Hormonal Kin Making: Transgender Reproduction, State Power, and the Right to Ambivalence

• In Event: Science, Knowledge & Technology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Shifting Technologies of State Knowledge and Power

Abstract

This article compares the relationship between gender transition and reproduction through two social fields: contemporary political discourse and the self-narratives of transgender adults. I revisit three long-standing insights of gender and feminist theorizing of reproduction, biology is political; reproduction is bio-social; and the state governs that terrain through racialized and gendered hierarchies, to show how each rests on a largely unexamined cisgender standpoint. By introducing the concept of the cisgender standpoint or the largely unexamined assumption that cisgender fertility serves as the baseline for theorizing reproductive behavior, I show how contemporary governance both presumes and polices a tight alignment of dimorphic sex and fertility even as interviews with trans people about their reproductive lives render that alignment untenable. Combining a qualitative archive of 2019–2024 U.S. bills, court cases, and expert testimony with 86 in-depth interviews with trans and non-binary adults, the analysis tracks a life-course arc from regulation of “future fertility” in youth, to criminalization of trans adults, to the forms of reproductive labor trans people perform. I recognize hormonal kin-work, reproductive dysphoria/euphoria, and reproductive speculation as practices through which trans people already reorganize kinship. Findings refine dominant claims that biology is political by exposing where cis assumptions enter and how they can be dislodged, while offering a methodological bridge between understanding anti-trans policy analysis and the real-world imaginative reproductive building done by trans people. The practice of gender transition resists the reduction of gender and reproduction to a relationship between politics and biology. Instead, I examine the autonomy that transition provides in reproductive choice and identity. The article concludes that reproductive justice must include the right to ambivalence: the freedom to want, refuse, or postpone reproduction without state coercion. Making trans reproduction mundane rather than miraculous is essential to truly transformative horizons of bodily autonomy.

Author

• Carlo Sariego, Yale University