reproductive justice

Pregnancy Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism

MICHA CÁRDENAS

Abstract The author’s hybrid poetry/bioart project, Pregnancy, presents a vision of trans Latina

reproductive futures, based on her experiences of cryogenic tissue banking, aka sperm banking, after

having been on hormones for many years. At the 2014 Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference,

Morgan Robyn Collado stated that violence against trans women of color is a reproductive issue

because they are prevented from living long enough to realize their dreams of having children. Trans

women of color want more than just to live. Existing literature on transgender pregnancy and family

planning focuses almost exclusively on transgender men. Books such as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves

focus almost entirely on trans men, while making only the most brief reference to the fact that trans

women can bank their sperm. This reproduces a trans-misogynist dynamic in which trans men are

highly valued by queer communities and transgender women’s concerns and existence are erased.

Keywords trans of color, bioart, interdisciplinary, praxis, reproduction

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A blizzard of hormones,

for months,

undersea volcanoes spewing hot affects

tectonic emotional swings

intense food cravings

my body is foreign to me

it’s changing, in ways I don’t like,

shape, texture

and so many little blacks hairs coming back,

despite being tortured out of existence,

on my cheeks, in my cleavage,

I have to wear baggy clothes,

all my underwear was too tight

for gamete making temperatures,

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 3, Numbers 1–2 * May 2016 48 DOI 10.1215/23289252-3334187 ª 2016 Duke University Press

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I have to take my vitamins every day,

all to make a baby.

I’m a trans woman

and I’m pregnant.

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I am no testo junkie,

this is no experiment,

these are not drugs, they’re my body.

I take hormones every day of my life out of necessity,

just to have a body I can live in,

to avoid death,

to survive,

both to avoid my own suicidal ideations,

that appear in my mind unwillingly, instantly, surprisingly,

usually with a painful, slowly resonating ache,

as I looked at some beautiful woman,

or some everyday woman,

going about her life,

a life I thought I could never have,

though now, mostly, in my own way, I do.

And 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,

my next poem is written,

my next performance is danced and spoken,

my next city, country welcomes me,

my next surgery date comes,

or, this time,

until I see the eyes of my bright screaming beautiful baby come into this

dimension

and join us with her cries of creation.

I’m not taking hormones, now, out of necessity,

the feeling of urgency of reproducing in the face of a world that wants me dead,

and wants my dearest loved ones,

from south asia, palestine, colombia, dead,

CÁRDENAS * Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism 49

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or from here,

Mississauga New Credit territory, dead.

And we will fight back these genocidal projects, by making life, family, love and

joy,

by making babies with our queer trans bodies.

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Instead of a becoming woman or becoming animal

or even becoming parent

this feels like becoming asshole.

I hate testosterone,

there are many reasons why I take estrogen

and spironolactone to block my testosterone.

I feel the edge back in my mind,

the edge of impatience, of being quick to anger,

the old version of myself seeps in,

in my voice, which sounds so deep and strange to me.

My friends who’ve done this told me to take Xanax,

but I prefer the tincture of motherwort I got

from my crazy femme witch poet friend Leah,

she gave it to me when my mother almost passed.

It’s the only thing saving my life right now, and my relationship,

after weeks of solid fighting,

mostly over my inability to understand my new emotional waves, rhythms and

tempos

my partner and I thought we might break up,

because of the chemical changes in my neuronal activity,

that resulted in weeks of

mean, mean fights.

But I did this,

so we can make a baby,

together.

Now the motherwort is

doing its magic,

I feel it in the corners of my eyes, like sleepiness

relaxing my anger and anxiety,

finally giving me, for the first time in weeks,

tiny moments of the sense of peace,

that I feel from estrogen.

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While I once thought taking hormones was a good experiment

an ethico-aesthetic experimental life act in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari,

now I realize what a masculinist, colonialist dream that was,

and I don’t like that old self of mine.

Some of us write out of need,

for some of us, this is not a luxury, as Lorde said.

Now, after so many years of taking them,

I realize that in these pills there is a home for me,

these pills, and all the changes they’ve brought to my body and life,

have brought me to a place of commitment to building a home and a family,

to heal the deepest wounds in myself,

to care for myself and those I love,

by creating stability,

by being careful with our hearts and our lives.

Funny that my Colombian father’s whole way of raising me,

was to teach me to be the man, the breadwinner,

and it didn’t work at all,

but absolutely rejecting man in the deepest way I could

brought me full circle to want to create and protect my family,

in a way that dad

will one day appreciate.

They told me I would be sterile,

the doctors and brochures,

that I couldn’t do this,

what I’m doing.

But they don’t know,

and they lied to me,

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and other trans women

have done it.

I mourned the loss of my children and family,

and I’ve heard my friends mourning them too,

but the truth is that even after 8 years on estrogen and t blockers,

you only have to go off your hormones for a few months

to make gametes.

Other trans women taught me how to do it.

Sadie said, get a microscope,

don’t pay hundreds of dollars for doctor visits to check your semen,

with a $50 kids microscope,

you can see sperm,

morphology and motility.

