#ReadWithMC (opens in new tab)-Welcome to Marie Claire's Virtual Book Club. It is a pleasure to meet you, and for the month of February we will be reading Detransition, Baby by Tory Peters (opens in a new tab). The book is the story of three cisgender and transgender people whose lives intertwine when they suddenly become pregnant. Read an excerpt from the book and learn how to join our virtual book club here (opens in new tab). (1]

When Reese was 26 years old, she was hit by a man for the first time - as men sometimes hit women. The blow was an open-handed hook, and she caught him as he opened his mouth to insult her. She did not see his hand coming. She jerked her head back. Her vision wavered. Surprise turned to pain, the intensity of which startled her. 'Really,' she asked quietly.

He wrapped his muscles tightly around her again, as if to indicate to her that yes, really. If she could do it over again, she would have spat at him. But her body, which did not like pain, betrayed her, and without thinking, she flinched and blurted out, "I'm sorry." Satisfied, he slumped his shoulders.

Copper ran thinly from her split lip to the gap between her teeth. She probed the edges of the cut with her tongue, her hands motionless at her sides, as still as an animal turned into a statue before a predator.

Somewhere away from the traitor's body, a secret part of her mind had slipped out to calculate its own advantage. Already she could see the doubt gathering on his face. Already, in the cool distance, she could see how this would play out: she would torment him for this. He was a calm, firm, stoic man, always in control of his will and unable to be agitated. It makes him feel guilty, it makes him doubt, it hints at abuse. When the animalistic part of her body settles down and pain turns to memory, she will almost sensually run her fingers over the bruises that are the spoils of a grim victory. His name was Stanley, a rich man in his late thirties who hated dogs. His dislike of dogs was one of the things Reese deemed important about his character. When he told his friend Iris his name, Iris said, "There is no such thing as a good Stanley. She said that the name was a curse that parents put on their sons so that the boy would grow up to be a bastard. Reese knew that Stanley was a jerk. Reese liked Stanley, but he never said he liked him. She liked his jealousy, his domineering attitude, and the way he told her how to dress. She liked seeing herself through his eyes. Tending to be vulnerable, fragile, and irritatingly feminine, he made fun of her obsession with her appearance, her flightiness, her dreaminess, and her very subjective and associative view of how the world worked. She liked it when he called her a whore and bought her expensive gifts. She would rub his legs, ask him for a new dress, call him a bimbo woman, and go buy him a dress. She liked that he was crazy about her and that he resented her infatuation. The more he humiliates her, the more she is captivated by him. And it became a filthy, dangerous pleasure to make him angry. Her friends hated him. [Only Iris, with her gorgeous blonde hair and love of partying, understood why Rhys was so deep into sex with Stanley. 'I want to drive men crazy,' Iris said, arching as usual. 'I want men to suffer. I want them to love me enough to kill me. I want them to love me to death so much that they can't tolerate my existence.'

Reese did not want to die. Compared to Iris, Reese felt like she was just playing out this kind of psychodrama (Fisher-Price): the first abusive man Iris only had time for abusive men. Iris had doll-like eyes and laughed like Marilyn Monroe. She had majored in English at Brown University, but then refused to read, instead exhibiting an empty ambition that allowed her to remain a subject. Fear of serotonin depletion mixed with an almost haughty insistence on passively describing her own actions.

The dreamy way Iris talked about what should have been a horror made Rhys jealous. Before Stanley, Reese's sex games had only glimpsed possession, but when she was alone with Hitachi, images of Iris's stories cameoed in her fantasies. A hand to her throat. A slap to her face. A fight away from her body. But Reese said almost nothing to Iris except "whoa." Only once did Reese ask Iris if she needed help getting away from those men. To which Iris smirked and said, "No, not like that." And only this time, Reese, a transsexual who never went to college, much less Brown University, clutched her pearls and said that whatever Iris actually got from the men she disappeared with, emotional or otherwise, instead of taking up sex trafficking, SVU s episode, I was embarrassed by my own sensitivities, imagining the sensationalism of the episode for the first time. It was the same tone of clueless concern that the older sissies used when they learned that Reese was a transsexual: Oh dear, your life must really be going wrong. The response always surprised them: I chose this. I chose this. It makes me feel right." Whatever Iris got, she got it because she found what she wanted in it, and Iris passed it on to Reese. The least Reese could do was not pretend not to understand the chaos that separated what she wanted and what she could say.

Consider for a moment Reese's own damage: she met Stanley on a fetish site with the word "tranny" in its name. During that period, Reese had only dated on fetish sites. She despised trans girls who despised trans chasers. It would be foolish to exclude all men who came to understand that they wanted their bodies. To think that being fetishized and objectified is not the hottest thing in the bedroom is a sign of an immature lack of discretion.

The only pursuers you have to avoid in the way Reese dates are crypto-trans women who want to be women but can't handle it in the closet, and they live their fantasies through you. When you are with a crypto-trans, you can feel it. The crypto-trans must eliminate your personality in order to use you. You are only a body for him to live vicariously through. It is the most alienating thing in the world. It's like being worn mentally. It's like a glove." Reese fled at the first sign of cryptotrance. She wished they would become women and stop being weird.

But all the other chasers. Don't bother trying to convince an OkCupid, ignorant, gun-shy boy that girls with dicks are sexy. I want a movie star. (If it satisfies a man's curiosity about showing his lower half to a transsexual, it's a B. If not, it's a C.) I want a tech mogul to show me his yacht. Nice. Someone with a powerboat would be great, someone with a sailboat would let me pull the appropriate rope, and imagining myself as a cool Jackie O. is just wishful self-deception. I want a picture of a walking Bruce Weber with his washboard abs cut deeply and always looking like he's being lit from the side" Take a couple of male models and save one for later. The only thing is, you can't get a decent guy to take you home for Thanksgiving dinner, but you can't get that on a non-fetish site either, so let's at least have some good sex.

I wonder how many girls Rhys knows who sift through thousands of men on straight dating sites to prove they can be like other women, looking for men who aren't awful, who even cis women think are awful, and how many hours, days, How many times had he heard of them wasting weeks and months trying to find non-horrible women who would be willing to try a trans woman? Eventually, I exposed myself in his bedroom wearing only a crappy lace lingerie set for armor, measuring my new-to-me proportions of slender hips and broad shoulders, and nervously muttering, "It's not for me."

No way. It's much more traumatic than running into a chaser. You go to a fetish site for men who want trans girls and pick out a decent girl from a bunch of wannabes. In matters of the heart, Reese held one firm belief.

From "Detransition, Baby" by Torrey Peters. Copyright © 2020 by Torrey Peters, published by One Word, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

If you like audio, listen to the excerpt below (opens in a new tab).

Audio excerpted from "Detransition, Baby" by Tory Peters, courtesy of Penguin Random House Audio, narrated by Renata Friedman