Detransition, Baby

“…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.”

Ames has experienced fraught reactions to masculinity his entire life, resulting in his transition to being a woman before later detransitioning. During his detransition, Ames feels that he has come to terms with his masculinity and accepted his gender identity. However, the revelation that he will be a father terrifies Ames, who feels uncomfortable and alienated by the societal expectations typically foisted on those who identify as male and as fathers. 

“When Amy detransitioned herself, she promised never to let anyone see her as she had seen William that night. Never to pant for inclusion from trans women. Ames wanted no pity and rejected their disgust.” 

Detransition is stigmatized by Ames’s trans friends, who seem to see it as both a personal failure and a capitulation to the prejudices of conservatives. One night, prior to his detransition, Ames meets William, a man who has already detransitioned. Though William tries to hang out with Ames’s trans women friends, they mostly rebuff him. Ames decides that he will not behave like William, and completely cuts off contact with his trans community, but he misses his friends. 

“[Stanley’s] controlling behavior confirmed how badly he wanted her. Anyone who needed her so close, who assumed the right to know where she was at all times, whom she saw, what she wore, was someone who wasn’t going away, someone who could be counted upon, not just despite her trans-ness, but for it.”

Reese’s relationship with Stanley is characterized by his volatile, domineering behavior. Stanley uses his money to control Reese, giving her a lavish lifestyle that she would be unable to afford on her own, and forcing her to obey his commands if she wants to keep that life. Though a part of Reese perceives Stanley’s behavior as abusive, his controlling behavior also feels secure to Reese, who interprets it as a sign of Stanley’s dependability and desire for her. 

“[Reese] didn’t make the rules of womanhood; like any other girl, she had inherited them. Why should the burden be on her to uphold impeccable feminist politics that barely served her?” 

Reese is sexually aroused by BDSM fantasies, particularly ones which revolve around her being beaten. As a feminist, Reese initially feels guilt and shame around these fantasies, which seem to turn misogynistic violence into a site of arousal. However, Reese realizes that such fantasies are shared by many women, both cis and trans, and she feels it is unfair to hold herself, as a trans woman, to the political expectations of a type of feminism that does not include or address the needs of trans women.

“A part of [Katrina] must understand that that moment between men excludes her, will always exclude her—but worse, a part of her must also see that in that moment, she is not the woman whom Ames, or anyone else, has positioned as eligible for protective love.” 

At a dinner in Chicago, an enraged Katrina tries to out Ames as trans to their straight, cis male clients. One client mistakenly thinks Katrina is saying that Ames is sexually interested in trans women, and the client comes to Ames’s defense, telling Katrina that he would never accept anyone speculating about his wife’s genitals. Though Ames expected the client to act poorly, he is surprised to hear him compare a trans woman to his cis wife. However, the client’s reaction enrages Katrina, who feels that the men are treating other women as more “eligible for protective love” than Katrina. As a result, Katrina more clearly outs Ames to their clients. 

“Reese has raised a few trans daughters over the years, and all of the mothering has been tacit: The girls need it, yearn for it, but won’t accept it if they realize what it is. And Reese, for as much as she complained about these ungrateful girls, needed them too—craved the chance to nurture someone, to care and soothe them with her softest, most selfless love.” 

Reese often finds herself serving as an informal mother to other trans women. In this role, she provides them with care and support, and helps them through the early stages of their transitions as they figure out how to survive in society as women. For Reese, these relationships often serve as a kind of substitute for the maternal nurturing she longs to provide to a child. 

“My mom, well, after we talked about everything, she was like, ‘The one thing I learned raising you—through successes and failures—is that the best way to be a mother is to do so with as many other moms around as possible.’” 

At first, Katrina is apprehensive about Ames’s proposal to co-parent their child with Reese, feeling that Ames is treating Katrina like a ‘walking uterus’ and devaluing her body. However, Katrina has a change of heart after talking it over with her mother, Maya, who tells Katrina that she needed all the help she could get in raising her. The passage implicitly questions the presumed normalcy of the nuclear family model, suggesting that other forms of families have advantages and are, in fact, necessary to parenting. 

“Two weeks later, Amy lay crumpled in bed, having inhaled poppers for the first time, and decided that nothing felt as good as being vulnerable to Reese…. Might as well enhance that vulnerability with chemicals, and Reese had whispered to Amy that the poppers would make her helpless, docile, and pliable. Amy’s whole problem pre-transition had been a complete inability to ever let anyone far enough past her defenses to glimpse any vulnerability.” 

