Sometimes, when I imagine being a mother, I find myself transported, for a moment, back to the beginning of one of my favorite films, Pixar’s charming coming-of-age—or, better, coming-of-emotion—story Inside Out (2015). In it, the protagonist, Joy, an anthropomorphized embodiment of the eponymous emotion, comes into being shortly after a girl, Riley, is born, and Joy—who lives in a little control room of sorts in Riley’s head, regulating Riley’s every action—immediately falls in love with her. Joy doesn’t need to say it for us to know; it’s obvious from the glow of wonder in her eyes, the quiet bliss at being in the presence of this new being, the open-mouthed awe at the psychedelic strangeness of birth. It’s a look I’ve come to recognize in myself when I think of holding the little one I haven’t yet met.
Article continues after advertisement
Joy isn’t a mother, of course, so much as a core aspect of Riley’s self, along with the other emotions that soon pop, ex nihilo, into being: Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. But Joy takes the reins the most, and she views Riley with a palpable, believable maternalism—that is, she behaves like a mother in the sense that motherhood is never simply one mode of being, but transforms, like lava into landscape, over time.
This is captured over the course of the film through Joy’s shift from her early, Elysian awe into a kind of obsessive helicopter-parenting, becoming a control freak who thinks she should determine how Riley feels more than any other emotion, particularly Sadness. By the end, however, Joy learns that suppressing emotions only causes imbalance and suffering. We need to feel it all—including despair—to be whole.
It’s a surprisingly poignant character-and-emotion study. Joy’s move from the wordless simplicity of love to destructive fixation gets at something real about mothers, the way mothers can so easily shift from kindness to toxic self-loathing projections, from joy to joyless fixations, from smiling in those simple moments that somehow effortlessly embody the Burkean sublime to days of overwhelming banality and frustration—and, of course, back again.
From the moment we began trying to have a child, I began feeling scared—scared of not knowing enough to be a mother, scared of not having enough money.
I’m no mother yet, of course. I’ll never really know what it’s like until I’m one. And my and my wife’s experiences as mums will ultimately be unique to us. But I already recognize this flowing uncertainty, this tidelike push and pull of the mother-child bond, from my relationship with my own mother—and, from that, the kind of mother I don’t want to be, especially in an America where queer, interracial families like mine are under threat from anti-queer, tacitly—or explicitly—white-supremacist conservative agendas.
An America where, so often, the flag that one citizen has pledged allegiance to has not, itself, pledged allegiance to another, as James Baldwin said in his famous debate against William F. Buckley—and what kind of citizen that flag will pledge allegiance to if the MAGA movement wins any future elections is a question I wish my future little one would never have to answer, but almost certainly will.
*
As a child, my mother felt like safety, a person whose own gentle smile I felt at home in.
I remember the night I realized that. My parents and I were in the kitchen, and my father was furious at me. I remember him beginning to take off his brown leather belt as he did in those early days of my childhood, ready to beat me for some insubordination I can’t even recall. I remember yelling before he could raise the belt and running out of the kitchen to my room, hiding under my bed. I’d been lashed before, but for some reason, I felt especially scared this time, my heart loud in my head like a bouyon beat at Carnival. In our home lost in the green mountains, I had become accustomed to a sort of quiet isolation, and I told myself I would stay under the bed forever if I needed to, listening to the sea-susurrus of the wind and the amorous cries of frogs while I slowly crumbled into dust.
My fatalism wasn’t to be. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps pattering on the old floorboards, and then my mother kneeled down to peer at me under the bed. She smiled. I don’t remember if she said anything, but oh, that smile. It hit me in a way I’d never felt before. I knew in that moment I was safe with her, not from lashings per se—those were simply part of our culture in Dominica—but in some larger sense I just instinctively felt. I could easily read the joy, the embodiment of Joy long before Pixar’s film, in my mother’s face.
I never would have imagined then that I would find myself estranged from her in my mid-thirties, after she rejected me for coming out as transgender and told me not to return to the island I’d grown up on. It left a strange scar, at once of heart and land. And after a decade, I still feel it. She still berates me for taking away the son she’d thought she had, still says I ruined her life by coming out, still says I need to come back to her Christian god.
I think about that scar, long as a sea, when I think about the kind of parent I want to be. The things I never want to say to my own child. The way I want—naively, I know—to hold onto that awestruck smile Joy has in that opening scene when I look at my own kid.
