42 pages • 1 hour read
Detransition, Baby
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BetaChapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Eleven weeks after conception”
The next week, Reese goes with Katrina to a “doTerra party” organized by one of Katrina’s friends, at which a representative of the company doTerra sells essential oils (284). The event is the first time Reese meets Katrina’s friends, who are unaware of Katrina’s pregnancy or her plans to co-parent with Reese. At first, Reese feels alienated and uncomfortable at the party, not being used to hanging out around straight professional couples. At one point during the party, the attendees are instructed to list their medical ailments, and Katrina announces to the party that she is pregnant. When the women ask Katrina who the father is, Katrina turns to Reese, who hastily comes out and explains that she is trans and will be Katrina’s co-parent but is not “the actual father” (291).
After the party, Reese and Katrina celebrate the pregnancy with several of Katrina’s close friends at a café. The women, who at first are bewildered, ask Katrina to explain her co-parenting situation. Katrina explains that she is excited “not to do the heteronormative thing” and to raise a child in a queer, unconventional way (293). Reese realizes that she is witnessing Katrina “coming out as queer to her friends” (293). While most of Katrina’s friends come around to the plan, one friend, Diana, feels unsure about the situation because her husband cheated on her with a trans woman.
As Katrina’s friends get ready to leave the café, Reese sees her cowboy lover walk in. At first confused about why he is there, Reese learns from Katrina that the cowboy is Diana’s husband. Reese quickly leaves, avoiding the cowboy and Diana, and assumes that she has escaped an awkward situation and that everything will be fine. However, Ames shows up at Reese’s apartment late that night and tells Reese that Katrina is furious about the situation, partially due to the fact that the cowboy is HIV positive. Katrina feels that Reese has recklessly put her child in danger and threatens to terminate her pregnancy. After Ames leaves, Reese grows increasingly enraged over Katrina’s reaction, which she sees as a homophobic form of alarmism over HIV. Reese writes an angry email to Ames and Katrina telling them that their “sharing-a-baby enterprise is nothing but an elaborate exercise in the gentrification of queerness” (306). Reese decides not to send the email and goes to sleep. However, the next morning, she awakens to texts from Ames telling her to “fix what she’s done” (307-08). Angered again, Reese sends both Ames and Katrina the email.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Twelve weeks after conception”
The novel’s final chapter follows the three characters in the days following Reese’s email. The email cements Katrina’s desire to cut Reese out as a co-parent, as “Reese’s subsequent cruel letter ruled out her participation in their family” (313). While Katrina wants to continue a relationship with Ames and raise their baby together, Katrina also tells Ames that she can no longer accept instability in her life. She asks Ames to firmly commit to being a parent with her, or else she will have an abortion and end their relationship.
Unsure what to do, Ames reaches out to his college friend Jon. Ames and Jon have met frequently for years to discuss emotional dilemmas and uncertainties. Their relationship and discussions continued through Ames’s transition and subsequent detransition. They meet at a café and Ames tells Jon what has happened between him, Reese, and Katrina. Jon tells Ames that he needs to “be honest with the women in your life about what you want” (314). Later that day, Ames and Katrina meet and have sex, and Ames realizes that he wants to raise a child with Katrina, but that he cannot promise her that he will not continue to question or change his gender identity. Before they can discuss it further, they get a phone call that Reese is in the hospital following a suicide attempt.
The narrative backtracks to explain how Reese ends up in the hospital. The day after she sends the angry email to Katrina and Ames, she goes with Thalia to Riis Beach. Though Reese tries to keep her mind occupied, she begins to succumb to sadness and despair over the loss of her relationship with Katrina. Reese goes on a walk by herself and begins talking to imagined ghosts, telling them that she has lost her baby. Reese realizes she has experienced the emotional equivalent of a miscarriage and begins to grieve her lost child. She decides to submerge herself in the cold ocean water in an attempt to numb her emotional pain—a technique she learned about from watching a video of a man named Wim Hof. However, the other people on the beach assume that Reese is trying to commit suicide and call an ambulance, which takes Reese to the hospital.
