Abstract
Introduction
Pregnancy is at the centre of many social and political functions globally: it is how people, institutions, and even nations reproduce. For as long as there have been social, legal, and medical approaches to pregnancy, it has been assumed in most contexts to be an experience limited to cis women with a social role of motherhood. Even ‘non-traditional’ cis woman mothers like those who have adopted or those who have engaged in a contracted pregnancy (surrogacy) have struggled with the strength of the assumed relationship between pregnancy and motherhood. Trans pregnancy also shows clearly that the assumption that a pregnant person (and only a pregnant person) is or becomes a mother is patently false. For example, some trans men choose to renounce or postpone hormonal therapies or surgery to maintain physiological capabilities to become pregnant. Some (and increasing numbers) then become pregnant men. The very existence of pregnant men renders the narrow view that mothers are pregnant (and therefore) women moot. Trans women, too, reproduce, for example, by banking their sperm. 1 This all impacts upon our social understandings of gendered and embodied identities and requires changes to our medical and legal apparatus around reproduction. We look at how this works in contemporary England and Wales as a theoretical starting point.
The discursive limitation of pregnancy to cis women is always and everywhere political, where it disciplines both gender and reproduction – whether that discipline comes from courts, legislatures, policies, international organisations, medical practitioners, or the general public. The politics of gendering pregnancy is not ‘just’ about reproduction or trans people – but instead both about the very gendered norms under which our social and political systems operate, and the relationship between (different understandings of) gender equality, different modes of governmentality, and different apparatuses of gender control. At stake in the landscape of trans/forming pregnancy is trans/forming gender politics, locally and globally.
Given the clear lack of correspondence between lived experiences of pregnancy and conceptualisations of it, what is to become of our (sexed and gendered) understandings of pregnancy? We argue for rethinking pregnancy and re-envisioning conceptual, social, medical, and legal approaches to pregnant persons by focussing on the trans experience, thereby trans/forming pregnancy within the following four domains: conceptual (engineering our concepts of gender and reproduction to be trans-inclusive); social (building trans-inclusive pregnancy-related social spaces and social scripts); legal (creating trans-inclusive recognition, policy formulation, and administration); and medical (building trans-inclusive pregnancy-related healthcare practices and perinatal care). Within these domains we argue for the need to aim towards two main objectives: identifying injustices that stem from existing limited understandings of trans pregnancy; and contributing to a theoretical body of work to underpin inclusive knowledge of trans pregnancy (and thus of pregnancy generally). We build on the pioneering work from the Trans Pregnancy Project funded by the ERSC from 2017-2021, headed by Sally Hines and including Carla Pfeffer, Damien W. Riggs, Elisabetta Ruspini, Francis Ray White, and Ruth Pearce. 2 Work in this area not only results in a renewed set of analytic and theoretical approaches to (trans) pregnancy, but also practical applications built from empirical and theoretical research with positive implications for all.
Conceptual
Sex and gender are fluid and various. The relationship between them and across time can be captured by what Ashley has termed ‘gender modality’, where ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ are examples of gender modalities: “Gender modality refers to how a person’s gender identity stands in relation to their gender assigned at birth”
3
. For many reasons and in many ways, persons who are trans, nonbinary, intersex, genderqueer, or gender fluid do not identify with the sex and/or gender they were assigned at birth, and thereby may cross or transgress perceived binaries of sex and/or gender. For the purposes of this article, we refer to the categories of ‘men’ and ‘women’
The overarching point we wish to make here is that the idea that all people are born men or women and retain that status throughout their lives does not reflect human experience, nor does the idea that all trans modalities manifest similarly. Many have utilised the asterisk in trans* in order to highlight the variety in trans experience and foreground intersectionality
4
– whilst here we do not use the asterisk, we nevertheless emphasise that there is no one particular way to be trans and therefore also no one particular way of being trans
Underpinning our work is a conceptual understanding that parental designations such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are inherently tied to unrepresentative sex binaries – to this extent, we describe them as being ‘genderfied’. 6 As Fineman argues, motherhood specifically denotes a familial role within (assumed) heteropatriarchal society. 7 This motherhood is encouraged by what Franke coined as ‘repronormativity’ – the hegemonic social forces that incentivise motherhood and the preservation of heteropatriarchal standards of sexuality, sanctioning reproductive sex between cis men and women, and ostracising anything outside of that narrow framing. 8 Parental designations such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ are negotiated and challenged, sometimes adopted, sometimes resisted, by trans and nonbinary parents – the variety in this respect demonstrates that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ when it comes to which terms are suitable. Much like other gendered terms, for example, ‘woman’ and ‘man’, these labels have the power to affirm or deny an individual’s identity and thus require being navigated on a case-by-case basis. 9
As argued in a recent article by Finn, motherhood has not just been ‘genderfied’ but has been explicitly tied to pregnancy, problematically reifying a ‘biological essentialism’ which takes birth-giving to be both necessary and sufficient conditions for motherhood. 10 When birth-giving is deemed necessary, all mothers are birth-givers, where there can be no mother who was not the birth-giver. And when birth-giving is deemed sufficient, all birth-givers are mothers, where there can be no birth-giver who is not thereby the mother. Together, these conditions create a biologically essentialist definition of motherhood whereby the mother is, and only is, the birth-giver. This reductionist account of motherhood via biological essentialism is overly restrictive, in that it cannot accommodate for a number of family formations 11 and precludes the existence of non-birthing mothers and birthing non-mothers.
