“I Want More than Just to Live”: Towards a Trans Feminist Politics of Reproductive Justice
by
Avik Sarkar
Trans pregnancy remains an unthinkable prospect for most. The scant research and existing literature pertain almost entirely to trans men. In this essay, however, I would like to invoke the seemingly impossible figure of the pregnant trans woman. This enigmatic figure appears in two works by trans feminine artists of color: That Fertile Feeling (1986) by Vaginal Davis and Pregnancy (2014) by micha cárdenas. With these works as my points of departure, I will argue that assisted reproductive technologies can serve as crucial modes of gender-confirming care. Still, reproductive justice must look beyond the individual subject to address the material conditions that unequally distribute life chances. Davis and cárdenas’s aesthetic projects speculate on futures not just of survival but of abundance for trans women of color, and so they challenge us to imagine reproduction and maternity differently and more capaciously. Taking on this challenge, I will attempt to theorize a specifically trans feminist politics of reproductive justice. Trans feminism and reproductive justice are both vital spaces of dissent against the cisnormative and heteropatriarchal control of bodies, yet they are rarely discussed together. My aim is to demonstrate that the scope of trans feminism is not limited to trans women, just as the concerns of reproductive justice do not pertain only to cis women.
Vaginal Davis is a multidisciplinary performance artist who came to prominence in the 1980s and is currently based in Berlin. Her short film, That Fertile Feeling, features Vaginal and her friend Fertile, a Black trans woman who is apparently “always pregnant.” In the opening scene, Vaginal chastises Fertile, “What is the story with you, girl? How many babies can you have in one sitting?” to which Fertile responds, “I just have one at a time!” Later on, Vaginal quips, “I’ve never seen you when you weren’t pregnant!”
The film parodies the images and discourses that converge in the body of the Black trans woman. Fertile’s constant pregnancy speaks to the hypersexuality often attributed to trans women, and it also conjures the problematic figure of the “welfare queen,” a term that emerged in the 1970s and is primarily associated with the poor Black single mother. According to this trope, the so-called welfare queen intentionally has multiple children to take advantage of public funds and state benefits. She is defined by her profligate lifestyle and excessive sexuality. Many have refuted this stereotype by appealing to Black women’s respectability and propriety, but Davis does exactly the opposite. She turns the mythology of the welfare queen on its own head. Why shouldn’t Fertile want to have a child—or eleven, as she ultimately does? Giving birth over and over again, Fertile pushes us into the realm of the absurd, thus reminding us of what is actually absurd: the state’s denigration of Black women.
When Fertile’s water breaks, Vaginal rebukes her: “Why do you always have to get pregnant and have babies at the worst time?” In this moment, Vaginal treats Fertile’s pregnancy not unlike the state treats Black and Latina mothers: an inconvenience at best and a burden at worst. Moreover, Fertile is not admitted to the hospital because she lacks health insurance, forcing Vaginal to play midwife and deliver her babies at home. Through its campy humor, the video satirizes the very real problem of health care and its vastly inequitable distribution in the United States. What lurks under the surface of comedy are the longstanding racialized, gendered, and class asymmetries of medical systems. While That Fertile Feeling reckons with this ugly reality, it also represents Black trans women’s survival within it. After all, Vaginal succeeds in helping her friend navigate pregnancy—a testament to the creative labors of trans kinship. Vaginal and Fertile’s relationship speaks to the traditions of care in trans feminist praxis.
What can Vaginal Davis’s work teach us about the meaning of reproductive justice? Conversely, what does it reveal about what reproductive justice is not? Fertile’s situation requires more than a narrow formulation of reproductive rights; it demands nothing less than a wholesale transformation in the allocation of life chances. To quote from Black feminist political theorist Kimala Price:
“Reproductive justice activists warn that the term “reproductive justice” is not meant to be a substitute or interchangeable term for other terms such as abortion rights… or even reproductive rights. It is a different way of conceptualizing reproductive freedom that is broader in scope than its predecessors” (Price 2010, 61–2).
Reproductive justice poses a critical challenge to liberal feminist paradigms of reproductive rights, which dominate both scholarly and popular discourses. The concept of reproductive rights depends on a stable notion of the liberal subject, the autonomous individual who is entitled to negative liberty—which is to say, freedom from external restraint and state interference with reproductive choices and decisions. While negative liberty can guarantee that the government will not encroach on any individual person’s right to receive an abortion, for instance, it cannot ensure that they will have the resources necessary to raise a child. In contrast, under a framework of positive liberty, the state would extend reliable childcare and financial support to all parents.
