[en] The ²⁶Mg(¹³C, ¹²C)²⁷Mg and ²⁶Mg(¹³C, ¹⁴C)²⁵Mg reactions have been studied at 35 MeV incident energy. Since distorted wave Born approximation calculations fail to fit many features of the data, the effects of inelastic excitation of the target and projectile systems are investigated and found to be important. In particular the L = 1 excitation of the 3/2⁺ state in ²⁷Mg state transitions is found to be anomalous in a fashion similar to that in earlier experiments using other targets and projectiles. The inclusion of a multistep route permitting a spectroscopically strong p/sub 3/2/ → d/sub 3/2/ transition, in addition to the one-step p/sub 1/2/ → d/sub 3/2/ transition, goes a long way towards removing the anomaly