I was myself very put off by the review of Peters' book that appeared in Bookforum. For example this part:

This is not a social novel in the strict sense, because there’s no problem at its heart beyond the immutable problem of coexistence. Peters shows that fiction as an art form has a relationship to fiction as a misrepresentation, either as the result of miscommunication or a deliberate lie, and establishes her as a foremost specialist in situations in which they become difficult to distinguish from one another. Courtesy Emma Kohlmann and V1 Gallery

"Sexy damange", I would almost think that this Bookforum author was trolling, like they want to say "mutilation" but can't due to Artforum being a woke publication, so this is their compromise. As for this part, "establishes her as a foremost specialist in situations in which they become difficult to distinguish from one another", that's a very roundabout away for saying that it's a book about gaslighting, and the thrill that the main character in the book gets from lying to people and getting away with it, especially weaponizing social coercion and peer pressure to get their targets to go along with their "family planning", I guess.

Reese’s damage is the sexiest, and Peters opens Detransition, Baby with a full blast of it. Reese has a genuine desire to be a mom, but she also has a genuine desire for disrespectful married men. Her trysts with other people’s husbands and wish for a child of her own are related but incompatible. We meet Reese adrift in the feeling that she has missed her only chance at motherhood, which was back with Amy, who no longer even exists. Reese may not know what to do with her desire to mother, but she is highly skilled at reconfiguring it through sex. She and an HIV-positive suitor married to a cis woman, for example, joke about forgoing condoms and “knocking her up.” The notional “danger” of exposing her to the virus turns into something proximate to the “danger” of conception: Reese runs the risk of creating something.

So this book actually conflates getting AIDS with getting pregnant?

And this part just goes to show how oblivious the Bookforum reviewer is to whoever the intended reader is:

In one of the book’s first really astonishing paragraphs, Reese sends the husband “one of the sexiest, but most ostensibly non-sexual, sexts of her life—a short video of her cramming a couple of her big blue Truvada pills into one of those distinctive pastel birth control day-of-the-month clamshell cases.”

Jo Livingstone doesn't even explain what Truvada is, because obviously whoever reads this review must already know what that is. When authors take such liberties of not bothering to explain anything for their fellow already-initiated fans, those liberties apparently extent to their reviewers as well.

Amy is afraid of self-pity, for example, but frames her fear in cultural terms, refusing to become “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.”

I don't even understand what's being said here. Can someone explain that wordsalad quote to me and give me an example IRL?

Jo Livingstone was awarded the 2020 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

"Excellence in Reviewing" LMAO!