Of course, I feel other things, too. From the moment we began trying to have a child, I began feeling scared—scared of not knowing enough to be a mother, scared of not having enough money, scared of losing my mind from not sleeping enough, scared, even, of my child immediately hating me, scared of the inevitable moment of angry overwhelm when you ask why this child is here at all. The same fears I know many parents feel.
By listening to what my fears can teach me rather than suppressing them, however, I’ve learnt to reframe some of those fears, as well as to remind myself that my wife and I will weather it all somehow, because we just will. When I get scared again, I sometimes glance at her, and, cheesy as it sounds, it can be enough to make me beam, Joylike, remembering what it’s all about.
I worry about how a second Trump presidency might usher in a new, far more restrictive era for queer Americans and trans people specifically.
But I’ve also been scared of something larger: what kind of world our child will find. In the wake of overturning Roe v. Wade, countless anti-LGBTQ bills and conservative book bans targeting queer literature, and with a possible Trump presidency and resultant shift towards Christian theocracy looming, I find myself worried that America is beginning to look more like the attitudes of the world I escaped after coming out: homophobia, transphobia, naive evangelism.
As my wife and I try to have a kid with sperm donors and IUI/IVF, I wonder about the way so many people, like my mother, reject our union as queer women, reject my very existence as a trans woman, reject the very IVF procedure we need to use for my wife to get pregnant, reject the idea that we as queer people could have any interest in children beyond conservative visions of grooming them.
I wonder about a world where queer teachers in certain states are advised not to display photos of their spouses on their desk, lest it offend some loving Christian; I wonder about a world where every time I let strangers know the child has two moms (much less if I reveal one is trans) there’s a chance they’ll back away slowly or argue about us needing a man or argue about someone like me being a man because I do not exist on their little maps. I wonder about a kid being brutally teased for having a parent like me.
I wonder about an older kid eventually understanding how frequently anti-trans legislation gets passed, how casually people like one of their mums is attacked by politicians and conservative parents as a freak fit for sideshows, a pervert, a grotesque science experiment unfit to parent, a cacodemon conjured from some bubbling vat in the moonlit woods. How easily one can be transfigured from woman into wedge issue.
I worry about how a second Trump presidency might usher in a new, far more restrictive era for queer Americans and trans people specifically, an era where the Republican playbook is Project 2025—a vast document outlining a conservative agenda for creating a new federal department staffed with MAGA loyalists and for firing government employees who aren’t Trumpists, thus paving the way for their agendas to be enacted.
Although Trump has publicly disavowed aspects of Project 2025 and the head of the Project has stepped down, the document remains a map of what Trump’s presidency might engender. And its plans for us are legion: that we should be banned from military service, banned from medically transitioning, banned from using the facilities that accord with our genders, banned, in other words, from existing with any legal protections from discrimination or with any legal dignity.
We tried a few times, and although we thought we got everything right—minus the unfortunate time that I dropped most of the sperm on the kitchen floor—it felt like stumbling in the dark.
It’s an attempt to push trans people even further into the margins, an attempt, in short, to erase us. I say “erase” deliberately, as it recalls another of the Trump administration’s anti-trans efforts: their directing the CDC in 2018 to stop using certain words, including “transgender,” which was widely seen by critics at the time—myself included—as an attempt to erase us by erasing our labels, our language. Destroy a language, and you begin to destroy its ideas, its definitions, its denizens. Remove someone’s ability to safely use public bathrooms or changing rooms—the same spaces most cisgender people can enter without ever wondering if they are allowed to—and you slowly force them out of public life altogether. Why wouldn’t conservatives go further if they win in November?
I feel like hugging my child tight, suddenly, as I write this, and then I realize, again, there’s no one there as yet. What a thing, to worry about the wellbeing of a phantom. And yet I’m glad they’re a phantom, for now, for at least a ghost is safe from all this sound and fury.
*
When we first became serious about trying, my wife and I decided to go through sperm banks. I hadn’t imagined just how much like online dating sperm bank sites could be. I also never imagined I would say the word sperm more than a certain chapter of Moby Dick.