Ames and Katrina come to the hospital to pick up Reese, who attempts to assure them that she didn’t actually attempt to commit suicide. Reese apologizes for the email, and Katrina tells Reese that parts of what she wrote were accurate. They drop Reese off at her house. Several days later, Katrina schedules an appointment for an abortion. She invites Ames and Reese to accompany her to the appointment. On the morning of the planned abortion, the three meet at Katrina’s apartment, where Reese asks Katrina to postpone the abortion and think it over. Ames observes that their discussions about this matter might be awkward and tense because they are fundamentally trying to figure out what womanhood means for each of them. The chapter closes with the three characters sitting in silence, thinking about their futures and the baby, and wondering whether or not they should go through with the pregnancy.
Chapters 10-11 Analysis
In the final chapters of Detransition, Baby, the growing tensions between Katrina, Reese, and Ames explode in conflict. After Katrina discovers that Reese has been sleeping with her friend’s husband, she grows irate, abruptly deciding to end her pregnancy and their co-parenting relationship. This type of climax in a novel is often resolved by a denouement, the moment when the author resolves the novel’s disparate narrative strands. While Peters brings her characters’ fears and desires to a head in their conflict over how to coexist as a queer family, however, she declines to reveal what decision they will come to.
At the beginning of Chapter 10, Reese and Katrina are as close as they have ever been. Katrina takes Reese to a party, introducing Reese to her friends and announcing her pregnancy and parenting plans. Reese realizes that Katrina is doing her own version of “coming out,” which queer and trans people must do (or decide not to do) constantly. While Reese is thrilled that Katrina is being so open and “excited” about their queer family, she suspects that Katrina is idealizing queerness. When Katrina excitedly tells her friends that “she always had an affinity for queerness”, and that she suspects it is what was “missing in her marriage with Danny” (293-94), she appears to adopt queerness as a utopic alternative to heterosexual relationships. Katrina hopes her relationships with Reese and Ames will offer her all of the support, nurturing, and respect she lacked in her marriage. Reese sees a naiveté in Katrina that she recognizes as common among newly out queer people who are excited about their newly acknowledged identity but haven’t yet experienced the pains and difficulties of living with an out marginalized identity.
Tensions abruptly come to a head when Katrina’s friend’s husband enters the restaurant and turns out to be the same HIV positive cowboy Reese is having an affair with. In this instance, a cis character’s fear of trans women connects to reality, as Reese is in fact having an affair with Diana’s husband. However, the chapter also explores the problems that arise when individuals’ actions are mapped onto broad cultural anxieties that demonize trans women and gay men, portraying them as general threats to the physical and emotional health of straight families. Katrina’s assumption that the cowboy’s HIV positive status will be transmitted to her future child through Reese treats being HIV-positive as an uncontrollable and inevitable danger, rather than as a health condition many people live with and navigate, as Reese does by taking PrEP.
While Reese’s affair and the cowboy’s HIV status become points of argument, secrecy and trust are the core issues that the novel’s protagonists must address. Reese sees Katrina and Ames’s interest in “queer family” as nothing more than a trend of mainstream culture accepting and consuming queerness in ways that make it palatable to societal norms. While queer people have gained wider acceptance in recent decades, it is often at the expense of those individuals who do not fit the molds of what straight society considers acceptable–“transvestites, drag queens, sissies, cross-dressers, transgendered, transsexuals, fairies, and on and on” (306-07). For Reese, Katrina’s freaking out over her lover’s HIV positive status is particularly indicative of her latent homophobia and discomfort with what it means to be queer: “Isn’t HIV exactly the symbol of an indigestible queerness that even the most assimilated queers haven’t figured out how to break down?” she asks Katrina and Ames (307).
All three protagonists, for different reasons, fear that a lack of shared values will doom their attempt to be a family. As a result of Reese’s email, Katrina decides to terminate her pregnancy, and she abruptly cuts off contact with Reese. At first, the alternative family that was bourgeoning between the three characters seems completely lost. However, they are drawn together again after Reese is taken to the hospital. When the novel closes, whether or not they will have a baby is left open: “They are together, and miles from each other, their thoughts turning to themselves, then turning to the baby, each in her own way contemplating how her tenuous rendition of womanhood has become dependent upon the existence of this little person” (337). The novel ends on a note of slight optimism by suggesting that a family is never something given, but rather something that must be constantly remade and rethought by the individuals who are a part of it.
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