A robust commitment to both negative and positive liberties, I would suggest, is absolutely central to any trans feminist politics of reproductive justice. To offer a concrete example, we should, of course, endorse a political agenda that defends trans rights to medical transition against legislative threat. But that means very little in and of itself to those living in conditions of poverty without access to employment, housing, and education. These are not, of course, mutually exclusive. Rather, my claim is that gender-confirming treatment and surgery must form part of a much more expansive repertoire of public goods and services that the state must provide in order to actualize reproductive justice fully. When I say “reproductive,” I mean in the widest possible sense, the ability for trans women of color to reproduce ourselves both biologically and socially—to not only survive but also flourish.
micha cárdenas takes up similar questions of reproduction and survival in a more contemporary context, where reproductive technologies are provisionally available to some trans women. cárdenas is a visual artist and scholar of trans studies whose multimedia work Pregnancy—which combines poems, images, and videos—has been exhibited in galleries and museums as a video, and also in print as a collection of photos and text. She characterizes it as a “bio-art project” inspired by her experience of pausing hormone replacement therapy in order to pursue sperm banking (cárdenas 2016, 48). In her own words, “I was documenting my body fluids and using a microscope to look for the presence of sperm, monitoring over time as my reproductive capacities changed from stopping my hormones” (cárdenas 2019). Pregnancy is an expression of dissent against the cisnormative assumptions of prevailing feminisms. It offers a glimpse into the phenomenology of trans motherhood—that is, an embodied account of what it means and how it feels to desire children as a trans woman.
More specifically, cárdenas’s objective is to envision the possibility of trans Latina motherhood, a phrase that is automatically associated with impossibility. That is at least partly because, in the popular imagination, trans women are presumed to be sterile and infertile. As Pregnancy makes clear, that presumption is a fiction. It is important to note, though, that trans women do undergo coerced sterilization, which endures as a pernicious form of eugenics and population control, rooted in a long history of reproductive violence against African American and Latina cis women. Drawing from Black trans artist and activist Tourmaline, cárdenas points out that in many prisons across the United States, trans women must consent to medical procedures that effectively result in permanent sterilization in order to reside with other women (cárdenas 2016, 55). In other words, they are cruelly forced to choose between the prospect of having biological children and the ability to reside in women’s rather than men’s prisons, which in many cases is a matter of basic safety. While white and cis feminists generally focus on the right to abortion, trans and women of color feminists remind us that the right to have children is just as crucial—and cannot be taken for granted.
By speculating on the figure of the pregnant trans woman, cárdenas necessarily raises fraught questions around technology, medicalization, and embodiment. For cárdenas, womanhood is entangled with motherhood, which is precisely why she decides on sperm banking, or cryopreservation. It is easy to imagine how some critics might respond. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists—or gender-critical feminists, as they call themselves—have long asserted that transsexual women wield hormones and surgery to “appropriate” women’s bodies and make a mockery of them. They might argue that cárdenas goes even further, using medicine to confirm and reproduce the patriarchal idea that women are defined by their capacity or desire to become parents. Historically, this strain of radical feminism has taken issue with all types of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), including those employed by cis women. As sociologist Sarah Franklin has noted, as early as the 1980s, it was not uncommon to hear that “new reproductive technologies encapsulate, enforce, and intensify the core values of patriarchal culture” or that “IVF is… the manifestation, or even proof, of a masculine desire to colonize and control the female reproductive process” (Franklin 2011).
I want to dwell for a moment on the normative logic that attaches womanhood to motherhood and femininity to fertility. I find it helpful here to place cárdenas in conversation with medical anthropologist Eric Plemons, who contends that “worries and celebrations about trans women’s use of ARTs are not about the babies who may hypothetically be made, but about the women who, through the use of these technologies, surely would be” (Plemons 2022, 527). To put it somewhat crudely, for both cárdenas and her potential critics, what is at stake is not product but process. Having children, or even just trying to, is a means of constructing and consolidating a gender identity. That is exactly why the very thought of the trans mother provokes such intense anxiety—her motherhood, if realized, would confirm her womanhood. As Plemons suggests, the trans mother asks, “to whom does maternal desire belong?” (Plemons 2022, 526). And ultimately, that cannot be answered in terms of bodies or subjects, for after all, many people who identify as women do not want to be mothers, and many people not assigned female at birth do. Any predetermined connection between gender, genitalia, and gestation falls apart when the pregnant trans woman enters the picture.