Though Amy has had a number of sexual relationships, her gender dysphoria keeps her from opening up and enjoying the pleasure and intimacy of these relationships. Instead, she frequently dissociates during sex, often escaping into fantasy to ignore her own body and physicality. It is only with Reese that Amy is slowly able to open up and overcome this aversion to vulnerability. 

“The first year of transition, Amy discovered, was about learning how much you’ve lied to yourself…. The awful part was watching what therapy called ‘your coping mechanisms’ flame out. There was a moment in which you could catch a glimpse of how scared you’d been and the degree of pain in which you’d been living as a boy….”

Having to grow up presenting as a boy, Amy learned a number of coping mechanism and strategies to repress the pain that the experience caused her and to pass successfully as a man. However, once she begins to transition, Amy is forced to lose these defense strategies and face the immense pain she has been living with. Though Amy at first is hesitant to accept this trauma, feeling that she has been more fortunate than numerous other trans people, Reese helps her to understand how much pain she’s been in and how it continues to affect her. 

“[Amy] knew that anyone she knew who discovered [her sexual fetishes] wouldn’t understand. They’d just think she hated femininity and equated it with humiliation. She’d be shunned, and deservedly so.”

Growing up, Amy frequently masturbates to erotic stories involving men being forced to dress up as women or be otherwise “feminized” (138). Amy feels a shame around her attraction to these stories, imagining that it must be a sign of deep misogyny. She further imagines that her sexual arousal in reaction to stories of feminization invalidates her desire to be a woman, and that most transgender women will not accept her. However, Amy later realizes that numerous women are sexually aroused by fantasies of domination and violence, and that there is nothing abnormal about her sexual desires.

“I mean, [divorced women] go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story…I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them….” 

When Reese and Katrina meet for the first time, Reese tells Katrina that she feels the experience of trans women and divorced women are similar in spirit. For both groups, their experience often reveals that traditional narratives of femininity are both societally constructed and broken. Reese feels that both trans women and divorced women are forced to reimagine womanhood outside of what has been deemed socially acceptable. 

“Because that’s not the question that cis women have to answer. The moms I knew when I was little didn’t have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It’s assumed why.”

When Katrina presses Reese to offer a justification for why she wants to be a mother, Reese chafes at the request. Reese objects that she would never have to offer a reason for desiring motherhood if she weren’t a trans woman. In Reese’s view, such questions serve to naturalize motherhood as the domain of cis women, while making trans mothers the outliers and suggesting that they are not fit to be mothers. 

“But for lots of 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 Reese contends that only trans women have to prove their desire for motherhood, Katrina argues that Reese is ignoring the experience of women in the United States who experience other forms of marginalization and oppression. Both the U.S. government and private American citizens demonize non-white mothers, and in many cases limit or remove their ability to have children, such as through forced sterilization. Katrina’s comments underscore that motherhood has always been a fraught identity for anyone outside of the privileged mainstream. 

“Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn’t mean she had developed immunity to them…. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body.”

Reese recognizes that to a certain extent, her gender dysphoria­ (intense negative feelings about elements of her body that do not align with her gender identity) stems from societal and capitalist notions of how a woman should look. Yet, in spite of this “political consciousness”, Reese still longs for surgeries that would allow her to feel physically affirmed in her femininity. 

“Attending the funeral is necessary for Reese to experience an emotion beyond irritation at the dead girl. Funeral after funeral has taught her to sit in the pews awaiting a moment of puncture: when some tiny detail pierces the smooth carapace of her indifference.”

Over the years, Reese has attended so many funerals for fellow trans women that she has grown numb to the news of death. However, Reese continues to force herself to attend these funerals, as she longs to feel grief, to mourn these women and overcome her numbness. At each funeral, Reese has learned that some small event will break her façade and allow her to feel sadness again. 

“In her heart, [Reese] doesn’t think Ames is a man. She just can’t believe Amy’s detransition is what it seems. How many times had she seen the way that Amy, even before detransition, used masculinity as a defensive cocoon?” 

While Reese’s friends Iris and Thalia feel that Ames’ detransition has to be respected and treated gently, a part of Reese is less compassionate towards Ames. Having dated Ames for years, Reese feels that his detransition is less of an authentic stage in discovering his gender than it is a defense mechanism to protect Ames from painful feelings. Reese believes that Ames has only chosen to detransition because his life as a trans woman hurt too much, requiring more vulnerability and openness than Ames could withstand. 

“In some future moment, Amy would find the shame of this moment intolerable, the image of herself reflected in Reese’s scorn—scorn for the posturing vestigial instinct of a once-male, indignant with the rage of insulted masculinity, dressed ridiculously in the outfit of a demure woman.” 

