Karl, a PhD and lecturer at MIT, gave birth to both of his children and despite being the one with the babybump, he was asked to wait outside while the nurses attended to his wife. Karl became a fat man because people were not able to see a man and a pregnant body. Karl was assigned female at birth and had a uterus and glands for lactating, but the medical staff didn't think he was a woman. Karl thought of himself as a PaPa, and other trans parents use more androgynous terms. Karl says that unconventional pregnant parents cause total gender confusion, even among medical practitioners, but at worst it results in trauma, violence, and harm, in trans men failing to get emergency care during miscarriages, and trans women being treated.
Woman and mother are not synonymous. Neither term has an objective reality.
We create constructs as a means of ordering the world and attempting to control it because we agree that it exists. When we mistake them for reality, they become extremely dangerous. Some commentators suggest that a trans woman's pregnancy warps her biological realities. In recent decades, scientific technology has come closer than ever to providing fertility to all, from those who struggle with infertility due to conditions like endometriosis or low gamete count to those born with the syndrome.
If we don't decouple the concept of motherhood from its exclusive connection to womanhood, we will end up in a society that punishes, imprisons, or commits violence against women. We built this term with meaning, and we can change it, and perhaps remove its demons.
One of the strands of motherhood was described by a poet and essayist. One is an experience, and the other is a political institution in which all women are seen primarily as mothers, and all mothers are expected to experience motherhood unambivalently and in accordance with patriarchal values. The recent Supreme Court decision draft makes it even more glaring that people with uteruses are left out of discussions about reproductive rights.
The rise of the middle class has led to gender-biased assumptions about motherhood. Among the poorer classes, men, women, and sometimes children worked to sustain the family; among wealthy or aristocratic women, nurses and governesses often took on the care of the children. If a man could keep his wife at home, it would be a mark of pride for the family. The woman, wife, and mother were fused into a single social category by the new middle class. June Cleaver had an image of the submissive housewife and mother that was reinforced in the 1950s and 60s. In 1965, dads spent 2.5 hours a week taking care of their children. That was a woman's work, even if it was a recent invention.
The experience of being a mother has always been limited by the social constructs. Class, education level, and race have all been used to deny the right to mother. In the 20th century, more than 60,000 people were sterilized against their will in the United States. Female prisoners in California were forcibly sterilized in 2010. In the past five years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement teams have been accused of forcibly removing people from their homes. All of these procedures were done on people who had the reproductive organs for giving birth and were considered women by those who took their organs away. There are people who are ready to take away the right to be a female from people who were assigned female at birth. It is clear that no term is unchanging.
Trans women are excluded from the category of motherhood in a number of ways. Some people have been denied the term " mother" by their children and even by court systems. Trans women are thought of as problematic by society. They have been presented as unsafe around children through sexist and genderist rhetoric. People who are gay create family. We make parenting. We can be parents even if we don't reproduce through gestation.
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