Detransition, Baby

Ames used to be Amy. He detransitioned three years ago and has been stumbling through life as a man ever since. When his boss and lover Katrina gets pregnant and isn't sure she wants to keep it, he has what might be a terrible idea: what if he, Katrina, and his ex Reese — a trans woman who has always wanted to be a mother — raised the baby together? What follows is a soap opera of spectacular dysfunction, desire, jealousy, and negotiation, written by a trans woman who was not thinking about cis readers while she wrote it, who let her characters be as messy and contradictory as anyone else, and who refused at every turn to make trans people brave or noble or paragons of anything. Peters won the PEN/Hemingway Award for this debut and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times — partly because the novel is very funny, and partly because it does something literary fiction about trans people has rarely done: it treats transness not as a crisis to be survived or a bravery to be celebrated but as one of the conditions of three specific people's specific lives. The novel has been criticised by some readers for not engaging fully with questions of race within its predominantly white character set — a fair critique worth holding alongside its genuine achievement. The most important trans novel on the shelf for showing trans lives as fully, flamboyantly alive.