Hi!
Who else has spent a weird amount of time reading about newly-minted gay icon JoJo Siwa in the past week? If you, like me, find her whole thing confusing, I found this explainer from Autostraddle very helpful.
Anyway, I learned while in the middle of writing this newsletter that she has a girlfriend. I also just learned that she possibly has traction alopecia from wearing too-tight ponytails. Much to think about.
On an entirely separate note, I had an essay published yesterday in Peach Street Magazine about why queer lit is so important to me. Read it here if you’d like, then keep scrolling for a book rec.
— Becca
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Fiction, January 2021
If you read or follow any major book pubs, you’ve already heard of Detransition, Baby. It’s gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews in The New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, and Oprah Magazine, among others, and Torrey Peters was recently the subject of this wonderful profile from Vulture.
This would all be notable for any debut novel, but especially for this one. It’s one of the first novels written by a trans woman to be published by a big-five publishing house, and one of the first to achieve this level of critical acclaim.
As Meredith Talusan wrote in a recent piece for them., “novels centering trans women’s experiences ... are the kinds of novels that could easily be termed “insular” by the same critics who have no issues reviewing and appreciating fiction that only features white straight cis characters.”
So why does this particular novel have such strong mainstream appeal?
Personally, I think it’s because Peters doesn’t shy away from anything. She said in a 2018 interview that “Trans women are fucked up and flawed, and I’m very interested in the ways in which trans women are fucked up and flawed.” And that feels very much like the heart of this book.
The action kicks off when Ames, who used to be a trans woman named Amy, finds out that he got his boss, Katrina, pregnant. Though he’s now living as a man, the thought of being a “father” is at odds with his identity. So in an effort to make the arrangement less heterosexual and more bearable, he decides to ask his ex, a trans woman named Reese who is desperate to be a mother, to co-parent.
After some understandable skepticism from both Katrina and Reese, the three tentatively move forward with the plan. Interspersed with this present-day arrangement, we also get several looks back at Amy and Reese’s past relationship.
And in all of it, Peters lets her characters be refreshingly honest about their desires, their fears, and their sometimes fucked-up logic.
This brilliant piece from Kaitlyn Greenidge, for example, focuses specifically on a section in which Reese admits to secretly wanting a man to hit her because it confirms her womanhood. She wants to “get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness; her infuriating attractiveness.” It would confirm that she’s “a woman and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm.”
This is just one of many passages that feels entirely, terribly honest. It feels like Peters, through Reese, is addressing one of many pieces of womanhood that no one is supposed to address.
Gender and transness, naturally, get the same skewering treatment. After all, this is a book that features a trans character who makes the decision to detransition—a taboo subject within the trans community, given how it’s been weaponized by transphobic advocacy groups.
But with Peters’ wit and insight, it’s a tender kind of skewering that ultimately makes it impossible not to empathize with each of her three main characters. And it’s this tenderness, in every part of the book, that I think makes it so compelling.
Queer points:
+6 for a reference to “the Tumblr-Twitter industrial complex” of trans activism
+11 for teaching me about the origin of the word "transgender" as an umbrella term the CDC came up with when they were categorizing people with HIV
+3 for a straight character who hears the word “heteronormative” once and then can’t stop dropping it into every conversation
Buy it from your favorite bookstore on Bookshop