Detransition, Baby

"The only people who have anything worthwhile to say about gender are divorced cis women who have given up on heterosexuality but are still attracted to men."
Katrina leans in. "Really?" She's interested, Reese can tell. She's asked the question with plain curiosity.
"Yes." Reese nods. "I mean, they go through everything I go through as a trans woman. Divorce is a transition story. Of course, not all divorced women go through it. I'm talking about the ones who felt their divorce as a fall, or as a total reframing of their lives. The ones who have seen how the narratives given to them since girlhood have failed them, and who know there is nothing to replace it all. But who still have to move forward without investing in new illusions or turning bitter - all with no plan to guide them. That's as close to a trans woman as you can get.

"Carrie," Katrina cuts her off again. "Ames isn't a woman."
"No, I know," Carrie assures her. "I know. She's a man."

This is what happens when the only trans voices out there are the loudest, shrillest trans girls constantly publishing dogmatic Trans 101 hot takes to rebuke the larger cis public. You get people thinking that in order to avoid offending trans people, you must locate and follow a secret guidebook filled with arcane rites, instead of just thinking about them decently, as you would anything else. You get one lady assembling an impromptu transgender focus group to assess how she should take the kind of basic responsibility that she clearly knows how to take in the non-trans-populated situations of her life, while another lady is going around gender-neutralising bathrooms because she doesn't dare ask Ames what he prefers in a direct, respectful manner.

[Reese] decides for the ten thousandth time that heterosexual cis people, while wilfully ignoring it, have staked their whole sexuality on a bet that each other's genders are real. If only cis heterosexuals would realise that, like trans women, the activity in which they are indulging is a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood, they'd be free to indulge in a whole new flexible suite of hot ways to lie to each other.

What I have tried to do is write characters that are so specific that they are not aspirational and they're also not representative. If you try to create characters that will perfectly represent everyone in the trans community, you also will disappoint people.

people have sex for a shared joy that keeps an existential loneliness at bay, so when she disappeared inside of herself, her more experienced partners sensed that absence and her disappearance hurt them. Since she dreaded hurting those she most wanted to connect with, she grew to dread and avoid sex with specifically those most-liked people. And of course, clearly dreading having to have sex with a person only hurt that person more and drove them away—concluding in a final angst in which the loneliness that had made her want to connect with someone in the first place returned upon her tenfold with every attempt to have sex.

Thalia was a former drag queen turned transsexual, one of the earliest converts in the Great Drag Enlightenment, when a significant quorum of Brooklyn’s queens came out as trans, began to inject estrogen, and renounced their gay past, the consequences of which miffed them into misandry, as the desperately cute twinks who used to sleep with them no longer would.