Even when these over-simplified biologically essentialist views are expanded ever-so-slightly to include mothers who have not been pregnant (e.g., adoptive mothers) and pregnant people who do not become mothers (e.g., ‘surrogates’), the key underlying but unstated assumptions remain: one must be a woman to be pregnant, and a parent who has been pregnant must (be a woman and therefore) be a mother. The constitutive other to that statement is also assumed: one must be a man to contribute sperm to the pregnancy, and a parent who has contributed sperm must (be a man and therefore) be a father. Thinking about this constitutive lack of pregnancy that constitutes (male) sex and renders (female) sex impossible is necessarily shaped by debates about coloniality and the defining of gender (queerness). Focusing on trans pregnancy shows more ways motherhood needs re-conceptualising, away from biological essentialism, and without the necessity and sufficiency conditions that restrict it to birth-giving. We explore this in social, medical, and legal contexts, then revisit the conceptual analysis of motherhood and its political framing to analyse some strategies for inclusivity in trans/forming the future of reproduction and gender relations.
Social
Historically, (cis, trans and nonbinary) women’s bodies and their reproductive capabilities have been terrains of social contention. Various feminisms have shown that gendered embodiment is importantly related to (economic) dependence, physical unfreedom, and a number of other axes of social oppression in an intersectional way. Trans bodies and their reproductive capacities have become both a target for and an echo of these broader social oppressions. Yet social oppression of trans people has an additional layer: it comes both from those who would promote a traditional, cis-hetero-masculinist view of the world, and from some who would promote (cis) women’s rights against that world. The first sort of social exclusion encourages sex and gender rigidity from a position of power in sex and gender hierarchies, investing in explicitly making trans persons invisible and/or non-existent, where such investments are particularly strong in the places seen as most fundamental to (cis) womanhood, particularly pregnancy. If pregnancy is constituted as both a necessary and sufficient condition for motherhood, and motherhood must correspond to womanhood, then pregnancy is framed by these trans-exclusionary arguments as that which must be defended from perceived threats of gender diversity, and as a technology to create borders around womanhood. This logic is reflected in transphobic misinformation campaigns about trans and nonbinary people generally, and about trans and nonbinary pregnancy specifically, caged in disingenuous terms about ‘sex-based rights.’ These campaigns have significant social effects, including but not limited to exclusion, unsafety, and isolation.
Amongst the main important social aspects of trans pregnancy that require analysis is the oppressive stance taken by certain groups of self-identified feminists who participate in the social marginalisation faced by trans people. This particular brand of exclusion is key to broader continued social oppression,
However, such separatist understandings and activism have not always been the norm: Caslin’s work shows that even in the 1960s and 1970s, when their relationship was not smooth, trans and cis women campaigned together to advance feminist positions on gender, embodiment, bodily autonomy and against medical authority.
