dez’s Reviews > Detransition, Baby > Status Update

“Let that hunger—for a family, for a child, for others to make a place in their lives for her—quiet itself a spell in anticipation of a coming satiation. 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.”

“rting. 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”

“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, those 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”

“And then you developed new coping mechanisms, new language, new walls to keep yourself safe. The problem with the poppers was that they made Amy too dumb to keep all that cognitive machinery going. It all ground to a halt, and instead of the new lies, she fell into direct contact with a raw fact: She was a girl in love with a girl. It was overwhelming. It was all she had ever hoped for.”

“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.”