Detransition, Baby
42 pages • 1-hour read
Torrey PetersDetransition, Baby
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Themes
The Performativity of Gender
A central theme that recurs throughout Detransition, Baby is the performative nature of gender. The concept of gender performativity is central to feminist and gender studies and is often associated with feminist theorist Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990). In the view of scholars like Butler, gender is a set activities and behaviors that individuals perform, and we learn to enact behaviors that follow societal codes for how a man or a woman should behave. According to this theory, gender is constructed and learned through social interactions, and is not an innate set of qualities that one is born with.
Throughout her novel, Peters explores how gender performativity impacts the lives of both Reese and Amy, who strive to perform femininity in such a way that they will pass as cisgender (that is, be perceived by others as people whose current genders match the ones they were assigned at birth). One of the main ways people perform gender is through physical appearance, including clothes, physical mannerisms, body adornment, and aesthetic choices. Reese and Amy both suffer from gender dysphoria—stress that occurs in trans individuals who feel a mismatch between their physical bodily appearance and their gender. For Reese, gender dysphoria arises from not having a vagina, as well as from her desire for a more feminine face shape. Amy’s gender dysphoria arises from her nose. Though noses aren’t typically a cause for gender dysphoria, “Amy’s hatred of her nose was extreme enough to merit her the necessary letters from therapists” for it to qualify as gender dysphoria, and Amy is able to have her insurance cover a surgery to alter its shape (197).
Amy and Reese’s performance of female gender goes beyond physical attributes to encompass the way they behave and their relationships. Part of Reese’s attraction to her cowboy lover is that his HIV positive status adds an element of risk to their sex, echoing the “frisson of danger” of getting pregnant that Reese assumes cis women feel when having sex with cis men (7). Likewise, a part of Reese eroticizes the abuse she suffers from Stanley because she sees such abuse as characteristic of women’s relationships in a patriarchal society.
The novel also explores how cis individuals perform gender, as it presents both cis and trans people as constantly striving to successfully perform their gender identities. In Chapter 10, a friend of Katrina’s excitedly tells Reese that her husband has gone upstate with friends for a bachelor party in a cabin. For Reese, there is an obvious tension between the bachelor party’s rituals of manliness and her own gender performances:
How is it, Reese wonders, that a bunch of New York men wearing flannel and slamming whiskey in a cabin is seen as a sorely needed release of their barely tamed and authentic manliness, but when she, a trans, delights in dolling up, she’s trying too hard? (287)
Detransition, Baby presents events like the bachelor party not as an authentic expression of innate desires, but as an opportunity for men to elaborately perform masculinity. However, Reese does not conclude that performing gendered rituals is negative. Rather, she believes that cis and trans people alike should see gender as “a big, self-pleasuring lie,” and take joy in playing with its conventions (287).
The Possibilities of Alternative Modes of Family
Detransition, Baby frequently explores the utopian possibilities of alternative family structures. The bourgeoning queer family that Ames, Reese, and Katrina hope to build together propels the novel’s plot. Though Reese and Katrina are initially skeptical of Ames’s proposal to co-parent as a trio, both begin to see co-parenting as an opportunity to receive something she would otherwise lack: for Reese, a child; for Katrina, additional maternal support; and for Ames, a connection to his queer past through Reese. The notion that queer parenting provides something lacking from the traditional heterosexual institution of marriage comes up multiple times. Katrina’s mother advises her that mothering is easiest with multiple mothers, and Katrina later echoes this idea when she tells her friends that “queer families have all these opportunities that she didn’t realize she was missing back when she was married” (293-94). In these scenes, Detransition, Baby presents queer households as a corrective to the nuclear family, and as structures that allow for more openness and emotional support in the rearing of a child.
Yet if Detransition, Baby’s characters have an idealized image of queer families, the novel also depicts the challenges such relationships face. Aside from a few friends of theirs, Ames, Katrina, and Reese have almost no established models to follow as they figure out their family structure. While Ames takes pleasure in thinking through the details of how their family will work, such as the necessary living and legal arrangements, the group also struggles in the absence of clear guidelines or societal norms. Such struggles especially impact Reese and Katrina as they discuss sharing the role of mother. Reese frequently fears that, as the non-biological mother, she will always require a “qualifier” and will never be treated as a true mother to their child. Such tensions come out in Chapter 9, when Reese and Katrina have an argument about whether or not to use a baby crib. Katrina wins the argument in the moment but ultimately relents, suggesting that conflicts in innovative family structures may be inevitable but are not unnavigable, and highlighting the importance of compromise and discussion in creating alternative modes of family.
Personal Desires versus Political Beliefs
Detransition, Baby explores the tension Amy and Reese feel about their personal desires and political views. Both Amy and Reese harbor sexual desires that sometimes seem to go against their feminist and queer politics. Reese is often aroused by fantasies of domination and physical violence: “…most talk about owning [Reese] turned her stomach liquid with desire” (53). Amy, before coming out as trans, often read erotic stories about men being forced to act feminine, dress as women, and have sex with other men. At first, both Amy and Reese believe that their eroticization of violence means there is something wrong with them. Amy, for instance, worries that people would “think she hated femininity and equated it with humiliation” if they found out about her fetish (138).
However, both Amy and Reese eventually realize that their sexual desires are shared by numerous women and that these desires do not compromise their queer identity or feminist politics. In her twenties, Reese sees the film Belle du Jour (1967), which depicts an upper-class woman who secretly enjoys working as a prostitute and having rough sex. Reese realizes that, far from making her unlike other women, the eroticization of violence is baked into how a patriarchal society characterizes femininity, and that means she fits the mold: “[Reese] didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them” (61). The novel suggests that one’s personal desires do not map easily onto one’s political beliefs, because both are conditioned by outside influences. Rather than police her sexuality to match her politics, Reese embraces the messiness of erotic desire, and becomes more critical of forms of feminism that exclude trans women and try to delimit what forms of desire are acceptable.
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