Detransition, Baby
A trans woman, her detransitioned ex, and the ex's pregnant cis boss try to build a family together. Peters wrote a novel about trans life that's also a sharp, witty New York comedy of manners about parenthood, desire, and what counts as a real family. It became the first novel by an openly trans woman to be nominated for a major literary prize, and it reads like it was always supposed to exist.
Peters lets her characters stop and lecture: internal monologues stretch out until betrayal gets compared to being tortured, and even fans call some of it self-indulgent. The musth-elephant passage, where Ames likens trans experience to elephants observed in South Africa, splits readers between illuminating and gratuitous. One reviewer says flatly Peters' prose is “clunky and unoriginal,” another calls the whole digression “an excuse for the inclusion of gender studies monologues,” and a third insists “a paper bag would probably beat Reese out for personality.” Katrina, the only major character of color, absorbs racist comments that land without consequence. The book stops short of resolving the co-parenting arrangement it spent 300 pages building, which several readers call less an ending than a shrug.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
