Transgender Parents
Personal Experiences
A transgender mother is often looked upon with suspicion, if not outright derision; “who is the real mother?”, one might ask, or perhaps “how did she have children?” [1]. The social construction of motherhood, perhaps more so than that of fatherhood (due to the additional dimension of sexism and misogyny), tied up with the body—a mother is not just a female parent [1]. A mother is a woman with a womb she uses to give birth, and breasts she uses to make milk: that is what society tells us [1]. These signifiers, these all-important symbols of motherhood, are denied to trans women by their own biology. While medical science may eventually allow transgender and cisgender individuals to perform the same biological functions, it is patriarchal to tie motherhood explicitly to them in the first place [1]. To do so denies, unnecessarily, the title of full motherhood to trans women, but also to adoptive mothers and any number of women who are biologically unable to ‘mother’—whether breast cancer survivors with mastectomies or cisgender women who cannot give birth, the norms that say a mother has to give birth and has to breast feed or any other related roles serves to both reduce some mothers to biological functions and to exclude other women from the role entirely [1].
It is not just transgender mothers who face scrutiny over their status as parents as well as their genders, but all transgender parents. Transgender fathers will have their masculinity put in doubt through their many acts as parents, especially if they do gestate—itself its own unique set of difficulties for a trans man [2]. For non-gender-binary or other genderqueer parents, the ubiquitous terms “mother” and “father” might simply not apply, with few alternatives and a world that tries to fit parents neatly into those labels, no matter how poorly they may describe what is actually there [3]. Male-presenting transgender parents can also face a common issue towards the societal understanding of what a father is: a bar set far, far too low [2]. Fathers will often receive effusive praise for basic parental tasks, which may be well-meaning but comes off as annoying and incredibly condescending [2].
There is a book called Pregnant Butch, about the experiences of a masculine woman dealing with pregnancy in a society where pregnancy has been inextricably linked to femininity [2]. While not exactly about transgender men and fathers particularly, it illustrates how pregnancy has been gendered in a way that makes it difficult for masculine women, transgender men, and anyone else who can get pregnant but isn’t traditionally feminine [2]. The attitudes that cast pregnant women as feminine “goddesses,” created as a response to pregnancy being both essential to families and misaligned with beauty standards, “are injurious to feminine gestational parents and wholly exclusionary of masculine ones” [2].
Custody Discrimination
Transgender parents can face legal discrimination regarding their parental status, and are particularly vulnerable to this in the realm of custody law [4]. In a custody dispute, particularly when a parent has started transitioning or come out as transgender after becoming a parent, the other parent will often use that as an argument against them [4]. This will often appeal to judicial prejudices, and can be compounded by anti-transgender expert testimony and the like [4]. Though there is no set legal doctrine saying that transgender status is a reason to discriminate against parents, there are also no uniform protections against discriminations, which means that rulings can vary heavily from case to case and judge to judge [4]. A transgender parent denied custody or visitation rights can be in a particularly tough spot, because custody decisions will generally only be appealed after a significant change in the parent has been exhibited—which, for a transgender parent denided custody for that reason, is not ideal [4]. Transgender individuals face discrimination in child visitation, custody, and adoption [6].
Research
While there has been a great deal of research on LGBTQ families, often it is the case that research on “LGBT” or “LGBTQ” families is not nearly that inclusive—often, for instance, the research heavily focuses on lesbian families [5]. While it may be convenient to lump people into the LGBTQ category for political or other social reasons, the individual groups (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer to encompass those and everything else) do not have identical family dynamics, and the groups deserve individual research, lest any of them be neglected within the group [5].
Most research on transgender parentshas been conducted through surveys of them and their children, often with small sample sizes [6]. Statistically speaking, there are significant numbers of transgender parents. Between a quarter and a half of transgender adults are parents, though 65% of adult males and 74% of adult females are parents in the general population, so it is at a lesser rate [6]. Transgender parents often become parents before transitioning compared to after, and a higher proportion of people who transitioned later in life are parents compared to those who transitioned earlier [6]. Different groups of transgender people seem to experience different rates of being parents, with transgender women being shown as more likely to be parents than transgender men [6]. While interesting, these statistics should not be interpreted to have specific psychological messages, and much more research needs to be conducted, on a much larger scale [6].
[1] Haider, Mischa. “I Am a Trans Mother — Deal With It.” The Advocate. Pride Publishing Inc., September 13, 2016. https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2016/9/13/i-am-trans-mother-deal-it.
[2] Bennett, Andrea and Kim Fu. “Beyond Mom ‘n’ Pop.” Hazlitt, September 11, 2015. https://hazlitt.net/feature/beyond-mom-n-pop.
[3] Bennett, Andrea. “I’m a non-binary parent. There still isn’t space for me.” Xtra Magazine, May 10, 2019. https://xtramagazine.com/love-sex/im-a-non-binary-parent-there-still-isnt-space-for-me-154990.
[4] Cooper, Leslie. “Protecting the Rights of Transgender Parents and their Children.” National Center for Transgender Equality. American Civil Liberties Union, March 2013. https://www.aclu.org/report/protecting-rights-transgender-parents-and-their-children.
[5] Veldorale-griffin, Amanda and Carol Anderson Darling. "Adaptation to Parental Gender Transition: Stress and Resilience among Transgender Parents." Archives of Sexual Behavior 45, no. 3 (04, 2016): 607-617. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10508-015-0657-3.
[6] Stotzer, Rebecca L., Jody L. Herman, and Amira Hasenbush. “Transgender Parenting: A Review of Existing Research.” UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. Williams Institute, October 2014. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/Trans-Parenting-Review-Oct-2014.pdf.