Chase Strangio
Attorney; founding board member, Lorena Borjas Community Fund
Making Room for More Impossible Decisions: Reflections on Being a Trans Parent
Posted: 12/18/2012 11:48 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chase-strangio/making-room-for-more-impossible-decisions-reflections-on-being-a-trans-parent_b_2300482.htmlOn July 5 of this year, when our daughter was born, my partner and I embarked on an adventure that has fundamentally changed how we understand ourselves and transformed our engagement with the world. With little sleep and lots of self-doubt, I have been trying to collect my thoughts on parenting and the many changes this little person has brought to my life in the five months since we met. In so many ways, being a parent reminds me of being trans*. The transition to parenthood creates public access to your life and your decisions: People feel comfortable touching you and your baby and telling you what is right for your body, your life and your future and how to correct the many mistakes you are making. As a trans person, this part of parenting feels incredibly familiar; it is perhaps the only familiar part. Strangers, family, friends and doctors have all felt entitled to inappropriately touch my body, ask me questions and assess the validity of my decisions. This public judgment, combined with and exacerbated by the fear and love generated by caring for a little baby, has made parenting the hardest and most rewarding thing that I have ever done. It has become another axis of identity and experience upon which all my privilege, politics and struggle are played out, and one that is complicated and enhanced by my transness.
The public access to parenthood and parenting decisions is most discussed by white, able-bodied, non-trans, heterosexual, wealthy women speaking about parenting with a certain disbelief about the judgment it has brought and the societally undervalued challenges it has presented in their lives. On the one hand I appreciate and relate to the many blogs and other reflections by this population, these self-identified moms speaking about the failure of the United States to recognize parenting as work and cultivate systemic support for the many people, mostly women, who do this work unpaid and underpaid. On the other, it is also clear that the most vocally outraged are those who have rarely experienced the failures of our systems to recognize the many types of work and survival that have created and sustained our lives and institutions for generations. Our country's lack of supportive and sustaining systems is commonly understood by people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, trans people, immigrants and low-wage workers, who daily navigate public access to and judgment of their lives. Those with the most public (that's not to say unjustified) critiques and frustrations with the challenges of parenting are those with the least experience pushing back against state systems of social control. Relatedly, this group of parents is also the group with the most resources to manage the many emotional, financial and logistical challenges of parenting.
