Torrey Peters

Peters' debut novel, Detransition, Baby, published by Penguin Random House in 2021, was met with critical success and praise crafting a tender exploration of gender, parenthood, and love.[12][13] The main characters are Reese, a trans woman, PR executive and former partner of Amy; Amy, who detransitions and becomes Ames; and Katrina, a Chinese Jewish woman who is Ames' boss and pregnant with his child.[14][15] Peters has stated that the character of Ames is inspired by an experience she had in 2016, when she visited Mexico and wore a suit to pass as male and avoid questions from customs about her male passport.[1]

Peters reflected that the novel is written in the genre of a soap opera and that the novel's characters talk "how I talk with my friends."[16][17] In 2021, Peters said that while she was writing the book in 2018, "I was just thinking about what was going to be funny for my friends and what was pertinent to our lives", and "I had the freedom to imagine trans people as just quotidian, boring, flawed people. I wasn't engaging with trans people as an embattled group."[18]

The dedication for Detransition, Baby is addressed to "divorced cis women". Peters' reasoning for this is that "divorced cis women must start over at a point in adulthood when they're supposed to be established", which she compares to what trans women experience.[19]

Detransition, Baby was nominated for the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction, making Peters the first openly trans woman nominated for the award.[20] The longlisting of Peters was met with some controversy from those who did not consider her to be a woman. A letter argued that she is "male" and therefore should not be eligible for the prize.[21] Its list of signatories included atheist writer Ophelia Benson and environmentalist Rebecca Lush, but as a rhetorical strategy the letter also included long-dead writers such as Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather.[22] Authors including Melinda Salisbury, Joanne Harris, and Naoise Dolan—another nominee for the 2021 prize—condemned the letter and expressed their support for Peters. The organisers of the prize released a statement condemning the letter and defending the decision to nominate Peters' book.[23][24]

In early 2021, a TV adaptation of Detransition, Baby was announced. Grey’s Anatomy writer-producers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan are the showrunners for the drama/comedy television adaptation.[25]