Perhaps Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel? Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted, Peters's book breezily plays with the structural conventions of literary realism. a dishy, engrossing new novel -New Yorker Irresistible. Peters confronts the unruliness of our desires, and our vitality as we struggle within their limits. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel. This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family–and raise the baby together? When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby–and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it–Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese–and losing her meant losing his only family.

Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Īmes isn’t happy either. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate.

The Masker by Torrey Peters