Torrey Peters

None of the money would go to trans people. GLAAD, like most of the big gay orgs, focused on messaging and lobbying; the money was not for trans people, it was to facilitate proper discussion about such topics as trans people.

Reese wanted the same for herself—no actually, she wanted more. Who needs your public bathrooms? We’re already in your bedrooms, fucking your husbands, and we’ll use the master bath, thanks very much.

As far as I can tell, at least from the outside, motherhood is just some vague test designed to ensure that everyone feels inadequate.

The way that Virginia included her with the other girls, complimented her on her grace, her form, the same as she did the others, so that eventually her daughter accepted Reese as one of them, and soon all of her friends did as well. The first time that Virginia just “forgot” and ordered five girl Happy Meals, instead of four girl Happy Meals and one boy Happy Meal.

“How would being a mom make no one ask you that?”

“Because that’s not the question that cis women have to answer. The moms I knew when I was little didn’t have to prove that it was okay to want a child. Sure, a lot of women I know wonder if they do want a child, but not why. It’s assumed why. The question cis women get asked is: Why don’t you want kids? And then they have to justify that. If I had been born cis, I would never even have had to answer these questions. I wouldn’t have had to prove that I deserve my models of womanhood. But I’m not cis. I’m trans. And so until the day that I am a mother, I’m constantly going to have to prove that I deserve to be one.

That it’s not unnatural or twisted that I want a child’s love. Why do I want to be a mother? After all those beautiful women I grew up with, the ones who chaperoned my classes on field trips, or made me lunch when I was at their house, or sewed costumes for all the little girls that I ice skated with—and you too, Katrina, for that matter—have to explain their feelings about motherhood, then, I’ll explain mine.

All my white girlfriends just automatically assume that reproductive rights are about the right to not have children, as if the right and naturalness of motherhood is presumptive. But for lots of other women in this country, the opposite is true. Think about black women, poor women, immigrant women. Think about forced sterilization, about the term ‘welfare queens,’ or ‘anchor babies.’ All of that happened to enforce the idea that not all motherhoods are legitimate.

The women you’re talking about, the marginalized women—they’re told that they shouldn’t have children, not that they shouldn’t want children. The wanting of children seems to be an accepted universal fact for women everywhere.

I want that same validation that other moms have. That feeling of womanhood placed in a family. That validation is fine for cis women, but it gets treated as perverted for me

Let’s come out and admit it: Everyone acts like moms are real women and real women become moms. Women who never have kids get treated like silly whores, obsessed with themselves, lacking some basic capacity to love.”