During Amy and Stanley’s confrontation over Reese, Amy instinctively takes the stance a man might take in preparing for a fight—what Amy imagines as a physical “prologue to a shouted Come at me, bro!” (254). Falling back on socially masculine behaviors reminds Amy of her past as a man. The image haunts and embarrasses Amy and causes her to begin to question her entire gender identity. 

“[Amy] had, of course, long come to understand that masculinity dulled her, that it dissociated her from herself. But honestly, that’s all she wanted at that point. A pocket of space to separate herself from the bright emotions of shame and fear, a veil between herself and the curious eye on the subway and at work….” 

Following Amy’s fight with Stanley, she is deeply traumatized by the incident and feels vulnerable and weak as a result. Seeking respite from these feelings, Amy begins to dress more androgynously and stops taking her hormonal treatments. For Amy, a masculine identity offers a sense of protection from the world’s harshness towards trans people, even as it disconnects her from her body and her feelings. 

“There was a utopic aspect to the way that Katrina talked about co-parenting, the way that recently out queers proclaimed their romantic loves and predilections with the most fervor, still innocent of the thorns inherent to queer life.” 

As Reese and Katrina bond, they grow increasingly excited about parenting together, with Katrina becoming particularly ecstatic about the idea of a queer family structure. Katrina suspects that her past marriage fell apart due to problems with the larger structures of heterosexuality, but Reese believes that Katrina is idealizing queerness. Reese fears that Katrina is ignoring the fact that queer relationships often have problems and hurt of their own, and she worries that Katrina will back out of their co-parenting plans once she realizes that queerness isn’t as utopian as she imagines. 

“That night, Reese sits at the little glass laptop desk in her bedroom, logs in to buybuybaby.com, and sees that Katrina has removed the crib from their registry.” 

While picking out a baby registry, Katrina and Reese argue about whether they should have the baby sleep in a crib or in bed with them. Though Reese tells Katrina that it isn’t dangerous for the baby to sleep in bed with their mother, Katrina insists on putting the crib on the registry. Reese perceives the argument as yet another instance in which Katrina’s feelings as a biological mother win out over Reese’s, making Reese the secondary mother to Katrina. However, Katrina ultimately takes the crib off the registry, highlighting her ability to compromise and respect Reese’s opinions. 

“Reese thought that she was the one coming out. But no, Katrina is coming out as queer to her friends. That’s why she’s being so aggressive about it. This is the path of baby queers. The borderline confrontational assertion: This is what I am, got a problem with it?” 

Katrina takes Reese to a party to meet her friends. At the party, she announces her pregnancy and the unconventional parenting structure she is entering into with Reese and Ames. Though Reese at first feels that she must come out as trans to Katrina’s friends, she realizes that Katrina is coming out as queer in a way, herself. As Katrina explains to her friends that she doesn’t want to raise the child in a traditional, heteronormative household, Reese recognizes that Katrina is embracing queerness in her own way.

“This whole sharing-a-baby enterprise is nothing but an elaborate exercise in the gentrification of queerness. Your whole queer kinship spiel, Ames, is nothing more than an overpriced and under-spiced fusion restaurant…. Neither of you can handle spice. You can tell, because Katrina is throwing a fit over HIV and infidelity, both of which are delicious for anyone who has a taste for authentic non-gentrified trans flavors.” 

After Katrina threatens to end the pregnancy in response to learning that Reese has been having an affair with a married, HIV positive man, Reese writes an angry email accusing Katrina and Ames of gentrifying queerness. In Reese’s view, Ames and Katrina only want to participate in a sanitized, idealized idea of queerness, one that doesn’t challenge them or their assumptions about relationships. Katrina’s discomfort around an individual who is HIV positive signifies her general willingness to embrace queerness only so long as it excludes those individuals who make her uncomfortable. 

“ ‘I lost my baby,’ she tells the building…. ‘I had a miscarriage,’ she tells the ghosts. Is this a lie? Can she lie to ghosts? Won’t they know the truth? Anyway, is it really a lie? She had planned for a baby, and now she had lost a baby, before it was even born.” 

After Reese and Katrina’s fight, Reese becomes despairing and depressed, mourning the unborn child she has attached herself to emotionally. At first, Reese feels ridiculous to be mourning the child in such an intense way, behaving as if she has had a miscarriage. Yet, Reese realizes that she really has lost a child in her own way and begins to accept that this is “a trans version of a miscarriage” (325).