> i'm not sharing what happened with anyone but you.
i don't know how we're supposed to go on living without Meril. every shot of this film, every vacant hall, empty street, and sunken shopping mall is haunted by her absence.
as trans women, the possibilities for our lives are deeply entwined. we look to each other, not as role models, but as mirrors. in the reflections, we hope to find the evidence we need to disprove what we've been taught: that our desire can never be realized. to hold an impossible desire is to be alone, and so our sense of potentiality is inseparable from our sisterhood.
when a sister leaves us, our connection to her is undiminished. we become shrouded in the lack of her. Aamina, Athena, and Victoria pursue their transitions—each in its own stage—and see themselves in each other. but their reflections are also in Meril. her fate belongs to them too.
> in my memory, the city had become desolate. people had disappeared. only roads, buildings, and nature were left. but in the empty city, there were also you and me.
[`unbecoming women` & `the beloved` -- maggie nelson, susan fraiman, john cage]
to change your whole
## ii
[`natural motherhood` | "seams & sutures"]
the obsession with the natural. an idealized
## iii
a nurse enters a postpartum suite and approaches a new mother holding her infant, eighteen hours old. her milk is not yet in, but the pair have had some success practicing the latch they'll need to establish in the coming days. the nurse [...] this, she explains, is the "super secret daddy hold". before she is able to describe its uses a voice from behind her interrupts, "that's not a word we use in our family." this is the voice of the birth mother. she is in the habit of correcting casual misgendering of her co-mom
## iv
[`the impossibility of trans motherhood | queer motherhood`]
## v
[`child bearing | naturalization`]
> Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat with naïve self-satisfaction. Compared to this positivistic conception, the fantasies which provided so much ammunition for the ridicule of Fourier exhibit a surprisingly healthy sensibility. According to Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature, is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers in her womb. To the corrupted concept of labor belongs, as its logical complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, “is there gratis [for free].” - Benjamin
> the transsexual body is an unnatural body - Stryker
> more work for mother
> biopolitics of fatherhood
## vi
[`separation & alienation from our children | inadequacy`]
> But it seems worth emphasizing that one of the consequences of our society’s gender stereotyping enterprise is to make many mothers feel that in order to be “real” mothers (or even “real” women), they must be so excessively nurturing that their children enter the world with the expectation that all of their needs will automatically be met. - MARI RUTI
the gendering of nurture
## vii
[`divorce | failure`]
a defining feature of authentic womanhood is the failure to live up to its ideal form.
## viii
[everyone must mother as a utopian, family-abolitionist slogan]
transgression of the family form is something our cis partners can gain through us. we are positioned as outside, as a challenge to, the naturalized divinity of the two-parent family makes us a conveinent personification of your liberated polycule, or whatever your queer utopian alternative may be. our presence shores up their claim to be dismantling and abolishing. when relationships become strained and the system cracks, blends, and reforms the outcome is predictable: another trans mom is separated from her home and her baby, uniquely understood as having failed to live up to her proper role.
## ixv
[`abjection & miserable forms` -- bataille]
## x
[`postpartum depression | dispair`]
i decided to induce lactation years before i named myself a woman.
## xi
[`the impossibility of motherhood | becoming women`]
## xii
[`reproductive labor `]
## xiii
[`embodied womanhood | having "the jugs"`]
## xiv
trans motherhood fails to be new or subversive.
## xv
motherhood and womanhood are aesthetically and morally identical.
## xvi
[the beloved, again]
## xvii
[`becoming` -- deleuze & guattari]
> We know that many beings pass between a man and a woman; they come from different worlds, are borne on the wind, form rhizomes around roots; they cannot be understood in terms of production, only in terms of becoming.
"trans women are women" vs "what connections are possible"
## xvii(a)
"which one"
## xviii
[labor again]
a real rec
genuine possibilities counter to the restrictions of the nuclear family and its binary configuration of the body can't materialize until [real recognition of trans motherhood]
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