15
So what happened? As argued by Serano
16
, in our social world, where exclusions based on sex/gender are so deeply imbedded in our collective understanding of and participation in day-to-day social practices that deviations from those social norms threaten a secure and already-tested understanding of concepts such as ‘woman’, ‘female’, ‘mother’, a degree of boundary-policing and (related) preoccupation with ‘authentic’ belonging is almost inevitable. It thus seems that this is what happened: in some corners of feminism, trans-exclusionary views started to develop in the early 1980s and were motivated by a certain uneasiness with the claim of authenticity, that is, a belief that trans women’s femininity was
Contrary to these trans-exclusionary views, de Beauvoir, 19 for example, saw ideated biology as largely responsible for certain socially structured practices regulating individuals, their desires and sexual divisions of labour. That is, the legitimacy of one’s claim to be a woman is defined by one’s ability and desire to mother (i.e. to reproduce). Accordingly, in order to weaken oppressive assumptions about women’s bodies and their reproductive functions, de Beauvoir (and others) argued for severing ties between the identity category ‘woman’ and (perceived or regulated) female biology. Still, it is not biological child-bearing capacity that defines gender-based oppression, rather, as Stone argues, their “social position as the presumed, and often actual, main carers for children.” 20 These social forms of oppression are damaging to all genders.
The relation of ‘woman-as-mother’ and ‘mother-as-woman’ is powerful, but it is worth keeping in mind that its basis is conceptual: it is sustained by the association of ‘mother’ with ‘female biological features’, an assumption codified and cemented in (cis-heterosexist) social-political expectations, language, medical practices and the law. 21 This internalised conflation has not served women, cis or trans: as McLeod and Ponese note, it causes a number of harms stemming from self-doubt and shame when, for example, experiences of infertility undermine women’s productive role. This is because, “according to pro-natalist norms, childbearing is a woman’s social role and if a woman does not bear children, then she does not ‘count’ (i.e., have value) in society, or she counts less than other women.” 22 As we discuss throughout the remaining sections of this article, these assumptions support a vicious co-constitutive cycle, where social values around and opportunities within reproductive spaces reify and are reified by biologically essentialist accounts of motherhood (and therefore of womanhood) to the detriment of inclusive social, legal, and medical practices for all.
We argue, then, that it is a condition of possibility for arresting social oppression of trans (pregnant) persons to separate the ideas of ‘woman’ and ‘mother’, and that this separation also has knock-on benefits for gender relations more broadly for cis and trans people. We discuss two of those benefits here one for dampening gender subordination itself, and another for challenging patriarchal family structures at large. As relates gender subordination, severing the ‘woman-as-mother’ connection would temper social harms and legal discriminations still currently framing biological-driven models of motherhood that cis, trans and nonbinary people often experience. Shortening the divide between privileged bodies that are able to reproduce and those that are incapable might also weaken the impossible matrices of expectations of contemporary femininities. Furthermore, it might dilute pro-natalist and geneticist assumptions about ‘the real mother’ as well as judgements experienced by same-sex parents or adoptive parents. For trans men and nonbinary people who experience pregnancy, it could begin to mitigate the “potent cocktail of gendered assumptions and gender oppression, specific to being a parent.” 23 If, as Ryan explains, “parenting is a gendered enterprise… tied up with assumptions of natural maternal instincts to nurture and paternal instincts to provide,” 24 delinking ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ is an important step in rethinking and reframing parenthood and gender, which is key to beginning to think about what safe public space for diverse experiences of pregnancy might look like.
Another benefit of severing the link between ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ and releasing (cis and trans) women from the status of primary child-bearing and child-rearing role is challenging dominant models of patriarchal family structures. Practically speaking, the increasing number of trans men and nonbinary people giving birth signals that this disruption is underway. We argue that, both in theory and in practice, this disruption can be precipitous to, and cognate with, a broader set of disruptions that would benefit cis and trans people alike. Theoretically speaking, such a movement represents the object of what Deleuze and Guattari intended when they envisioned their ‘schizoanalysis’,
25
namely, the conceptual arsenal for the dismantlement of identities, myths, representations and cis-hetero-patriarchal reproductions. Following this, if we question the very adherence of authority with patriarchal structures as post-structuralism suggests that we do – which is also the foundational premises of queer theory – then we must also be in the position to imagine that other processes are
Returning, then, to the question of social spaces for/of trans pregnancy in a world in which ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are tightly linked and regulated, we see that it is overdetermined that the space is narrow and oppressive. Not only are gender-diverse pregnancies excluded or even targeted by cis-hetero-patriarchal establishments, those attacks are often implicitly or even explicitly endorsed by those who have come to be recognised as adjudicators of gender equality. A combination of political investment in the continued narrowness of these spaces and conceptual traps that reify their boundaries mean that social experiences of trans and nonbinary pregnancy can be lonely, exclusionary, confusing, and even dangerous. 26 These oppressions are reified and replicated in medical and legal practices, which we shall now turn to, respectively.
