Detransition Baby Read online

  Detransition, Baby is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Torrey Peters

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  ONE WORLD and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Hardback ISBN 9780593133378

  Ebook ISBN 9780593133392

  oneworldlit.com

  randomhousebooks.com

  Designed by Fritz Metsch, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover art: Moopsi

  ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Torrey Peters

  About the Author

  CHAPTER ONE

  One month after conception

  THE QUESTION, FOR Reese: Were married men just desperately attractive 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. Look at her, wearing a black lace dress and sitting in his parked Beamer, waiting while he goes into a Duane Reade to buy condoms. Then she’s going to let him come over to her apartment, avoid the pointed glare of her roommate, Iris, and have him fuck her right on the trite floral bedspread that the last married dude bought her so that her room would seem a little more girly and naughty when he snuck away from his wife.

  Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed time to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn’t be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere. To jolt herself back to life, she went on Grindr, or Tinder, or whatever—and administered ten thousand volts to the heart by chasing the most dramatic tachycardia of an affair she could find. Married men were the best for fleeing loneliness, because married men also didn’t know how to be alone. Married men were experts at being together, at not letting go, no matter what, until death do us part. With the pretense of setting the boundaries of “just an affair,” Reese would swan dive super deep, super hard. By telling herself it would just be a fling, she gave herself permission to fulfill every fetish the guy had ever dreamed of, to unearth his every secret hurt, to debase herself in the most lush, vicious, and unsustainable ways—then collapse into resentment, sadness, and spite that it had been just a fling, because hadn’t she been brave enough and vulnerable enough to dive super deep, super hard?

  She saw herself as attractive, round face and full figure, but she didn’t pretend that she stopped traffic; nor did she frequently note people standing around to admire the harvests of her brain. But with the right kind of man, she bore a genius for drama. She could distill it and flame it like jet fuel when solitude chilled her bones.

  Her man this time was similar to her others. A handsome, married alpha-type who put her on a leash in the bedroom. Only this one was better, because he was an HIV-positive cowboy-turned-lawyer. He had a thing for trans girls and had seroconverted while cheating on his wife with a trans woman, and the wife had stayed with him, and now he was at it again with Reese. Wheeeee!

  “Did you bottom or something?” Reese had asked on their first date.

  “Fuck no,” he said. “My doctors said I had a one in ten thousand chance to contract it from getting head. You figure that at least ten thousand blow jobs are happening every minute, but that one in ten thousand was me. Also, she gave me a lot of blow jobs.”

  “Cool,” said Reese, who knew that that explanation wasn’t factual, but had only really agreed to make sure he wasn’t going to try to bottom with her. Within the hour, she had him back in her room and confessing from whom he’d gotten HIV and where. Within two hours, Reese convinced him to talk about his wife’s disappointment, how she was unwilling to let him fuck a child into her even though his HIV had declined to undetectable levels. He described how much his wife hated the IVF treatments, how their clinical nature reminded her over and over what he had done to put her on a cold doctor’s table instead of in their warm marital bed.

  “You’re getting a lot more candor out of me than I’m used to,” her cowboy said, sounding surprised at himself, even as he squeezed Reese’s tits. “The power of pussy, I guess.”

  “You might get my pussy,” she responded, enjoying herself and aping his cowboy drawl, “but a good woman’ll flay your soul.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he drawled back. He lifted a big paw to the back of her neck and brought her face close to his. She sighed, went limp.

  Her eyes glassily held his.

  “Tell you what,” he told her, “first I’m going to own your pussy…” He paused, and with his hand still on her neck, he slowly, firmly, pushed her face down into a pillow. “Then we’ll see about my soul.”

  * * *

  —

  Now he slides back into the car, with a little brown bag full of lube and condoms, and a tickling of anticipation slides across Reese’s stomach. “Do we really need these tonight?” he asks her, holding up the bag. “You know I’m gonna want to knock you up.”

  This was why she still put up with him: He got it. With him, she’d discovered sex that was really and truly dangerous. Cis women, she supposed, rubbed against a frisson of danger every time they had sex. The risk, the thrill, that they might get pregnant—a single fuck to fuck up (or bless?) their lives. For cis women, Reese imagined, sex was a game played at the precipice of a cliff. But until her cowboy, she hadn’t ever had the pleasure of that particular danger. Only now, with his HIV, had she found an analogue to a cis woman’s life changer. Her cowboy could fuck her and mark her forever. He could fuck her and end her. His cock could obliterate her.

