Look, it has been an impossible month for reading, but if there’s any premise that should absolutely grab you by the face at this time, it’s a trans woman’s novel about detransitioning, because, well, you’re up on recent discussions, yes? Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters (published January 7th by Serpent’s Tail in the UK, and coming January 12th in the US via One World) is just such an attention-commanding novel, and though I haven’t gotten to read it yet, I absolutely cannot resist featuring it this month.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese–and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby–and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it–Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family–and raise the baby together?

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