Medical
Perhaps the clearest – and most impactful – practical implication of the problematically gendered and narrow assumptions about pregnancy is the ways that they manifest in medical practice, and how medical practice contributes to the social construction of the pregnant person. 27 The problematic aspects of the medicalisation of pregnancy have been well documented with respect to the negative implications for (cis) women. Katz Rothman describes: “As medicine took over, as births moved into hospitals, maternal and fetal mortality and morbidity rose… one can write entire books on the historical and contemporary medical mismanagement and misunderstandings of the physiology of labor and birth.” 28 Indeed – entire books have been written, by Katz Rothman and others, on this point. 29 Here, we show that the gendered medicalisation of pregnancy is harmful for trans and nonbinary people too, in ways similar to and different from the problems caused by the medicalisation of pregnancy generally. Porter and Katz Rothman describe this as they highlight the patriarchal contexts in which trans men experience medicalised pregnancy. 30
For trans pregnant people, medicalisation is intersectionality compounded as it occurs not only with respect to their pregnancy but also with respect to their trans status. Most egregiously this manifested in the medicalisation of transitioning (by requiring specific surgical interventions in order to be legally recognised as a certain gender) which until recently included sterilisation, thus, as argued by van der Drift, restricting who gets to be what gender and who gets to be able to reproduce, demonstrating the globalisation and global implications of forced sterilisation. 31 Without the sterilisation requirement, and with trans people experiencing (the medicalisation of) pregnancy, the intersectional forms of oppression range from apparently innocuous things that do harm like the gendered labelling of ‘maternity’ services to deeper problems with providing adequate medical care, guaranteeing safety while receiving medical care, and protecting patient privacy.
Across medical domains, one can find either explicit endorsement of or vestiges of the idea that mothers are women and that pregnant women are
Across health care systems, these problems seem especially present in places where they might be the most problematic, like messages encouraging those who are pregnant to take advantages of perinatal mental care services – which might be especially of interest to trans parents given the social dystopia they face. Yet, the 2019 NHS Long Term Plan which discusses mental care in-depth explicitly assumes that those giving birth must be women (and therefore mothers, or mothers and therefore women), and those with whom they are partnered (as they must almost by definition have partners) must be fathers (and therefore men, or men and therefore fathers).
35
These assumptions are not only cissexist, but heteronormative and heterosexist as well, and they make a difference to
Following on from the work of Finn and Nirta, together we note that key to these struggles is that pregnant trans and nonbinary people are rendered ‘invisible’ 38 – as impossible figurations – by the sexed and gendered medical discourses of pregnancy, highlighted also by Dietz 39 . As Hoffkling et al. note, medical practitioners often cannot “make sense of the concept at that time of being male and pregnant,” which inevitably leads to the production of discourses and practices “in which the notion of a pregnant man [is] unintelligible.” 40 Trans pregnancy thus becomes a state of exception, 41 which is termed by Singer as a manifestation of the ‘transgender sublime’: “the conceptual limit to a service-provider’s ability to recognise the legibility and meanings of trans identities and bodies.” 42 The applications and implications of this ‘transgender sublime’ are discussed in more detail in Drouillard’s paper which juxtaposes gender non-binarism, French policy, and French national identity. 43
The invisibility of pregnancies of trans men and nonbinary people is at least in part due to the continued focus of reproductive research on cis women.
44
Research that does pay attention to trans persons’ pregnancies finds them differently situated to and disadvantaged as compared to cis people
Trans men who have been pregnant talk about this reticence to go through health care systems as directly related to the sex- and gender-exclusive practices of care-providing institutions and individuals.