I did, I can and I do,

see hundreds of sperm squirming their way across the field of view,

clearly swimming in a line,

I shared with the other women a short video I made,

and they exclaimed:

you’ve got swimmers!

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Whose language is this?

The logos of cis-heteropatriarchy?

I am writing this,

the hormonal chemistry I was born with bubbling up in my body,

it feels so foreign,

like I’m in here looking out of these eyes,

but this mind isn’t mine,

these words, this rhythm, all feels so foreign, so not me.

When Anzaldúa says “I am again an alien in new territory . . . I have another set of

teeth in my mouth . . . the heart in my cunt starts to beat”

I think she knows much of what I’m feeling, yet still

I don’t think she imagined this particular mystery,

of growing face and chest hair again,

of the erotic being transformed into

the crassest instant desire for any hot woman I see on the street,

the intense quick urge to orgasm that is calling me to masturbate every day,

an urge I can barely resist.

Yet this is my experience, as a mixed race mujer,

a woman pregnant with life.

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Aching

just dim morning winter grey light on the bricks outside the window,

aching so hard, a slow pulsing, I don’t want to get out of bed,

and my girlfriend doesn’t like me and no one likes me and I don’t like me

but that was last week,

but we decided to do this together,

to go the biological route,

because adoption seems almost impossible,

for two sick brown queer and trans women,

with histories of mental illness and poverty in both our families,

you know, just the usual for QTPOC.

The legal rights you have to your baby,

are more tenuous if you don’t have a biological input,

and I don’t want another trauma at an international border,

and the cost of IUI, ICSI and IVF are in the tens of thousands,

oh the privilege of

cis-hetero reproduction!

Everything happens through a haze,

I feel slow,

thinking is hard,

putting words together is a struggle,

the cold is biting, the sun is so shy

and the sun lamp’s light is so white.

I need to just sit here, and write.

and jerking off helps

my mood for a minute

and meditating and tarot give me something larger to hold on to

and I just have to hold on, for a few more weeks, or months,

of pregnancy.

CÁRDENAS * Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism 53

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Gloria says “something pulsates in my body, a luminous thin thing that grows

thicker every day. Its presence never leaves me. I am never alone.”

I see the sperm under the microscope,

each one swimming, with its own intention,

each one it’s own possible life,

and I feel the strangeness of this mind and these feelings,

brought to the surface by hormones,

and I wonder

how many people are inside me?

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* * *

T rans of color feminism is a feminism that responds to the violence done to

trans women of color, and the historical absence of trans women in both

white and women of color feminism. Trans of color feminism learns from and

extends women of color feminism and queer of color critique. Additionally, the

broader field of transfeminism must include the reproductive rights of trans women

in its concerns.

Toward these ends, my bioart project, Pregnancy, presents a vision of trans

Latina reproductive futures, based on my experiences of cryogenic tissue banking,

aka sperm banking, after having been on hormones for many years. At the 2014

Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Morgan Robyn Collado stated that

violence against trans women of color is a reproductive issue because we are

prevented from living long enough to realize our dreams of having children

(Collado 2014). I want more than just to live. Existing literature on transgender

pregnancy and family planning focuses almost exclusively on transgender men,

reproducing the transphobic practice of conflating trans men with women by

including them in women’s spaces, such as books on lesbian parenting. Further,

books such as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (Erickson-Schroth 2014), which claims to

be “for the transgender community,” focus again almost entirely on trans men

and their feelings, while making only the most brief reference to the fact that trans

women can bank their sperm if they want to have children. This reproduces a

trans-misogynist dynamic in which trans men are highly valued by queer com-

munities and transgender women’s concerns and lives are erased.

Queer theory has historically used trans women of color as the image of

death and our desires for family as a symptom of heteronormative false con-

sciousness, such as in Judith Butler’s discussion of Venus Xtravaganza (Butler

2011). Additionally, queer theorists such as Lee Edelman (2004) have often pre-

sented reproductive desire as anathema to queerness. Yet books dealing specifi-

cally with transgender experience have reproduced this as well, such as Judith

Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place (2005), which defines queer time and

space by their difference from life time lines structured around reproduction.

Recent work by trans of color scholars counters this, which is not surprising, given

the history of people of color’s reproductive rights being taken away from them.

In an interview that appeared in Captive Genders, Reina Gossett points to the fact

that trans women in prison can only have the safety of being housed with people

of their own gender if they submit to surgical procedures that are a form of

sterilization (C. Gossett 2011). The present model of trans women sperm banking

is not supported by insurance companies, in my experience, and therefore leaves

trans reproductive rights only for those who can afford them.

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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.

