Detransition, Baby

by Torrey Peters

In lieu of the book, Reese read as many blog posts as she could find on the subject. Her friend was right: The notion of queer temporality was comforting. Of course, she told herself, the flow of time and the epochs that add up to a queer life won’t correspond to the timeline or even sequence of straight lives, so it is meaningless to compare her own queer lifeline to a heterosexual’s lifeline as though they were horses on the same racetrack, released from the gates at the same moment. And that was just for your run-of-the-mill queer. Now imagine that you were trans! You would have to go through at least two puberties! By age thirty, the financial ads said, you should have saved two years’ income for retirement. But at age thirty, the trans girls Reese knew held most of their investment portfolios in the form of old MAC lipstick shades they’d worn once; they spent workdays sending each other animated gifs and occasionally got trolled online by actual thirteen-year-olds.