In cárdenas’s trans feminist account, assisted reproductive technologies function as modes of gender-confirming care, and as such they are vital to futures where trans women of color can live and thrive. The matter of futurity is at the heart of her aesthetic practice. In her essay accompanying Pregnancy, she insists, “The failure of queer and feminist theory and culture to envision futures for trans women of color underscores the importance of our writing our own futures” (cárdenas 2016, 56). She cites queer theorist Lee Edelman, for example, who has received considerable attention for his polemic against what he calls “reproductive futurism,” a heteronormative politics centered around The Child (Edelman 2004, 2). What are the implications of this line of thought for trans women of color, for whom the possibility of reproduction is foreclosed from the start?
cárdenas also makes reference to Jack Halberstam, who advocates for a queer temporality and spatiality not only outside of but directly opposed to a heteronormative trajectory that revolves around getting married, buying a home, and having children (Halberstam 2005, 14). Without denying the value of queer alternatives to heteronormative ideals, it is also essential to ask: what does it mean when those who have been historically excluded from the norm in turn express a desire to embody the norm? What if we comprehend this desire as itself queer—as a nonnormative inhabitation of the norm (see Chu and Drager 2019)? Surely Black and brown trans women who aspire to marriage and childrearing must be understood as somehow different from what queer theory has rightfully designated as its central object of critique: the nuclear family consisting of the monogamous, heterosexual couple with children, supposedly unmarked by race but implicitly white. Trans women of color’s desire for progeny and futurity ought not to be dismissed as symptoms of complicity or false consciousness. Rather, as cárdenas phrases it, we feel “the urgency of reproducing in the face of a world that wants us dead” (cárdenas 2016, 49).
cárdenas makes clear the necessity of a specifically trans of color feminism, since after all survival is hardly a given for most trans women, especially those who are racialized, low-income, using drugs, living with HIV, or engaging in sex work. The trans woman of color is quite literally imagined as a body with no future, who is always already dead or on the verge of death. For cárdenas, motherhood represents a site of potentiality and resistance to anti-trans violence and premature death. In Pregnancy, she writes of her struggles
to avoid death at the hands of others,
the constant promise of necropolitics
that I face everyday,
knowing that as a trans woman of color,
I’m not likely to survive until my
next dream is realized.
And we will fight back these genocidal projects, by making life, family, love and joy,
by making babies with our queer trans bodies. (cárdenas 2016, 49)
In this necropolitical context—where transness is rendered synonymous with negation—to have children and to raise a family are indeed radical acts. They are life-sustaining and world-building practices that affirm trans survival in the face of pervasive violence.
Together, Davis and cárdenas’s interventions powerfully demonstrate that for trans women of color, issues of pregnancy, gestation, and procreation cannot be separated from the broader forces of inequality, hierarchy, and violence. To quote Black feminist legal scholar Dorothy Roberts, reproductive justice “must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context… Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice” (Roberts 1997, 6). The theorists and artists that I have considered collectively challenge us to address the material conditions of precarity that make reproduction impossible for so many. The reproductive politics of trans feminism, then, is invested not only or even primarily in each individual’s right to have children, notwithstanding the importance of that aim. Rather, it is a site of dissent against the structures of neglect and abandonment that threaten trans existence, that prevent us “from living long enough to realize our dreams of having children.” As cárdenas insists, “I want more than just to live” (cárdenas 2016, 55).
References
cárdenas, micha. 2016. “Pregnancy: Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3 (1–2): 48–57. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3334187.
cárdenas, micha and Allan Gardner. 2019. “MICHA CÁRDENAS, Algorithms & Poetics of Trans People of Colour.” Clot, March 18, 2019. https://clotmag.com/interviews/micha-cardenas-algorithms-and-poetics-of-trans-people-of-colour.
Chu, Andrea Long and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–116. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.
Davis, Vaginal. 1986. That Fertile Feeling, directed by John O’Shea and Keith Holland, video.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press.
Franklin, Sarah. 2011. “Transbiology: A Feminist Cultural Account of Being After IVF.” Scholar & Feminist Online 9 (1–2). https://sfonline.barnard.edu/reprotech/print_franklin.htm.
Halberstam, Jack. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York University Press.
Price, Kimala. 2010. “What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists Are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 10 (2): 42–65. https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.2010.10.2.42.
Roberts, Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Pantheon Books.