50
A participant in Fischer’s study of how nonbinary individuals’ experience pregnancy who worked as a birth professional explained: “Despite working in hospitals, I have a phobia of birthing in one ... I didn’t want to be in that system when I went into labour ... dealing with people who wouldn’t necessarily respect our family, our pronouns, or wishes, or you know, especially in terms of having a medicalized experience.”
51
Another participant classified traditional medical services as a place of unsafety and described seeking alternatives to find a safe and affirming space. The participant, called Sam, explained that they had hired a gender-affirming midwife as opposed to seeking traditional medical care, to avoid dealing with “telling everyone about my gender [who] I don’t trust to be affirming of our family and identity.” 52 Survey data analysis suggests that this phenomenon is not anecdotal but general. For example, a survey of trans people in the European Union found that more than a third of trans respondents reported discrimination when seeking medical care, and nearly half preferred not to disclose their status as trans to medical professionals. 53 There is a clear lack of trust in the system, as described by Mullin with respect to providing support for autonomy. 54
While each pregnant person ought to have choices for their medical care, the choice not to seek formal care because it feels harmful limits, rather than expands, those options. Studies show that widespread avoidance of perinatal care by trans persons because of exclusion, discrimination, and microaggressions is related to negative outcomes for trans and nonbinary birthing parents. 55 These negative outcomes brought about by avoidance are compounded by negative outcomes when trans and nonbinary persons do seek health care – creating a vicious cycle. 56 For example, the 2022 report by the LGBT Foundation about perinatal services in England for trans and nonbinary pregnant patients showed that those patients consistently received lower-quality care than their cis woman counterparts. 57 Some of those disparities can be related to the dearth of specific research and knowledge about trans reproduction, while others can be directly attributed to problems caused by cissexist assumptions and practices. 58 As Nowakowski describes, nonbinary and trans persons who seek treatment for pain or illness while pregnant are frequently misdiagnosed or even dismissed by medical professionals. 59 Studies account for these disparities in part by referencing training gaps, where workers in the health sector often lack training about the needs of trans patients, particularly in the area of reproduction. 60 These training gaps are compounded by deficiencies in infrastructure, and inadequate diagnosis and treatment protocols. 61 Together, they mean that healthcare providers are often poorly equipped to provide care for trans patients, leaving them underserved by medical establishments and more vulnerable to health threats than patients who fit cis-heteronormative training modules, infrastructures, and diagnostic protocols. 62
The LGBT Foundation report from England describes the need for more training to increase inclusive healthcare generally and trans competence specifically, for stronger physical and planning infrastructures and more diverse clinical protocols, and for the use of appropriate pronouns and language to make comfortable, relate to, diagnose, and treat trans and nonbinary pregnant persons. When these developments remain in progress, or when they are hindered by biological essentialism or even transphobia, it is no surprise that the inadequacies of healthcare systems for trans and nonbinary pregnant persons exacerbate stigma, neglect, discrimination, and erasure to make anxiety a defining feature of interactions with (or thinking about interactions with) medical establishments. 63 This might be why the literature that does study trans and nonbinary experiences of pregnancies notes the prevalence of reporting isolation and loneliness when seeking (or not seeking) reproductive healthcare. 64
We suggest that the project of trans/forming pregnancy needs to include rethinking the ways in which medical care surrounding pregnancy is conceptualised, planned, and administered. Research by the LGBT Foundation in England provides examples of good practice in perinatal and reproductive care, which share that they take a proactive approach to gender inclusion. As argued by LaChance Adams 65 , given the performative aspect of language, those proactive approaches start at centring the needs of the patients and using fitting, rather than inappropriate, terms. They include targeting outreach towards trans and nonbinary birthing parents, universalising inclusive language 66 , delivering personalised perinatal care aware of and informed by trauma, and designing protocols that meet the needs of all pregnant persons rather than only cis women. The data emphasises the importance of affirming the gender of trans and nonbinary pregnant patients, given that affirmation increases both the use of healthcare systems and comfort with that use. 67 Increased use can and should be paired with increased training and improved research to improve outcomes. This is why it is a crucial part of the project of trans/forming pregnancy to develop frameworks for medical care provision to recognise, accommodate, and provide excellent perinatal and reproductive care for trans and nonbinary pregnant persons, whilst also challenging the problematic aspects of the medicalisation of pregnancy that impact negatively on all who experience it. This, however, relies on the co-development of the interrelated conceptual, legal, and social frameworks to rethink, re-categorise, and re-build views of what pregnancy is and how it works, in connection with non-medicalised (and not biologically essentialised) understandings of gender.
