42 pages • 1 hour read
Detransition, Baby
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Juvenile Elephants
The “juvenile elephants” appear in the third chapter of Detransition, Baby, and become symbolic of trans women’s relationship to motherhood and queer community. Ames uses the imagery of juvenile elephants in a conversation with Katrina as he tries to explain why he became alienated from the trans community and chose to detransition. Ames once read a scientific article that described how gangs of juvenile elephants were causing violence and demonstrating aggressive behavior in numerous countries including South Africa, Uganda, and Sierra Leone. These juvenile elephants had lost their mothers and other elders to poaching, leading to “a total and ongoing breakdown of elephant culture” (100). As elephants are highly social creatures that depend on intergenerational relationships, these juvenile elephants began to act out because they were an “orphan generation” (100).
In Ames’s view, his generation of trans women is akin to these juvenile elephants: “We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma” (101). Many trans women are alienated or cut off from their biological families after coming out, and in turn form familial relationships with other queer individuals. However, Ames argues that his community of trans women are “a lost generation,” as most older generations of trans people have “died of HIV, poverty, suicide, repression, or disappeared to pathologized medicalization and stealth lives” (101). In the absence of older, maternal figures who can offer guidance and support, Ames observes that younger trans women have become emotionally stunted, “lash[ing] out with our considerable strength” at each other and ostracizing those individuals who could otherwise offer mutual support (101). The image of juvenile elephants evokes the necessity of queer maternal figures for younger trans people, and the pain and trauma that occurs in the absence of such a community.
The Sex and the City Problem
The television show Sex and the City is a recurring motif in the first and final chapters of Detransition, Baby. The show, a hit in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, follows the lives of four single woman in their thirties who live in New York City. Within Detransition, Baby, Sex and the City acts as a shorthand reference for the difficulties women face in forming fulfilling lives for themselves.
In Chapter 1, Reese describes the so-called “Sex and the City Problem,” which she sees as “a problem for all women” that begins when “a woman begins to notice herself aging” (9). Though feminist activists may have achieved a greater liberty for women, Reese feels that women are still confined to the limited handful of life choices represented by each of the four characters on Sex and the City: “find a partner,” “have a career,” “have a baby,” or “express oneself in art or writing” (9). In Reese’s view, the Sex and the City problem is a kind of developmental experience shared by each generation of cis women as they begin to exit their youth. However, this experience of femininity has been denied to all but the “most stealth” of trans women, whom society typically bars from any of the four aspirational life paths available to the characters of Sex and the City.
The Sex and the City problem reappears at the end of Detransition, Baby when Ames, Katrina, and Reese meet before Katrina’s planned abortion. The three make strained conversation, and Reese implores Katrina to reconsider the abortion. Ames reminds Reese of her idea of the Sex and the City Problem, suggesting that their tense conversations are their attempt “to imagine our own solution, to reinvent something for ourselves” (337). Whereas the Sex and the City Problem initially evokes trans women’s continual exclusion from conventional structures of femininity, at the end of the novel it flips to suggest that Reese and her generation of trans women are now participating in the same sorts of questions about femininity and meaning that have characterized past generations of cis women. However, the novel’s protagonists are doing so by subverting traditional ideas of femininity and family, and by reinventing what it means to be a woman.
The Crib
In Chapter 10, Katrina and Reese go to a baby store to make a registry and squabble over whether or not to put a crib on it. The crib symbolizes the larger conflicts over motherhood that exist between the two women, and points to the necessity of compromise in successful parenting. Katrina initially wants to put a crib on the registry, but Reese tells her she doesn’t want to use a crib to raise the child, as she feels babies are happier when they sleep in the same bed as their mothers. When Katrina argues that such parenting methods are dangerous, Reese draws upon her personal experience working as a nanny and tells her there is little danger. However, Katrina doubts Reese, making a snide jab about Reese’s experience with childcare and putting the crib on the registry anyway. Reese relents, partially due to feeling that Katrina will always have “final say in how the baby will be raised” owing to her being the child’s biological mother (280).
Though Katrina has told Reese that she wants Reese to be an equal co-parent to her child, Reese has lingering fears that she will be treated as a lesser or secondary mother. In other conversations with Katrina, Reese expresses concern that she will always be “the mommy who needs a qualifier” (230). While Katrina assures Reese this won’t be the case, in their argument about the crib, Katrina tells Reese that they need “consistency” in their parenting style and assumes that her own parenting opinion will be the one that they both respect (280). However, when Reese looks at the registry website later that night, she discovers that Katrina has removed the crib from the registry. The change suggests that Katrina has realized she, too, needs to compromise and respect Reese’s opinions if the two are truly going to co-parent.
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