"She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as."
First things first- Detransition, Baby is an emotionally intense experience full of traumatic and triggering topics so‼️CW: gender dysphoria, domestic ab*se, ab*rtion, m*scarriage, and - as you may have guessed from the title - detransitioning.
It’s also a very ambitious novel: a celebration of queer love, an unapologetic reimagining of what it means to be a family, an intimate take on the journey of gender identity, and a casual treatise on the trans movements of past and present.
We follow multiple characters and their intertwining lives, each coming to terms with themselves as individuals and as members of a community within a specific cultural moment. It’s messy and complicated because everyone is flawed and problematic in their own way: but all in all, it’s a remarkably sensitive and cohesive take on their multifaceted narratives. Because the book attempts to be so much all at once, there may be the impulse to label it as representative of the “trans experience,” but that misses one of the main points of the novel. While providing a hyper-realistic glimpse into a small subset of people’s own realities, it is far from encompassing all motivations or trajectories for anyone else on similar paths. Overall, we absolutely loved it - 5 stars. 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
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