Finding a New Home to Come Back to: Trans Motherhood and Family Abolition
My darlin’, I’m never comin’ back from where I’m going
My darlin’, I’m never comin’ home
My darlin’, I’m never comin’ back from where I’m going
My darlin’, I’m never comin’ home
Never comin’ home again
Ramshackle Glory — Never Coming Home (Song for the Guilty)
About once a month I watch this video of Ramshackle Glory playing Never Coming Home from a 2014 gig. The song is played to a room filled to the brim with (admittedly very white) trans people, screaming that we’ll never come back from where we’re going. Whilst Pat The Bunny isn’t a trans person, there are multiple trans people that have been involved in Ramshackle Glory, including members would later be a part of the incredibly trans pastoral rock band Loone. If we take the home as a place that trans people are systematically barred from, the lyrics to the above song turn into an acceptance that trans people are collectively thrust out into the wilderness, barred from cisheteropatriarchial family norms. In that context, of never coming home (there being no home to come back to), where are we to go to? I want to argue in favour of small utopias, sketching out my own minoritarian utopia in order to find an alternative to the home, a model of resilient care webs that do the work of reweaving relations for abundant flourishing.
A brief interlude — I am a mentally ill trans woman who wants to be a mother. I’ve wanted motherhood since before I knew I couldn’t be a dad, and I was class-privileged enough to get my sperm stored before going on hormones. Every year an invoice for £350 comes through my door, and I pay it diligently, as a promise to myself that one day I’ll be able to crack the sperm out of the deep-freeze and use it to produce a child. That obviously requires a few things: the money to pay for fertility treatments; the health in order to not break in my mothering; the financial stability in order to care for a child in a neoliberal hellscape; the housing to hold my child, me, and any co-parents that want to live with me; a community of support including co-parents, godparents, many-gendered mothers; and finally someone who would like to carry a child. None of these facets of potential parenthood are necessarily overdetermined by transness and gender — the person that carries the child could be of any gender, my health is improving despite the best efforts of psychiatrists, I’m about as stable in my transition as I’ll ever be. But they are affected by it — I’ll probably need to spend more time on my PhD than I’d like given the traumatic content; it’s always harder to find a job outside of hyper-specialist NGOs if you’re a trans dyke; I’ll always be at risk of housing instability unless I come into enough money to actually buy a house, and that’s tempered by direct discrimination based on my transness. And so, I’ve been scheming. I’ve been scheming to think about what my life could be like in 3, 5, 10 years, and plotting out a route to a trans future wherein I can have a child. That scheming isn’t just about putting me, individually, into a better financial situation, but is about thinking through how the ‘I’ in my communities can be in a world where it is possible for us to have a child.
It would be remiss not to mention Detransition, Baby, the 2020 bestselling trans motherhood novel by Torrey Peters (a novel I’ve bought for my own, wonderful mother). Needless to say, that book broke me in its stark assessment that trans motherhood was an impossibility, that we are as trans women simultaneously too broken (like orphaned elephants), too interpersonally fractive (in the continual failings of the characters to navigate a network to actually parent the god-damn child), and ultimately too structurally oppressed to have a child once you come out as a trans woman. I think that Peters is right that trans women are barred from the traditionally cishet family, at least all of us with economic debilitation (Belinsky 2021) — as I said above, there is a way in which we can “never come home”. But I do think that some forms of non-normative mothering are possible for trans woman like me, frankly I have to in order to keep pushing forward. This is my small utopia: a network of people, with a child at the centre, that can provide enough nourishment in order to allow that child to flourish however they need and desire to. It’s not the revolution, it’s not the abolition of the family, it’s not communism, but it is something that right now feels impossible to me. And what is revolutionary activity if not producing something thought impossible, illuminating a horizon and struggling, pulling it directly into our concrete reality.
Understandably, a lot of trans healthcare activism focuses on early transitional healthcare, getting on hormones, getting bottom surgery referrals, FFS etc. We have some work going on supporting trans dads (for example the trailblazing Trans Pregnancy Project), and there is a little work being done to support the children of trans parents that have come out after having a child. There is even a little about our rights to gamete storage (we fought to include it in the National Union of Students’ Women’s Campaign policy, for instance). But almost nowhere will you find campaigning support for trans women who have been out for some time to actually use her sperm and produce a child. A few support groups, some informal networks, the odd radical maternity nurse, but no campaigning. It’s a blind-spot in trans healthcare activism, and it has its roots in the deeply transmisogynistic (and often racialised) view that trans women are too broken to produce a child.
Nat Raha, in Transfeminine Brokeness, Radical Transfeminism (2017) speaks of how the transfeminine condition is one of varied precarity, pathologisation, a ‘situation of slow death’ — how could a dying woman produce a loved child? She’s right, of course, and her strategy for undercommoning a world in and against capital, sabotaging gender and capitalism in order to build a new form of mutuality, is one I hold dear to my heart. Indeed a subaltern, undercommoned, monstrous mutuality sounds like a wonderfully radical space in which to bring up a child. Sometimes, though, I wonder if I’ll ever be well enough again to fight the war that requires, that total negation of a white supremacist capitalist gender order that grinds transfeminine people into dust.
So I think I need a new strategy, a smaller strategy. That doesn’t mean it has to be a reformist one, just that the distance to the revolutionary horizon is a little shorter, more apprehendable. What is a family-abolitionist non-reformist reform in this context? Is it refusing the state’s tacit insistence that I mobilise the couple-form in order to bring up this child? Is it refusing to be a diversity statistic in the fertility company’s books? Is it necessarily a refusal? Can it instead be something productive, something like what Hwang, 2019, called ‘elsewhere care’, a “daily practice that divests from a liberal sympathizing individuated relationalism” (569/70). I think it’s butch practice to build and protect and hold space, and it’s something I’m good at — is this smaller strategy about staying despite the transmisogyny, becoming an immovable mother in the way of the state?
I both want it all “where all is a list for everyone to make” (Abi-Karam and Gabriel 2020), and want just enough to be alright, to be loved, in this place, at a time of my choosing. I want this small utopia, with the promise that the edge of that utopia is another utopia, one that truly abolishes the current state of things.
Citations
Abi-Karam, Andrea, and Kay Gabriel. 2020. “Making Love and Putting on Obscene Plays and Poetry Outside the Empty Former Prisons.” In We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, 1–10. Nightboat Books.
Belinsky, Zoe. 2021. “Trangender and Disabled Bodies: Between Pain and the Imaginary.” In Transgender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, 179–99. London: Pluto Press.
Hwang, Ren-Yo. 2019. “Deviant Care for Deviant Futures QTBIPoC Radical Relationalism as Mutual Aid against Carceral Care.” TSQ 6 (4).
Raha, Nat. 2017. “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 116 (3): 632–46. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-3961754.