Legal
Often the unavailability and unfriendliness of medical services for trans and nonbinary pregnant persons is paired with political and legal structures which constrain both options and access for those persons. The example that we use, English and Welsh law, is highly ‘genderfied’ and creates an environment hostile to the needs of trans and nonbinary pregnant persons. Following how it is articulated by Finn
68
, we focus on one aspect of English and Welsh law to highlight this, namely, the
As is the case in the social and medical spheres, we infer that the reason behind treating the mother as certain (and thus treating the birth-giver as certainly the mother) is conceptual conflation of motherhood and pregnancy.
72
This is evidenced by Lord Simon in the Ampthill Peerage case, where he states that “[m]otherhood, although a legal relationship, is based on a fact, being proved demonstrably by parturition.”
73
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act makes similar assumptions when it mandates “the woman who is carrying or has carried a child as a result of the placing in her of an embryo or of sperm and eggs, and no other woman, is to be treated as the mother of the child.”
74
As a result, then, in England and Wales, the law does not distinguish “between giving birth and being a mother.”
75
In fact, it explicitly states that motherhood “refers to the biological process of conception, pregnancy and birth”.
76
There is no other way to attain legal, unqualified, motherhood status in English and Welsh law other than by giving birth – Finn demonstrates that this is a straightforward application of biological essentialism.
77
To be the legal mother
A landmark case of this in action was the legal decision of
The Gender Recognition Act confirms this, stating that “the fact that a person’s gender has become the acquired gender under [the Gender Recognition Act 2004] does not affect the status of the person as the father or mother of a child.” 86 Therefore, legal motherhood refers only (and always) to birth-giving, resulting in McConnell (and all those who give birth) being registered as a ‘mother’ on birth certificates regardless of gender or preference of social role. Davis describes how trans reproduction deconstructs traditional gender roles and calls for reform in the birth registration process in England and Wales. 87 The legal situation for trans and nonbinary parents is similar across European jurisdictions (with only a few notable, more positive, exceptions), as outlined by Indesteege and Finn, who address the impacts of such European jurisprudence on European gender politics in critical comparative context. 88
A project of trans/forming pregnancy, then, must pay attention to rethinking the production and application of the legal status of parenting, including but not limited to motherhood and fatherhood, not only to represent those trans and nonbinary persons who become pregnant and deal with the diversity of their experiences of pregnancy and parenthood, but also to provide a gender-affirming and gender-inclusive legal framework for identifying, processing, and adjudicating legal issues related to pregnancies and family-making.
Trans/Forming Futures
It is important to again acknowledge that trans identity cannot be understood as a homogeneous nucleus of individuals with analogous circumstances, desires and expectations. Some trans individuals going through experiences of reproduction may not feel maladjusted within the current medico-legal models; for them, the rigidity of existing structures such as language do not represent a challenge, and may, in fact, provide a sense of stability and inclusion within the framework. For others, as explained above, such rigidity can alter their lived experience of pregnancy in dramatic, practical ways. As such, we argue that identity as a conceptual and political framework fails to capture the multitude of ways in which trans, as a subjectivity, is embodied, lived through and enacted, for it focuses on collective experiences (that are not unified) losing sight of the singular. For example, when focussing on the individual, being trans and pregnant vary significantly when it comes to ‘passing’ as trans and/or pregnant, as described by White et al. 89 Therefore, the attempt we make here is to propose a conceptual framework of motherhood that can include the varied experiences of trans men and nonbinary people whose needs and desires are not met by current models, without thereby leaving behind or disadvantaging those who are comfortable within them.
