Of seahorses and mermaids: Trans parenthood and a problem with labels
A man is not a man when a British court tells him that the child he has just birthed makes him a mother. A woman is not a woman when the same court rules that because the Orthodox Jewish community inherently rejects trans identities she will lose all access to her children. Semantic truth, an absolute desire to pin things butterfly like to boards and dictionaries cages gendered identities into neat boxes, all of which are ill fitting at the best of times. If fatherhood is solely in the donation of sperm, and parenthood in the community restrictions under the law, then at what point does those semantics become the central issue. Trans identities have always been questioned and picked apart, our bare bones exposed to society, yet inherently all trans people want to do is exist in the same manner and thrive as the world around us.
Making sea horse trans men mothers inherently puts motherhood as an instrumental term, divorced from any particular gender identity. It becomes a walking womb within which the child is carried through the world in amnion until it is ready to be born. At which point the law only needs to recognise the man as the mother, without any need to state who the father is. The sperm donor is inherently legally irrelevant at that point, with only motherhood necessary for a child to exist in the world. If trans men are men, and that should be self-evident, then motherhood becomes a semantic legal construct, not the preserve of the feminine. Men become mothers. Yet, societally this is dissonant, because men and masculine folk are perceived and treated as fathers.
Semantic burdens are placed on trans folk, as it seems contradictory to say a man can give birth or a woman can be a sperm donor. English is a versatile language, yet in its approach to gender it inherently grounds itself in biology. There is no wriggle room in the middle for identities outside of the congruent; to be trans is to throw the dictionary out the window and enter into a world that considers you disordered and personas of chaos. Yet, in nature seahorses exist, proving the point that men do indeed give birth. Trans men who bear children deserve the linguistic and semantic nuance that we grant aquatic seahorses, for if it is so easy to understand the aquatic concept why not the human?
The same issue arises over gamete donation, where there are plenty of aquatic animals who expel their gametes into the water to co-mingle and produce eggs. Humans have developed a rigid way of seeing bodies and procreation, forgetting that ours is but one in a multitude. Our desire for inheritance, inherent need to shape children in our own image blinds us to the multiplicity of cultural experiences. Human societies have many different ways of raising children, from the communal creche to concubines to handmaidens to single parent households. That we assert that one semantic understanding of gendered parenthood is the definitive cuts off the richness of the human experience.
If fatherhood is providing a second set of chromosomes, the does this not erase the social construction that the word father actually contains? Fathers have a particular place in English, often perceived as remote, at word, in the pub, absent, or a factor beyond the actual acts of child raising. To be a father in English is associated with many negative traits, especially in films, books, and television shows. Positive fatherhood is rarely shown without critique or comedy, and the insinuation is that motherhood is where the child raising actually happens. Legally, in Britain, a child does not need a father on their birth certificate, reinforcing this notion of fatherhood as this absent construct.
Thus, to reject trans men as fathers and force them to be legal mothers, the law essentially gates them into a specific conception of parenthood. There is no room for the indolent or the feckless, it is all about the societal expectations placed on the word mother. This is not to say that trans men will be either exceptional parents or utterly feckless or something in-between, it is just that legally, semantically and societally they are treated as the sum historic total of our views on motherhood just because the law is not versatile enough to flex for sea horses.
It is the paradox of the UK’s post-Gender Recognition Act (2004) legal environment that while trans folk can and do get their birth certificates changed this means practically nothing when it comes down to being a parent in the eyes of the law. Parenthood is defined by how a doctor perceived you at birth, recorded you at birth on your original birth certificate, and UK law refuses to accept otherwise. Trans women have no similar parental motherhood rights as cis women, treated as fathers and potentially exorcised from their children’s lives should the mother and her community reject trans identities. Transitioning does not make you a legal mother, it makes you something to be shunned and cauterised.
When the media talk about trans rights, this inherent right of parenthood affirmed within gender identity, not chromosomal biology, is completely lacking. Parenthood is pinned to the board of biology because we see biology as sacrosanct, and language follows suit. To be a human gamete donor inherently makes you a father, and to birth makes you a mother. That trans people subvert this and call into question this whole semantic construct says more about how society clings to its linguistic shibboleths than it does those who transition. If it is good enough for aquatic sea horses it should be more than enough for us.
