Detransition, Baby Quotes

“Many people think a trans woman’s deepest desire is to live in her true gender, but actually it is to always stand in good lighting.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“She knew that no matter how you self-identify ultimately, chances are that you succumb to becoming what the world treats you as.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Yes.” Reese nods. “I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I’m talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter—all with no plan to guide them. That’s as close to a trans woman as you can get. Divorced women are the only people who know anything like what I know. And, since I don’t really have trans elders, divorced women are the only ones I think have anything to teach me, or who I care to teach in return.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“She's the type to turn hardship into hardness, like a shield for people she loves.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“I got to a point where I thought I didn't need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of self.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“All my white girlfriends just automatically assume that reproductive rights are about the right to not have children, as if the right and naturalness of motherhood is presumptive. But for lots of other women in this country, the opposite is true. Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘anchor babies.’ All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“The moms I knew when I was little didn't have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It's assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don't you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn't have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I'm not cis. I'm trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I'm constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one. That it's not unnatural or twisted that I want a child's love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with — and you too, Katrina, for that matter — have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I'll explain mine. And do you know what I'll say? Ditto.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Jealousy is like a hangover: When you are in the midst of it you want to die, you are poisoned, useless. Nothing stretches before you but an expanse of ashes and regret; yet despite the intensity of your suffering, no one feels sorry for you, no one cosigns your fury. No sympathy for you! Look how wantonly you indulged! Of course it hurts, but your suffering is nothing unique, everyone has suffered like that, so get ahold of yourself, show some backbone and discretion, for god’s sake. Don’t go making any major decisions. Jealousy and hangovers, as common wisdom goes, are temporary.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“IF YOU ARE a trans girl who knows many other trans girls, you go to church a lot, because church is where they hold the funerals.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“That's who is now, he reminds himself, someone who makes decisions, who doesn't let life just act upon him. Wasn't that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles, that delay is just form of hiding from reality. That you just figure what you what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don't know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want. So do something.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“The past is past to everyone but ghosts.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“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 in 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.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Sometimes the wonder over the object of a crush is indistinguishable from the simple relief that you are still able to leap into one at all.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“She’s suggested, in the way that naive cis people do, with a hint of self-congratulation at their own broad-mindedness, that it seems like trans people are starting to be everywhere, that maybe gender doesn’t matter that much. In his reply, he can’t help but let loose an old defensiveness on this topic. “I think it’s the opposite,” he says too sharply. “The whole reason transsexuals transition is because gender matters so incredibly much.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“She believed that one ought to have a singular major failure, in which all of one’s hopes were dashed, in order to sprout a life into something interesting, as pruned trees grow baroque and beautiful, because an unpruned tree only grows vertically and predictably, selfishly sucking up as much sunlight as possible.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women conform their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the Lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard. Or just watch your local heterosexuals drinking in a bar. Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do, which still places pain front and center. Hear the strange sense of satisfaction when they talk about the men who have hurt them—the unspoken subtext of it being because I am a woman. The quiet dignity of saying ow anytime a man gets a little rough—asserting that you are a woman, and thus delicate and capable of sustaining harm.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“To have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she had sway over one's precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism's arbitrary mechanics doesn't satisfy - the heart demands a human explanation.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“So you got sick of being trans?"
"I got sick of living as trans. I got to a point where I thought I didn't need to put up with the bullshit of gender in order to satisfy my sense of myself. I am trans, but I don't need to do trans.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Wasn't that the big lesson of transition, of detransition? That you'll never know all the angles that delay is a form of hiding from reality. That you just figure out what you want and do it? And maybe, if you don't know what you want, you just do something anyway, and everything will change, and then maybe that will reveal what you really want.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Why does she deserve to be so angry? What has she truly lost? Quietly, to herself, she answers her own question: I have lost a child.
The statement jolts her. She hears in her own voice a latch sliding into place. She says it again, phrased slightly differently, I have lost my child. Is it grief she feels? Is grief even a feeling to which she is entitled?”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Back before all this gender shit, her body was like a good dog. Maybe it wasn't fully her, but her dog did everything she wanted: she moved so fast, pulled himself up trees, sprinted through forests and across fields, giddy and waggy. She was lucky to have gotten a dog like that. She didn't deserve such a good dog. She'd thought she'd have that dog forever - when they were both old, he would lay at her feet like a canvas duffel, loyal and obliging and charming to the last...
When Amy transitioned, she lost her dog. There was just her. She and her body were one and the same. Every sensation simply belonged to her, unmediated. It was supposed to be good. Sometimes it was. She didn't have to guess what was going on from her dog's behavior. But without a dog to hurt for her, on her behalf, her life as a woman arrived with pain; pain that had to be endured, withstood, pain that was the same as being alive, and so was without end.
As Jon bats, Ames tries to listen to his body. He has not thought about his dog in a long time. Does he still have a dog? In his detransition, he supposed he'd get his dog back, but he didn't. He has simply lost the vibrancy of both pain and pleasure. The world has receded to a tolerable distance, the colors unsaturated, while the dog stayed dead.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“I forget what it's like being around trans women," he admits. "That for once, I'm not the only one constantly analyzing the gender dynamics of every situation to play my role.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Reese is a veteran of the horrific social gore that results when individuals fight personal battles with unnecessarily political weaponry on a queer battlefield mined with hypersensitive explosives. As a Veteran, she usually steers clear of such tactics, an adherent of the Geneva Conventions. Unless of course, in a moment of hurt or outrage or vengeance, her bloodlust gets the best of her and she goes looking for maximum gore.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“Children make studies of their parents, decipher them, propose theories about their behavior, turn them this way and that, examining every flaw, and continue to do so long after the parents themselves are gone. In stories, at the therapist's office, at holidays--the story of the parent never ends.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“All pain merits care, but not dogmatically egalitarian relativism.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“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 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.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby

“The women we love are sacred and we will defend them.”
― Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby