42 pages • 1 hour read
Detransition, Baby
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Reese
Reese is one of the main protagonists of Detransition, Baby. The narrative jumps between Reese in the present day and her past romantic relationships. A trans woman living in New York, Reese is originally from Madison, Wisconsin, where she works as a waitress before meeting her boyfriend Sebastian in her early twenties and moving to New York. Reese has a series of troubled relationships with emotionally absent and abusive men, and a romance with Amy that reemerges in a new form of potential intimacy when now-detransitioned Ames asks Reese to co-parent with him and Katrina. A caring woman who mentors and mothers younger trans women, Reese offers stability to others but does not find it easily for herself.
Reese relies on her romantic relationships to affirm her gender identity and attractiveness, sometimes with harmful results. She begins a relationship with Stanley, a married man she meets on a website geared towards men who fetishize trans women. Though Stanley is domineering and controlling, Reese stays in the relationship because she interprets Stanley’s abuse as a confirmation of “how badly [Stanley] wanted her” (57). However, Stanley begins to get violent with Reese, causing her to question their relationship. At a picnic for trans women, Reese meets and becomes enamored with Amy, a younger trans woman who has only recently begun transitioning. Reese abruptly leaves Stanley and moves in with Amy, and the two begin a long-term relationship. However, after several years, Reese reconnects with Stanley and begins an affair with him. A heartbroken Amy begins to detransition, and she and Reese break up.
In the three years after Reese and Amy’s breakup, Reese has not been in another serious relationship, and instead has flings with married men, as “she [doesn’t] know how to be alone” (5). When Ames calls to tell Reese he has gotten his boss, Katrina, pregnant, and that he wants Reese to co-parent the child with them, Reese is incredulous at first. However, she remains open to the proposal, as she longs to be a mother. Reese and Katrina meet and immediately experience tension between them, with Reese expressing resentment that Katrina can be a biological mom while Reese cannot conceive. However, they begin to build a friendship and Reese develops a “mom-crush” on Katrina, fantasizing about the two of them being co-parents together “five years [later], in hopeful domestic scenes” (266). In this new arrangement, Reese transfers her need for affirmation to Katrina and to domestic daydreams.
Reese and Katrina’s friendship abruptly falls apart, however, when Katrina discovers that Reese has been having an affair with Katrina’s friend’s husband, who is HIV positive. Angered by Katrina’s reaction, Reese sends an email to Katrina describing her and Ames’s co-parenting plan as a “gentrification of queerness” (306). Realizing she will never be able to be a co-parent to the child, Reese is overcome with grief and begins mourning the loss of the child she has become emotionally attached to. At a beach with her friend Thalia, she submerges herself in cold water to try and numb her feelings, but passers-by on the beach think that Reese is trying to commit suicide, and Reese is taken to a hospital. Though she reconciles somewhat with Katrina and Ames, at the end of the novel Reese still does not know if she will get to be a mother.
Amy/Ames
Amy/Ames is the secondary protagonist of Detransition, Baby. The novel jumps between the character’s past as Amy, a trans woman, and present life as Ames, a “detransitioned” cis man. In the chapters that describe life before Amy’s detransition, the narrator uses the name Amy and feminine pronouns to describe her; in those chapters that take place after the detransition, the narrator uses the name Ames and masculine pronouns.
Much of Detransition, Baby focuses on Amy’s complicated relationship with her gender identity. The novel explores how Amy’s life pre-transition resulted in Amy becoming detached and alienated from her body. At the age of fifteen, Amy (who is currently presenting as a boy and has yet to come out) loses her virginity to an older girl at his high school, Delia. At first, Amy is uncomfortable with having to perform sexually while presenting as a man and is only able to pleasure Delia by imagining how Amy would like to be pleasured if she were in Delia’s position. The result is that Amy “dissociate[s]” from her body, beginning a “cyclical loneliness of disappearing in dissociation during sex” that haunts Amy into adulthood (129). When Amy first begins dating Reese, she struggles to be physically intimate and vulnerable. However, Reese is able to help Amy recognize that she’s “been in so much pain” from being a woman while having to present as a man (152). Amy’s initial transition appears to release her from that pain by forcing her to reckon with it.
However, Amy begins to detransition after she confronts Stanley and he punches her in the face. Amy is traumatized by the violence and sees a masculine gender identity as a way to repress her negative emotions, treating it as “a pocket of space to separate herself from the bright emotions of shame and fear” (258). She becomes Ames and begins to use masculine pronouns again. Ames completely separates himself from his trans women friends and begins a romantic relationship with his boss, Katrina, who is initially unaware of his past. After Ames gets Katrina pregnant, he decides to come out fully to her.
Though Ames now feels reconciled to being a man, his act of fathering a child brings up complicated feelings for him about his gender identity, and he perceives his impending fatherhood with “a creeping sense of horror” (26). Ames sees co-parenting the child with Reese as a means of reconnecting him with his queer side, an act that could help him come to terms with being a father. However, after Reese and Katrina have a falling out, Katrina asks him to make a commitment only to her. Ames ultimately tells Katrina that while he wants to parent a child with her, he “cannot promise that he is sure of who he is,” suggesting that he still feels unsettled in his gender identity (318).
Katrina
Katrina is Ames’s boss at an ad agency, and the two begin a clandestine romantic relationship. Katrina is emotionally fragile owing to her recent divorce. Though she tells people that the divorce stemmed from a miscarriage, she tells Ames that she really got divorced as she became disenchanted with the entire institution of marriage and how she was expected to behave in it as a woman, referring to her emotional state during marriage as “the Ennui of Heterosexuality” (19). When Katrina becomes pregnant, she is initially excited, hoping that it will lead to a stronger and more committed relationship with Ames. However, after Ames comes out to her, Katrina grows furious, feeling that she has been lied to and can no longer trust Ames.
While Katrina is at first skeptical of Ames’s proposal to co-parent with Reese, she slowly grows more and more open to the idea, especially after Katrina’s mother tells her that it’s best to raise a child “with as many other moms around as possible” (110). Katrina and Reese begin to develop a deep friendship and excitedly make plans about co-parenting together. At times, they conflict over the fact that Katrina will be the baby’s biological mother, because Reese feels that her decisions and opinions will always be secondary to Katrina’s. However, the two learn to compromise and work through their conflicts.
Katrina is excited by the idea of entering into a queer family and tells her friends that she feels “queer families have all these opportunities that...were missing in her [prior] marriage” (293). Katrina’s idealization of queer relationships bursts when she learns that Reese is sleeping with an HIV-positive man. She kicks Reese out of their co-parenting arrangement and threatens to terminate the pregnancy. Katrina and Reese ultimately hesitantly reconcile, and the novel leaves open the question of whether or not the group will raise a child.
As a cis, straight woman whose marriage did not fulfill her, Katrina sees queer family relationships in a rosy light, as the solution to the inequalities women often face in straight relationships. Her limited knowledge of queer and trans communities sometimes leads to outbursts where her ignorance and privileged social position emerge as fear and anger—first when Ames comes out to her, and later when she learns that Reese’s lover is HIV positive. Katrina can overcome her anxiety and biases in order to learn about and accept Ames and Reese, but her attempts to move between straight and queer social worlds are rocky and require ongoing recalibrations.
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