina, plays a major part in the story but we only see her through the eyes of the other two characters. Amy (in flashbacks) has a lot of thoughts about wanting to be dominated which are tied in to fantasies about being a girl, then post-transition seems happy in a relationship with Reese for a time, and then seems to be having absolutely vanilla sex with Katrina after detransitioning.
Reese uncritically gets off on sexual danger and violence and humiliation of the kind that is, in real life, disproportionately nonconsensually directed against women. Possibly some women feel that way outside of fiction - for example, Histoire d'O was written by a woman, albeit for the purpose of exciting her sadomasocistic male lover rather than for a general audience. (Maybe it’s just Reese’s personality? Maybe it’s due to some past trauma?) What makes this book overtly misogynist, though, is the relentless and overriding narrative that all women feel this way and have throughout history. There’s no critique of this from the author or any other character. It is not only treated as the character’s belief, but as a fact. There’s no acknowledgement at all that that these attitudes actually put women in more danger and promote a culture of misogyny, hardcore porn-as-(faux)-reality, and rape apology. I’d criticise any writer for that: male or female, trans or not.
I can’t imagine too many women enjoying reading this book when the real world is so bleakly misogynistic and looking like it’s getting worse at the moment. For people who really don’t “see” misogyny (or see it and feel other than upset about it) I can believe they would gloss over the monologues about how the essence of woman is an object to be used and try to get back to the action. (I don’t think many people are going to be interested in the sex scenes which mostly just sound like, well, bad sex.) There’s also a short passage about incest, with Reese musing on how she is a mother to the younger Amy as well as a lover, and therefore has a kinship with all mothers. Again, Dunham: that weird, non-self-aware crossing of a perceived cultural line (or for the more traditionally minded a taboo) and relishing it not for its own sake but in the belief that others will find it edgy.
The book is also very NYC-specific and seems kind of retro although the setting for the main story line is roughly present-day. It has a kind of Kathy Acker/Sarah Schulman New York Before it Gentrified feel - which I enjoyed, and I think a lot of readers will. Reese’s (and formerly Amy’s) social group is insular with (it seems) only trans people in the group - which might be a necessary plot device to set up the conflict for Ames over leaving and returning to the community. (There’s even more weird Dunhamish stuff here, in that the author kind of side-references black and Latina transwomen and briefly tells us what “they’re” like, but doesn’t include them except as an apparent checklist item).
Ames explains to Katrina that he thinks of the community as orphaned elephants; they’ve been traumatized by not having any older trans people around to guide them, no blueprint of what it’s like to “do trans” and just get on with life once you’ve figured out you are trans and made any necessary social, medical, legal, etc. adjustments. Ames says this explains their anger, violence, etc. toward each other and the rest of the world. I found that an interesting insight but - and here’s where my aforementioned friend’s perspective comes in - I wished for some discussion or acknowledgement of how older trans people, people who have transitioned more than a few years ago, and/or trans people who are indeed getting on with life and interacting with the outside world are now rejected, threatened, and silenced as “truscum” and “transphobic” and “traitors” by their community. Which is ironic, because their success is what Ames/Peters seems to be saying that younger trans people and people who have transitioned more recently want but don’t know how to get - because they have no elders or role models. Head meets desk moment, for me.
I’m not normally an advocate of strict “stay in your own demographic” rules for writers, but here - the old advice “write what you know” might have been helpful. The author isn’t detransitioned and the detrans storyline is a weak point of the book, which is bad as the publicity hinges on it. But then, Ames isn’t really detransitioned; when Katrina is struggling to understand Ames’s transition and detransition, she says she can’t opt out of being a woman or get rid of the physical disadvantages or cultural baggage even if she wanted to. Ames responds that it’s the same for him - he’s still a woman and still trans, just not “doing trans”. I wanted Katrina to engage further, but she just acquiesces - furthering my growing view that Katrina (the only non-white main character in the book, and the only natal woman) is a cardboard cut-out stereotype.
We know from Evaristo that this prize isn’t looking for books of literary merit, so the above might help someone that’s thinking of reading the book, but won’t help the prize committee. She says they are looking for good storytelling and a story that hasn’t been told. Is there good storytelling here? Sure, mostly in the flashbacks - but it doesn’t come together as a unitary whole. Is it a new story that has never been told? I’ve been thinking about this a lot - there are not a lot of novels written for adults with adult transpeople as the protagonist or narrator or main character(s). But there are a lot of nonfiction books very similar to this one, minus the not-so-strong fictional plot line: Long Chu, Julia Serrano, etc. There’s also a lot of generally mediocre-to-bad YA fiction with trans protagonists which touches on similar themes (without the sex and the overt misogyny) almost all of it by people who transitioned well into adulthood.
I feel like we’re in a similar place with literature by and about trans people now as we were in the 80s/90s with literature by and about lesbians: where baddish or at least not goodish stuff gets hyped and people in the group love it because they’re desperate for something - anything! - that reflects their world view and there’s not much. And people outside the community feel like it’s all OK now, because there’s “representation” - when in fact it wasn’t OK and books with lesbian characters were being published willy-nilly regardless of quality - but ONLY if the lesbians were doing lesbian things all through the book, and only for a lesbian market. I hope the whole trend toward self-publishing and accessibility online hastens the arrival of good books with trans narrators and protagonists and main characters just existing and doing whatever, and trans authors writing freely AND WELL on a variety of subjects.
My verdict on Detransition, Baby : get rid of Ames and Katrina, get rid of the misogyny, give Reese some self confidence, and then give her a murder mystery to solve or a mountain to climb or a space demons to battle to get her mind off the navel-gazing. THAT could be a good book. Oh, and put some fucking black people in it - this is NYC we’re talking about!
To be fair, I haven’t read all of the other books nominated and I did see that Naoise Dolan’s overtly racist and colonialist Exciting Times is on the long list too, so hey - I’m open to the view that Peters’s book might come across as brilliant by comparison, especially to people who are used to calling out racism but not misogyny. I’m cheering for Yaa Gyaasi, though, who - in addition to being a genuinely excellent writer - manages to do both.