Paper Short Abstract:

This paper analyzes the stories that trans and gender nonconforming parents tell about their reproductive experiences. Drawing on memoirs, podcasts, and documentaries, we explore how these storytellers utilize distinct rhetorical strategies in order to navigate dominant configurations of kin.

Paper Abstract:

Focusing on the third reproductive justice pillar on the right to parent in a safe environment, this paper analyzes the stories that trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) parents share publicly about their reproductive and family-making experiences. Our archive includes memoirs, documentaries, and podcasts circulating widely in the US, the UK, and Canada–while some target dominant mainstream audiences, others are made by and for the TGNC community. Using Sharon Yam’s “deliberative empathy” and Aja Martinez’s “counterstory” as analytical frameworks, we engage our primary source archive, exploring how TGNC storytellers utilize distinct rhetorical strategies in order to address specific audiences and exigencies. While some TGNC narrative impulses are deeply (and understandably) assimilatory in nature, drawing on strategies that normalize TGNC reproduction and families to claim social and political inclusion, so too do these narratives contain significant moments of resistance, challenge, and critique.

We demonstrate that in addition to calling for state recognition and/or inclusion grounded in a human rights framework, TGNC storytellers adopt strategies of deliberative empathy to prompt the possibility of political solidarity with mainstream audiences and embrace counterstory to challenge and rewrite dominant configurations of kin. Not only is this the necessary survival work of making TGNC lives and families visible as lives that matter, but it is also the point of departure for imagining a future rooted in reproductive justice.