Fields such as science-fiction film, new-media art, digital technology, and spec-

ulative design still reproduce forms of misogyny and racism, and as such they

have far to go to reach transfeminist consciousness. Given this, the question of

who gets to write the future is even more urgent. I was able to succeed in this

process only with the aid of other trans women who used social media to create

their own space. On a popular social media website, I found a closed group for

trans women’s fertility. The group was small, with only eight members, about half

of whom actively post. Yet it was here that I learned that I could simply buy a

microscope to monitor my own fertility, and that I absolutely had to wear baggy

clothes if this was going to work. I made all the images and videos in this piece

myself, of my own sperm samples, with a microscope and slides I prepared with a

pipette. Pregnancy is in dialogue with bioartists who engage with the tools and

technologies of biology to create artworks. The project responds to bioartists such

as Orlan who claimed, “I am a woman to woman transsexual act,” a statement

that, coming from a cisgender woman, erases the experience of transsexual

women (Akman 2006). Instead, Pregnancy continues my research into the science

of the oppressed—reimagining science in the interest of oppressed people—and

into trans of color poetics, developing a poetics that may reduce the violence faced

by trans people of color.

In some ways, I am living a trans Latina future so far from the experience

of important elders such as Sylvia Rivera. Partly, this is because of my privilege as

a light-skinned Latina whose immigrant father made sure she made it through

college. In California, I had access to a trans-woman endocrinologist and a trans-

woman surgeon. Under the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, it became illegal

for insurance companies to discriminate against transgender people (Quinn

2014). Soon after this, I was able to get my surgery costs partly covered by my

insurance companies, despite my doctor’s and surgeon’s office staff telling me

they had never seen that happen before. Now, surgeons who perform gender

reassignment surgery such as Dr. Marci Bowers describe having an unprecedented

demand for their services. Yet there is still so much to be done to make sure that

trans women of color can even live long enough to realize their dreams.

In these poems, I ask how many people there are inside me. I wrote these

poems during a period of months in which I was off my hormones. I consciously

shifted my body’s hormone levels back to those common to male bodies. I wrote

these poems in that state. The project represents an example of shifting as a

material and conceptual operator of trans of color poetics, which I have described

elsewhere (cárdenas 2015). By shifting my body’s state, I was able to produce new

knowledge and new material output. In the end, I was able to bank nine “straws”

of gametes, nine million sperm. How many people are inside me? Multitudes.

56 TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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micha cárdenas is an artist/theorist who creates and studies the trans of color movement in

digital media, in which movement includes migration, performance, and mobility. cárdenas is

an assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at the University of Washington

Bothell.

References Akman, Kubilay. 2006. “Orlan and the Work of Art in the Age of Hyper-mechanical Organic

Reproduction.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 3, no. 1. www2.ubishops.ca

/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/akman.htm.

Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge.

cárdenas, micha. 2015. “Shifting Futures: Digital Trans of Color Praxis.” Ada: A Journal of Gender,

New Media, and Technology, no. 6. doi:10.7264/N3WH2N8D.

Collado, Morgan Robyn. 2014. “CLPP 2014: Morgan Robyn Collado, Poet.” Presentation at the

Civil Liberties and Public Policy Conference, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, April 11–

13. www.youtube.com/watch?v =66g_lR-I9AY.

Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University

Press.

Erickson-Schroth, Laura, ed. 2014. Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender

Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gossett, Che. 2011. “Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett, and

Dylan Rodrı́guez.” In Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial

Complex, edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, 323–43. Oakland, CA: AK.

Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New

York: New York University Press.

Quinn, Melissa. 2014. “How Obamacare Affects Transgender People.” Daily Signal, August 31.

dailysignal.com/2014/08/31/obamacare-affects-transgender-people/.

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4/week 4.docx

Answer question one by one:

1. How is ableism tied to White supremacy? How have disability and sexuality been connected? How have disability and race been connected? Why is it important to center disability and the stories of people with disabilities in feminist anti-racist work?

2. How has gender difference been studied? How has sexuality and sexual identity been studied? What does this tell us about the ways that both are socially constructed and dependent on binary thinking? How do people in their lived experiences defy this? How is science defying this? You should reference both Somerville and Maines in your response.

3. What would you include in a health bill of rights? Remember to consider gender, race, class, sexual identity, immigrant status, physical, mental, and cognitive ability, language, size, parental status, AND intersectionality.

4. What was included in your school's sex education curriculum? What do you wish had been included? How is the "Let's Get it On" study and report from Forward Together (see ppt) feminists in both its form and content?

5,. What is reproductive justice? Create a definition based on the readings and conversation in class with the concepts and ideas from the readings recognizing who created the term. How does the history of scientific research and eugenics impact the need for framing of reproductive rights and issues in this way? Reference 2 of the readings in for these prompts. Why is violence against transwomen of color a reproductive justice issue? Reference Cárdenas for this prompt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNIWbvdeJas

Reference Cárdenas ( in other Uplod file )

6. What is disability justice? Why is it important to go beyond a "rights framework"? How might science fiction help us imagine a more just society around bodies? Don't focus on "cure" in your response (no Avatar film-type solutions focused on individuals); how might we eliminate societal disability to expand peoples' ability to participate in society regardless of individual impairment (as Berne and Milbern distinguish the difference)?