Torrey Peters talking to Liz Duck-Chong about Detransition, Baby - SWF 2022

At 8pm on Thursday 19 May I walked into a cavernous hall at Carriageworks to hear Brooklyn-based writer Torrey Peters talk via video from Poland to Liz Duck-Chong in Sydney.

It was an absolutely mesmerising conversation. Even via screen Peters was dazzling! She brought the house down. And Duck-Chong asked such beautifully nuanced, thoughtful and searching questions that at the end Peters praised their exceptional contribution to the evening. The audience questions were also excellent, including one that prompted Peters to reflect on ‘sad girl lit’ and Jean Rhys.

Peters was there to talk about her novel Detransition, Baby, her breakthrough book which became an internationally acclaimed bestselling sensation in 2021. Its three central characters are bound by the question of a child: trans woman, Reese; her former partner who’s detransitioned from Amy to Ames; and cis woman, Katrina, who suddenly finds herself pregnant with Ames’s child. Peters called Reese a trans version of Fleabag, living in Brooklyn, NYC.

Detransition, Baby is dedicated

To divorced cis women, who, like me, had to face starting their life over without either reinvesting in the illusions from the past, or growing bitter about the future.

Perhaps a counterintuitive move – but one that makes perfect sense to me, living as a post-marriage woman. Chapter One – ‘One month after conception’ – opens:

The question, for Reese: Were married men just desperately attracted to her? Or was the pool of men who were available to her as a trans woman only those who had already locked down a cis wife and could now ‘explore’ with her? The easy answer, the one that all her girls advocated, was to call men dogs. But now, here’s Reese, sneaking around with another handsome, charming, motherfucking cheater.

Peters said that philosophically she came from the trans movement in Brooklyn circa 2013: trans women writing for trans women, inspired by black literature and writers such as Toni Morrison, who said in her 1993 Nobel Prize speech that she’s a black woman writing for black women. So she doesn’t have to slow down to think about her audience. She doesn’t have to explain herself to her readers.

For Peters, the only real limit on her own writing is fear, which she was feeling in Poland, where trans issues are very different from in the United States.

Her two earlier books, novellas, were self-published and read by a niche audience. So when she was writing her next book, Detransition, Baby, Peters didn’t expect to be read by more than 100 people. Now she’s touring Europe – she’d just been in Berlin – and speaking by video live at a writers’ festival in Sydney, Australia.

And now Peters worries that with her success and new international audience, fear may stop her from writing freely in her next book. Especially from making jokes - because certain jokes in Detransition, Baby got her so much grief from readers that now she has to psych herself up even more to write the jokes she wants to.

Then Duck-Chong said: All your characters are so ashamed. Could you talk a little about that.

Peters said she has a lot of shame so she’s very interested in shame. From therapeutic circles she’s learnt that shame festers when you can’t speak it. But when you can speak it and look at it, you can move through it. It loses its power.

Realising that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally acclaimed autobiographical novel series My Struggle is riddled with shame freed her up.

‘He’s a tall, handsome Swedish guy! He’s talking about his shame and I don’t even think it’s a big deal, so why don’t I write about my shame?’

When asked about the title, about ‘detransition’, Peters said she wanted to play with the existing idea of detransition that’s thrown around – and is a bit taboo, even in trans circles. After an experience in Cuba when her passport forced her back into suits and a male persona, she felt entitled to talk about detransition. She didn’t want it to be a word for people who weaponise it against trans people; ‘the story out there is that detransition happens because trans people have ruined their lives. They were wrong about their gender and had made a mistake.’

No! Peters says. It’s more that living as a trans person is really difficult. The thing that’s been weaponised in the detransition conversation is regret. But so what? Regret is a normal part of life. She wants to destigmatise detransition, which she attempted to do by figuring out its mood. Mood is easier for her than politics or ethos – and fiction is a place to discover the moods.

Trans families

Traditionally, when women have sought meaning in narratives, we have four choices:

1. husband
2. baby
3. career
4. art

… as exemplified by the choices of the four women in Sex and the City.

But if you have a trans family, you break the nuclear family: there’s always going to be a third person, another woman, to have the baby. So she went looking for precedents, for the oldest story about two mothers - and she found the ancient story of ‘Solomon’s choice’ from the Hebrew Bible. It’s about King Solomon and two women who both claim to be the mother of the same child.

There are so many varieties of motherhood, she said.

Peters described the narrative journey of Detransition, Baby as a process of stripping away the lies you tell yourself and the delusions and coping mechanisms you carry. So her characters have to ask and answer the same questions at the end of the novel as they did at the beginning, except now stripped of all the delusions they’d had at the outset.

At the beginning there are three people wondering if they can have a baby. At the end there are three people facing the same question.

Dedication to divorced cis women

Speaking of her book’s unlikely dedication Peters said: ‘Oftentimes the messiness of literature is not captured well by identity.’ 

While she was writing Detransition, Baby, Peters found herself reading books by divorced cis women like Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante, and realised that in a way their lives are the same as trans women’s. Both are framing questions about how to live in uncharted and little narrated waters, how to move forward, how to find meaning. For her the two groups shared a resonance because trans women and divorced cis women are not (yet) common categories, so they haven’t yet ossified - which makes their experiences rich and fascinating material to write.

Peters was grateful for their books and wanted to speak back to them, to have a conversation with divorced cis women.

Drawing on Joanna Russ’s characterisation of the three stages of feminist literature, Peters argues that trans lit has moved through these stages and is onto a fourth:

1. We’re just like you
2. We reject you
3. We have nothing to do with you, we’re our own thing
4. The dominant culture picks up queer people’s concepts to understand themselves.

Now cis people realise they’re doing a gender: ‘I didn’t realise, I’ve been doing it for years. I’m doing a lumberjack – or a ballerina.’

What does trans art do when the world has come to us? Peters asks.

Some trans writers are turning to the past, such as Andy Warhol and the Factory, asking what was trans in the past? Peters herself is interested in the new potentials opened up by other languages.

‘Some of our preoccupations are very provincial and bounded by our language, English.’ But there’s a wealth of linguistic expression available for trans experience. ‘For example, in Polish they use the word for Baby Jesus to describe baby trans people.’ That is, people who have recently transitioned and so are baby in the trans world.

Writing Detransition, Baby was the process through which Peters shaped a generational problem for trans people: what about having a baby? How do we do this? She thinks in ten years we might be able to look back and say: look at what we did, all the different ways we found for how these characters might live. 

Reflecting on the pandemic and the connection between gender transition and AIDS, Peters said that the CDC (Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the USA’s national health agency) decided on the word ‘transgender’ to name the vector of a disease, HIV. So this word and trans people are bound up not only in the history of HIV – but also of HIV as death.

In reply to an audience question about ‘sad girl lit’ and the fact that Detransition, Baby could have been but isn’t sad girl lit, Peters said her novel had started out as ‘sad girl lit’, like Jean Rhys. But as she wrote she began to find it all funny.

‘So much about gender is funny. Confronting sadness pushed me into confronting the absurd – and that led me straight to humour.’

This conversation stretched my mind big time. It left me with so much to think about, including about humour and the absurd, and questions like: Is climate change humour possible?

Next up, another extraordinary conversation, between Hanya Yanagihara and Anton Enus.