RaveThe Guardian (UK)Perhaps Detransition, Baby is the first great trans realist novel? Witty, elegant and rigorously plotted, Peters’s book breezily plays with the structural conventions of literary realism ... sexually peppery, though also casually self-instrumentalising, cliches may or may not charm the reader—they did this one—but Peters’s remarkable skill is to divert our attention from the cliche to the mode of self-narration in which it moves and has its being ... The portrayal of detransition itself is tender rather than mawkish, Ames’s motivations admirably ambivalent. Detransition, Baby makes a careful distinction between \'being trans,\' which it treats as a condition of desire, and \'doing trans,\' a set of actions and protocols that have simply become too exhausting for Ames to continue ... Peters’s novel approaches the well trodden topic of baby fever, and although it renders the specificity of trans community and subjectivity in vivid, electric prose, its real appeal is much wider.