  His viral load was undetectable, he said, but she never asked to see any papers. That would kill the sweetness and danger of it. He liked to play close to the edge too, pushing to knock her up, to impregnate her with a viral seed. Make her the mommy, her body host to new life, part of her but not, just as mothers eternal.

  “We agreed on condoms always. You said you didn’t want it on your conscience,” she said.

  “Yeah, but that was before you started on your birth control.”

  She first called her PrEP “birth control” at a Chinese place in Sunset Park where he felt safe that none of his wife’s friends would possibly run into him. It popped into her head as a joke, but he looked at her and said, “Fuck, I just got so hard.” He signaled for
the check, told her that she wouldn’t get to see a movie that night, and drove her right home to put her facedown on her floral bedspread. In the morning, she sexted him one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-sexual, sexts of her life—a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-of-the-month clamshell cases. From then on, her “birth control pills” were part of their sex life.

  There was another reason, beyond the stigma, taboo, and eroticization, that their particular brand of bugchasing had bite for Reese: She really did want to be a mom. She wanted it worse than anything. She had spent her whole adulthood with the queers, ingesting their radical relationships and polyamory and gender roles, but somehow, she still never displaced from the pinnacle of womanhood those nice white Wisconsin moms who had populated her childhood. She never lost that secret fervor to grow up into one of them. In motherhood she could imagine herself apart from her loneliness and neediness, because as a mother, she believed, you were never truly alone. No matter that her own and her trans friends’ actual experiences of unconditional parental love always turned out to be awfully conditional.

  Perhaps equally important, as a mother, she saw herself finally granted the womanhood that she suspected the goddesses of her childhood took as their natural due. She’d set herself up for it, once. She’d been in a lesbian relationship with a trans woman named Amy—a woman with a good job in tech, and who became so suburban-presentable that when she spoke, you imagined her words in Martha Stewart’s signature typeface. With Amy, Reese had gotten as close to domesticity as she figured possible for a trans girl—the trust and boredom and stability that now had the faded aspect of a dream recalled right after you wake. They even had an apartment by Prospect Park—the kind of bright, airy space that evinced enough good taste and stalwart respectability that the idea of showing adoption agencies where they lived had been one of the lesser obstacles to motherhood.

  But now, three years later, as Reese’s odometer clicked up into her midthirties, she began to think about what she called the Sex and the City Problem.

  The Sex and the City Problem wasn’t just Reese’s problem, it was a problem for all women. But unlike millions of cis women before Reese, no generation of trans women had ever solved it. The problem could be described thusly: When a woman begins to notice herself aging, the prospect of making some meaning out of her life grows more and more urgent. A need to save herself, or be saved, as the joys of beauty and youth repeat themselves to lesser and lesser effect. But in finding meaning, Reese would argue—despite the changes wrought by feminism—women still found themselves with only four major options to save themselves, options represented by the story arcs of the four female characters of Sex and the City. Find a partner, and be a Charlotte. Have a career, and be a Samantha. Have a baby, and be a Miranda. Or finally, express oneself in art or writing, and be a Carrie. Every generation of women reinvented this formula over and over, Reese believed, blending it and twisting it, but never quite escaping it.

  Yet, for every generation of trans women prior to Reese’s, the Sex and the City Problem was an aspirational problem. Only the rarest, most stealth, most successful of trans women ever had the chance to even confront it. The rest were barred from all four options at the outset. No jobs, no lovers, no babies, and while a trans woman might have been a muse, no one wanted art in which she spoke for herself. And so, trans women defaulted into a kind of No Futurism, and while certain other queers might celebrate the irony, joy, and graves into which queers often rush, that rush into No Future looked a lot more glamorous when the beautiful corpse left behind was a wild and willful choice rather than a statistical probability.

  When Reese lived with Amy, she aspired to the Sex and the City Problem herself. It felt radical for her, as a trans woman, to luxuriate in the contemplation of how bourgeois to become. It felt like a success not to have that choice made for her. Then Amy detransitioned and it all fell apart.

  Now futurelessness had crept back into view. Now Reese made other women’s prizes her own bliss, and made babies out of viruses.

  “All right,” she says, after they’d been driving for about ten minutes.

  “All right, what?”

  “All right. Let’s see if you can get me pregnant.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Her cowboy starts to say something, but she cuts him off. “Only, if we’re going to do this, you’ve got to start treating me better. You’ve got to treat me like the mother of your child.”

