Alana’s Reviews > Detransition, Baby > Status Update

"Reese spent a lifetime observing cis women confirm their genders through male violence. Watch any movie on the lifetime channel. Go to any schoolyard….Hear women define themselves through pain, or rage against the assumption that they do…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." (59)

"And without legible traumas to point to, what would pain make her? At best, a trans version of those Didion-worshipping Bourgeois white girls who subscribed to a Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain…minor-wound-dwelling brooders with no particular difficulties but for an inchoate sense of their own wronged-ness, a wronged-ness that fell apart when put into words but nonetheless justified all manner of petulance."

"Amy’s performance had created a fundamental separation between the two of them. Something that hadn’t existed before. Something animal in her. A brute who could take a woman. Delia talked to her differently-like she had more respect for Amy, but also, had to maintain a careful distance. This was a budding man, after all." (129)