Between the absolutely diabolic things screeched at Grace Lavery for being excited about womb transplants and the pushback to Detransition, Baby being nominated for the Women's Prize For Fiction...

... trans women's reproductive sorrow is really hard to avoid this week.

This subject hits close to home.

One reason I didn't start transitioning until I was 30 was that I so badly wanted kids, but could never afford fertility preservation. I had to choose between womanhood or parenthood. I spent so long trapped between them that I was losing both.

Fertility isn't guaranteed to any woman. There's no comfort in that, but it's the truth. This sorrow is not ours, alone, but another bond shared with cis women.

The cis women who don't see that are clinging to what little social power patriarchy offers them for reproduction.

We think of gender dysphoria as being an exclusively trans experience, but if you've ever heard a cis woman talk about how her infertility made her feel like less of a woman, or how her social position under patriarchy changed... well.

Gender is a construct for cis people, too.

A key difference is that, when a cis woman is infertile, there's compassion, and (unsolicited) pity, and tiptoeing around her feelings. Her loss is acknowledged (in a deeply flawed way).

Medical research into uterine transplants for cis women is an obvious, accepted social good.

How many feminists joke about uterine implants for CIS MEN, to redistribute the burden reproductive labor?

But when the subject is reproductive medicine for trans women... well, Kavanagh voiced the atmosphere of transmisogynistic disgust quite colorfully:

CW: transmisogyny

"vultures clambering over the dead to peck their eyes" / "ghouls" with "slow, dead, grey eyes," "dark forces craving flesh" / "maggots" "denigrating the bodies that grew them"

I just want to raise a child.

An unquestionable right, for straight cis people.*

*for straight cis WHITE people. The state is more than happy to sterilize cis women of color. The mechanisms of transmisogyny are inextricable from white supremacy.

Women have fought so, so hard to separate womanhood and the value of women from our ability to perform reproductive labor.

Other women have mystified pregnancy as a sacred power intrinsic to womanhood.

Sometimes they're the same women, and somehow don't see the contradiction.

And those same "wombyn" peddling the divine feminine essence assure cis women: "When the baby comes, you'll know what to do. Motherhood is an instinct. You'll love the baby and you'll always know what's best for it."

There is no magic mom gene. Childcare is skilled labor.

I was a caretaker to my younger siblings starting at age 10. I was a teen babysitter; like Reese, I was a daycare worker, I took master's level courses on child literacy, I became a youth librarian. I have been teaching and caring for other people's children my entire life.

For most of it, I was wrongly assumed to be a man, and the constant gendered microaggressions apparent-men get in the child care field were so, so difficult to stomach.

(Now that I'm out as trans, ~mysteriously~, I don't get hired for these positions at all, anymore.)

Childcare is skilled labor.

No woman is guaranteed fertility. By the same token, not all cis women who can and do give birth will find themselves suited to childcare.

They can learn the skills on the fly, but not if they approach it with arrogance about biological suitability.

When you work in child care, you will meet countless terrible mothers.

You're not allowed to call them that, because "you don't know how hard parenting is." But you will meet mothers entirely disinterested in their children, mothers who delight in public cruelty to their kids.

When you're queer, you already know that the heterosexual family unit, and its unquestionable, fascist authority over children, is a cesspit for abuse. You lived it, you know countless people who did, but your voices no longer count.

"That's envy speaking." "Hateful." "Spite."

The state agencies that're supposed to counterbalance total parental authority broadly target poor families, families of color, fat children.

~Somehow~ they never go after the quiver-full parents who falsify homeschooling documents and marry their kids off to their friends.

When adults who've escaped evangelical upbringings recount the horrors of their early lives they're often told: "Reconcile! Your parents love you. Forgive them. Family is the most important thing."

Why?

Why is a system that hurts millions of children permitted to exist?

To return to trans women's reproductive sorrow:

Like gender, the heterosexual family, as the smallest unit of community under patriarchy, is not an ironclad institution and not the naturally-occurring structure that patriarchy would have you believe. It's a recent isolation.

For most of human history and, to the best of our knowledge, prehistory, childcare was communal, often a specialist labor conducted by a community's elderly or disabled. "It takes a village to raise a child."

Cis feminism understands that childrearing just isn't a job for only one person. But its solution has been to beg, bribe and berate fathers into contributing "more"... with mixed success, because resources just don't go as far when divided into units as small as a hetero couple.

When trans womens' reproductive sorrow is acknowledged, the focus is often biological: our bodies, with rare exception, cannot sustain pregnancy. Many of us cannot have genetic offspring. There can be a physical sense of loss and incompleteness attached to these things.

Maybe some day medical technology will change all of that for us; grant us access to the flawed household unit of community.

But here and now, we can absolutely address the SOCIAL half of trans women's reproductive sorrow by REJECTING that unit, which inherently excludes us.

I say "we can address it," but of course the reality is that "we" here means, most directly, the people who already have access to the familial unit. The people with the least incentive to give up that power.

I'm sorry if you were hoping for an optimistic cap on this thread.

The ache trans women feel regarding childlessness is just one expression of the isolation of cishet families to serve capitalism.

None of these ideas are new. Abolition of the family was a central idea for Marx; it's everywhere in emancipatory feminism.

A good first step would be to attach social costs to transmisogyny. Right now bigots break out words like "grooming," "abuse," and "predatory" to describe trans women apropos of nothing at all, are believed, and face no consequences.

For some, it's lucrative career journalism!

I can't get jobs in child care anymore unless I take my trans status out of my cover letters and go back in the closet, at which point I'm a perfect candidate. Even liberal employers are intimidated by the stigma. *I'M* intimidated by the stigma.

Give me your unwanted children. End of thread.