  He reaches over to pinch her side. “Mother of my child? C’mon. You don’t want that. If I put a tadpole in the well, then you’re gonna want to be the knocked-up sixteen-year-old from the bad side of town. You want everyone knowing it’s ’cause you’re an easy slut.”

  She squirms away from his pinch. “I’m serious. Treat me better.”

  He frowns, but keeps his eyes on the road. “Yeah. Okay. I will. Let’s get some food,” he says, braking at a red light.

  “Really?” They were driving to her neighborhood, Greenpoint, and he often wouldn’t eat with her in that area. He knew too many people who lived there. Once she forced him to go out to a vegan buffet by her house, and he barely made eye contact the whole time. His gaze instead jerked to the door whenever someone new came into the place. After that, she let him drive her south, or sometimes into Queens. Never Manhattan, never Williamsburg, where his wife made her social life.

  But now, she says he can fuck her without a condom and all his rules go out the window. Reese has a moment of satisfaction. Her body is the ultimate trump card.

  “Yeah,” he says, “maybe you could run in somewhere and pick up some takeout.”

  Of course. Takeout. With him waiting in the car. She nods. “Sure, what would you like?”

  * * *

  —

  In the Thai restaurant, she doesn’t order anything for herself. He loves curries, spiced to a barely edible Scoville level. She does not. She’ll make herself something at home after he leaves. She’s scrolling through Instagram when her phone rings, and it’s a number she doesn’t recognize, some out-of-state area code. Her cowboy uses Google Voice so her texts don’t show up on his iPad at home, which his wife sometimes borrows, and Google often routes the calls through weird numbers.

  She hits the green Answer button and brings the phone to her ear. “I got you green curry with beef, five-star spiciness,” she says by way of a greeting.

  “Hey, that’s nice of you, but if you remember, I was always such a wuss about spice.” A man’s voice. Warm and smooth, but none of her cowboy’s drawl, which he somehow managed to keep, even through his years in New York.

  She lowers the phone, checks the number. “Who is this?”

  The man’s tone changes, not quite apologetic, but inviting. “Reese. Hi. Sorry, it’s Ames.”

  Out in the car she can see her cowboy, the glow of his own phone illuminating the glasses he only wore to read. She turns away, as if he might overhear her through the glass windows of his car, the plate glass of the restaurant, over the clang of the kitchen and the talk of the scattered customers.

  “Why are you calling, Ames? I didn’t think we were speaking anymore.”

  “I know.”

  She waits, holds her lips together. She can hear him breathing. She wants to make him talk first.

  “I’m not calling to bother you,” he presses on. “I was hoping for your help.”

  “My help? I didn’t know I had anything left for you to take.”

  He pauses. “Take from you?” His bafflement sounds genuine. This was his whole problem. That he couldn’t see what he had led her to lose. “Maybe I deserve that. But I promise I’m not calling for that. It’s almost the opposite.”

  “I’m on a date. I’ve got some Thai food coming.” She knows it’s vindictive to say. But she can’t help it. He’s th
rown her off, and she wants both to return the favor and to prove to him that her life has moved on.

  “I can call at a different time?”

  “No, you’ve got until my food gets here to explain yourself.”

  “Is there some guy watching us talk?”

  “I’m getting takeout. He’s waiting in the car.” A thrum of satisfaction plays in Reese’s chest. Clearly, however Ames had anticipated this conversation going, she has wrested it away from him.

  “Okay,” he says, “I’d hoped to explain this at length, but we’ll do it your way. Remember how you always wanted us to have a baby together? That’s what we had planned for?”

  Something must be off with him that he’d call her about this. He wasn’t the type to hurt people for fun, and he must know such a question, asked so directly, would hurt her. She feels stupid for having told him that she was on a date.

  “Is that still something you’d want? A baby, I mean?” His question ends on an up note, as though he’s slightly afraid of his audacity in having voiced it.

  “Of course I still fucking want a baby,” she snaps.

  “That’s so good to hear, Reese,” he says. His tone is relieved. She knows him so well, she can almost picture the way his body is relaxing. “Because something happened. Even after everything, you’re the person I trust most to talk to me about it. For everything we had, please, please, can I see you? I badly need to talk to you.”

  “You’ll have to tell me more than just this, Ames.”

  He exhales. “All right. I got a woman pregnant. I’m going to have a baby.”

  Reese can’t believe it. She can’t believe that Ames would call her to tell her that he had gotten the thing she so desperately wanted. She closes her eyes, counts to five.