Winter Gocher
The novel Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters covers the many complexities of relationships and family making, focusing on lived experiences from the perspectives of trans women. It also highlights how gender and identity can affect relationships in one’s life. The story revolves around three main characters: Reese is a trans woman who desires to play out the role of being a mother; Ames (Reese’s ex-boyfriend) is a cisgender man who once lived life as a trans woman, but has detransitioned; Katrina is Ames’ lover (and his boss) who becomes pregnant by Ames. The story delves into unconventional relationships, queer parenthood, and finding a sense of belonging. By highlighting the experiences of individuals that do not fit into the gender binary, the novel offers a critique of the binary within time and identity, allowing for the idea of alternative futures.
The concept of queer time challenges the idea that time is linear, especially when factors such as gender and sexual identity are involved. However, queer time doesn’t have to solely include or surround queer individuals. It can also be used as a much broader concept in order to describe anything that forges a path that strays from social norms and traditions as it relates to time and temporality. For example, someone going to college for the first time at the age of thirty. Queer time sheds light on the fact that many people often experience time in their own unique way because even if you take the same path as someone, it doesn’t mean that both of you will reach your final destination at the same time.
In Detransition, Baby, Peters utilizes this concept as a tool for storytelling in order to clearly display how queer time challenges the conventional progression of time by disrupting the milestones that most people are expected to accomplish at certain periods in their life. Gender and identity function as key factors on the subject of starting a family as a trans individual. Peters applies this notion to the three main characters in the novel by exploring each of their pasts, presents, and futures in a non-linear order. The novel allows readers to see how each of their lives are disrupted and change course based on the obstacles they encounter during a certain point in their lives, ultimately highlighting the everlasting presence of time that is queer. The main disruption in this case would be the unexpected pregnancy.
The novel itself plays out in an unconventional manner, with events from the characters’ pasts and present colliding in an order that is non-linear. The way that the chapters of the book are set up is a method of queering time all on its own. The novel integrates flashbacks and multiple perspectives as a method of storytelling in a non-linear fashion in order to emphasize how time itself is fluid, particularly in relation to queer parenthood and familial structures. Themes of queer parenthood and familial structures are explored through its portrayal of non-traditional family dynamics. For instance, the flashbacks of Reese and Ames’ past relationship provide context for their relationship in the present as they navigate with one another. Such flashbacks include expository reflections like this one: “Only after the breakup with Amy did Reese begin to concede that perhaps Amy had been her own first major failure. She had previously been under the impression that she had failed majorly for most of her life, but in fact, she had simply confused failure with being a transsexual—an outlook in which a state of failure confirmed one’s transsexuality, and one’s transsexuality confirmed a state of failure” (#). Also, Reese’s desire to be a mother results in her rethinking what the socially acceptable version of a family is. This leads her to explore alternative parenthood routes outside of heteronormativity.
Because of Ames’ complicated relationship with masculinity and manhood, the mere thought of being a father to someone was more than he could handle: “…after all his mental gymnastics, after all the lessons of transition and detransition, fatherhood remained the one affront to his gender that he still couldn’t stomach without a creeping sense of horror. To become a father by his own body, as his father was to him, and his father before him, and on and on, would sentence him to a lifetime of grappling with that horror” (#).
While Detransition, Baby offers an exploration of queer time, its limitations should also be discussed. There were certain areas that could have been explored more. One of these could be a deeper dive on how intersectionality plays a role in the concept of queer time, as far as racial identity, class, etc. is concerned. Peters writes, “All my white girlfriends just automatically assume that reproductive rights are about the right to not have children, as if the right and naturalness of motherhood is presumptive. But for lots of other women in this country, the opposite is true. Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘anchor babies.’ All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate” (#). While the novel lightly touches on these topics, they definitely could have been explored further as far as how different marginalized identities contribute to shaping one’s experience of time and temporality.
Analyzing Detransition, Baby alongside Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds helps readers grasp a better understanding of queer temporalities and how they function and affect individuals. Freeman suggests that individuals often feel pressured to conform to timelines that are to be expected when it comes to relationships, especially familial ones. Reese and Ames challenge this by thinking of ways for them to be parents that lie on the outside of social norms.
Freeman also states that individuals may feel trapped within the confines of societal norms, and are unable to live their lives as authentically as they desire to because of the fear of being judged, harassed, ostracized by others. In Detransition, Baby, Peters writes, “So you got sick of being trans?” “I got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn’t need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don’t need to do trans” (#). This revelation stems from Ames’ not feeling safe enough to live life as a trans woman because of the various risk factors that are associated in doing so. It just wasn’t worth it to them to put theirself through unnecessary trauma. As long as they know who they are on the inside, then how the world views them seeing only the outside is not their problem.
By queering time through a non-linear narrative structure, Peters challenges conventional notions of temporality, which encourages readers to reimagine status quo structures in life. From Reese’s longing for motherhood to Ames’ journey of detransitioning and Katrina’s unexpected pregnancy, the characters navigate these disruptions and forge new paths as they discover themselves and find a sense of community in those around them. By placing focus on marginalized identities and life experiences, the novel notes the validity of following alternative paths as time fluctuates.
Works Cited
Freeman, E. (2011) Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Peters, T. (2021) Detransition, Baby. New York City, New York: Penguin Random House.