Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters

It was almost inevitable that I would have issues with this book. I have reacted strongly against the media’s interest in what they call “Detransitioning” and what I will refer to as “retransitioning”, not just because it is yet another ploy to create a false drama around transitioning used to bait the trans community and their supporters, but because it suggests the withdrawal of something and the taking apart of something constructed. Which is exactly not what trans is about. To see trans as a kind of assembly-kit of identity or a machine for processing gender is an insult to everyone who has at any time questioned their gender-identity and chosen to explore another part of the gender-universe. We are constantly in transition, everybody is, and to seek to reverse a physical commitment is actually to move forwards (or just around, onwards) not backwards. There is no backwards in life, - experience, once gained, is built into us. It should be no surprise that America, which was built on renewal and has a national habit of claiming things for themselves, - the American Century, the Great American Novel, - adopting aspects of history and adapting them to the American mind-set, - has taken trans to itself and is treating it like the commodities it so thrives on. “Detransition, Baby” is one example of how the treatment works. It is awash with life-style and life-style choices, set amongst the entitled echelon of American society who can afford long cab-rides and healthy food. It is also awash with transwomen, roomfuls of them, gangs, aggregations, something you imagine might only apply in New York, so that this experience of trans, whose very essence is individual and beyond categorization, becomes generic. Meanwhile the wider, actual, world beyond this hothouse of self-absorbtion, is almost invisible. Where is history? And yet the novel has become extremely popular, a kind of cause celebre. I have asked myself what particular itch it has scratched and my conclusion is that the very public advance of trans in society, the overall positivity it has brought to the cause of personal realization, has made it the target for people with problematic lives (which is most of us most of the time) who would seek to find a crisis in there somewhere, a disintegrating doubt, a fracture in the structure of trans, to reassure themselves that “these people” are only “like us”, - which of course we are. We claim no more than common humanity and the rights and responsibilities which go with that, but we do reject any idea that what we do is either mechanical or pre-programmed. And yet…. “Detransition, Baby” is not trans-fiction, but a fiction about trans, and in this it fails. It is steeped in style obsessions which are more about gay than trans, and very much about “Baby”. The heavy plotting makes sure that no apparently important aspect of trans goes unvisited, - from this North American perspective anyway. Along the way it works in a lot of trans reference points, way-markers on the journey to transitioning, and various arguments about that process presented as character points-of-view, for which it might be given due credit, if it didn’t feel like a regular character-story dressing in trans for the occasion. One writer it reminded me of was D.H. Lawrence whose grand explorations of personal and psychological pre-occupations have fallen out of favour in the last half-century. I enjoy reading Lawrence but I recognize in “Detransition, Baby” the cloying attention to emotional complexities and moral conundrums, the various dramas it works through, as Lawrence-lite, without the dimension of almost cosmic significance which he gives to his fiction. These are not earth-mothers but drama-queens, in whom a kind of dissociation rules, as though life was about managing your own impression of yourself, and others’ impressions of you. But these are also a kind of Lost Generation, who never had mothers (as in vogue “families”) to support them. The answer, as it says somewhere in the book, is to stand in good lighting. “Detransition, Baby” is a sophisticated read and is recommended reading, especially for those who like sophistication above all. It makes some nice distinctions. But are these pre-occupations structural to the fate of society? Trans is still looking for the form of writing which will express its very unique perspective on the world and the turbulence within. How hard is it to write gender in the third-person? The story ends (as does “Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl”, also reviewed on this site) on a note of wistful indecision. Is that the best conclusion we can reach in these trans-insurgent times?