Again following Finn, there are strategies for re-conceptualising motherhood that propose de-gendering motherhood and queering, or de-sexing, motherhood 90 . These strategies widen the concept of ‘mother’ in order to be more inclusive on grounds of gender (such that a person of any gender can be understood as a ‘mother’), and sex or biological contribution (such that a person who did not gestate or birth a child can be understood as a ‘mother’). Whilst many trans and nonbinary parents may be empowered and accurately reflected as a mother on one of these grounds, there are still many trans and nonbinary parents who are not accommodated by such strategies. This is because some trans men and nonbinary parents consider being termed a ‘mother’ to be a case of misgendering, and that is both conceptually and practically important for understanding and managing pregnancy and parenthood, socially, medically, and legally.
According to the de-gendering strategy, ‘mother’ becomes ‘inclusive’ of all those who give birth, regardless of their gender, thereby including trans men and nonbinary people as mothers as a result of birth-giving. This accommodates the existence of mothers who are men and nonbinary mothers (when those men and nonbinary people choose to go by ‘mother’), but misrepresents those trans men and nonbinary parents who gave birth that wish not to be termed a ‘mother’ due to its gendered implications. An example of de-sexing motherhood is to ‘queer’ motherhood such that it is inclusive of different forms of mothering that deviate from the singular sexed role of birth-giving.
91
There are inclusive implications of this approach, and ways in which it dovetails with the process of trans/forming pregnancy. Again, this accommodates for the existence of mothers who are men and nonbinary mothers, but may misrepresent those trans men and nonbinary parents that wish not to be termed a ‘mother’ due to its gendered (even if queered) implications. As Finn argues, even if a by-product of a trans man’s pregnancy
In resistance to some strategies for inclusion, Radi and Cormick describe the purported justification for continued usage of trans-exclusionary gendered language by appealing to the political purposes of highlighting gendered inequalities that cis women experience in pregnancy and parenting. 93 There is concern that deviating from ‘mother’, ‘maternity’, and ‘pregnant woman’, for example, may be detrimental to the majority of perinatal service users (who are presumed to be cis women). This is a form of what is termed ‘mundane cisgenderism’ 94 where cis women are the normative population to be served – not just in pregnancy services, but also other domains where ‘trans’ as ‘other’ deviates from the ‘cis’ norm and thus deemed lower in priority. The project of trans/forming pregnancy requires interrogating and dispensing with such hierarchies and the dichotomies that they rely on and perpetuate.
One might expect feminist movements to come to the defence of trans and nonbinary people generally, and specifically with respect to reproductive issues like that of pregnancy given the prominence of reproduction in feminist activism. Indeed, some feminist movements do consider trans and nonbinary (reproductive) issues within their remit. But as described earlier in the section on the social, many feminisms have been complicit or even primarily responsible in the matrices of exclusion in which trans people who experience pregnancy find themselves. Movements for trans rights have found intense opposition in some feminisms that reject the very existence of ‘trans’ as an identity or a gender modality 95 . Some even argue that any advancement in trans rights will trade off with cis women’s rights (as is the case in ‘mundane cisgenderism’), where cis women’s rights are pitted against and seen as contrary to trans rights, by employing a “scarcity narrative” 96 as if there are not enough rights to go around.
In contrast to thinking in terms of (who gets what) rights in a zero-sum game, we propose that the project of trans/forming pregnancy be in line with the aims of reproductive justice. Where rights are ‘individual’ based, justice is ‘system’ based, and given that the issues addressed in this article are systemic, the solutions going forward must attend to the system and not to the presumed competing rights of individuals at the behest of that system. This is in line with Young’s sense of justice and the politics of difference, where liberation does not require “the transcendence of group difference”
97
, and is also in line with Horn’s aims where “we might set our sights beyond gender ‘equality’ between men and women and towards justice for pregnant people and families of all genders”
98
. Furthermore, justice for some at the expense of others is not to be considered justice at all: harm to trans and nonbinary people (in the context of pregnancy and beyond) cannot be deemed as tolerable collateral damage of protecting cis women (from reproductive oppressions and beyond). The project of trans/forming pregnancy must do better than that, in challenging the assumptions underpinning discriminating against trans and nonbinary persons
Conclusion
Looking at differences between and within populations is a way to highlight where theory fails to capture complexities. Here, women who cannot or do not get pregnant are treated as having some existential lack compared to ideal-typical womanhood,
99
and pregnant men are treated as states of exception. Trans/forming pregnancy
Footnotes
ORCID iDs