I didn’t realize how unprepared I was until our first try, when we received the sample in a heavy luggage-like shipping container that had the distinct appearance of biohazardous cargo. When we opened it, we found another container inside, this one arctic from dry ice; frigid air unfurled when we unlocked it. We then had to thaw the sperm and, nurse-like, prep a long syringe to transfer the sample into, which ended up being the trickiest part.
Everything, we quickly learnt, had to be clinically precise: when you order the sample relative to when you assume you’ll be ovulating, when you open the inner container, how long you let the sample thaw, how you transfer the semen to the insertion tube, how you lie on your back and for how long after the insertion, how you repackage the imposing shipping container to be returned.
We tried a few times, and although we thought we got everything right—minus the unfortunate time that I dropped most of the sperm on the kitchen floor—it felt like stumbling in the dark, hoping for the best. We switched to IUI, which involved a doctor performing the whole, slightly more in-depth ritual, but even then, we had to deal with mishaps and ignorance, including a doctor seemingly shunning the advice not to thaw the sperm in water, while another seemed cavalier about missing an ovulation window or differed sharply about how to position your body after insemination.
The whole process soon started to feel horribly biased against queer couples, in part because the language in almost every fertility guide we read was explicitly tailored to straight couples who could keep trying even without the donor material. For us, though, each expensive effort was the only shot we had, so it mattered to get it, well, right. And while the odds for IUI are never sky-high, it’s hard not to blame yourself (and differing doctors) each time it fails. The pregnancy test has become a sort of scrying pool, a future-reflecting thing you approach as much with dread as hope.
As a trans person, it’s difficult not to take this all in and feel like an unwanted visitor in America.
Now, finally, we’re going to try IVF. The cost is prohibitive without insurance, and we have to travel upstate for it. And, while New York is unlikely to do what red states have done—attempting to scale back IVF, making it difficult for both queer parents’ names to be on their child’s birth certificates, making it difficult for queer families to adopt if it comes to it—the rights we have still feel especially tenuous, able to be threatened every few years simply depending on who is in office or what conservative cases—deliberately made outlandish so as to be challenged and eventually brought before the Supreme Court—our nation’s disgracefully partisan justices have before them.
I’ll never support the myopic idiocy JD Vance spouted about Americans needing children; no one should be shamed for choosing childlessness, and families should be able to have any structure the adults consent to. Yet in a country so fanatically obsessed with children, it’s tellingly difficult, if not financially implausible, for certain families—ones who look like my wife and me—to bring another of those kids into the world, especially if you merely happen to live in the wrong part of the county.
The system is broken, in part because of the greed interwoven into our ridiculous healthcare system, and in part because to so many of those in power, we aren’t the kinds of families they want around kids at all. We are still too tinged with brimstone.
*
As a trans person, it’s difficult not to take this all in and feel like an unwanted visitor in America, to feel like those in power would prefer I applied for a passport to the Undiscovered Country. It’s difficult not to feel betrayed when you leave a place where it’s illegal to be openly queer only to find that your new home also wants to do the same, also views you as a monster, a witch-born thing.
But there’s power in being a monster, a being as much sorceress as cyborg to the ones who instinctively fear our strangeness. There is strength in the strange, a deathlike authority in our ability to unsettle. The flood of laws stifling our freedoms is a symbol of just how much a simple expansion of an oversimplified view of gender can unsettle, just as witchcraft unsettled the Puritans, just as torches unsettle the night. Perhaps all this anti-queer sentiment, in a sense, is an acknowledgement of our power to reshape the world—and the grand, Kurtzian horror that conjures in certain conservatives.
So, then, let us unsettle. Let us show our power, our witchery of the self. Let us reflect on what it means to be queer, to be trans, to by your very nature cleave the claustrophobic walls of traditionalism. Let us wander the liminal spaces we so luminously represent, the dreamlit mountains where Borges’ blue tigers roam. Let us bloom as beautiful-terrible as stellar death. Let us be as glorious as the women who run with wolves, a sack of grinning bones on their backs.
Let us be vast and unruly in a world that so often wishes everything small and neat. Let us be, and teach our little ones to do the same, if they wish.
I think now of holding my little one for the first time, a new bond quietly woven, and my fears fade, obliterated by the overpowering all-ness of it all. I smile, instinctively, like Joy, knowing we’ll figure it out, even if some people think their mother is a monstress. Great ones, after all, have been raised by monsters before.
