Detransition, Baby

With the same subtitle as Chapter 2, this chapter focuses on Amy’s relationship history, instead of Reese’s. The chapter opens with Amy taking a hit from a bottle of poppers, a chemical substance that causes a brief high and is often taken before or during sex. The poppers cause Amy to feel overwhelmingly vulnerable and open to Reese, and the intensity of those emotions make Amy start to cry.

The chapter then shifts to explore the history of Amy’s relationship with sex and intimacy. Pre-transition, Amy’s gender dysphoria (the misalignment of her inner self, her body, and her social gender roles) means that sex typically involves her “managing her own impression of herself as she fucked,” causing her to become disconnected from her body and physicality (121). Amy first loses her virginity at fifteen years old to Delia, a seventeen-year-old girl at Amy’s school. At first, Amy tries to perform oral sex on Delia, but her self-consciousness about her body, and her anxiety about being perceived as masculine, result in Amy performing “inept and cramped fumbling” as she tries to pleasure Delia (123). Their attempts at sex only grow more and more awkward. Amy begins to fantasize that she is a girl and to imagine what she would want Delia to say and do to her in such a fantasy.