As a Black, non-binary femme who, while pregnant, intended to raise a “gender creative” child after birth, many of my concerns as a parent-to-be weren’t—not surprising, but disheartening nonetheless—addressed in the traditional parenting books I read about, was gifted or purchased.

I had countless romanticized ideas about the experience of pregnancy combined with feelings of paranoia regarding things that could go wrong, anxiety about how I’d cope with the upcoming changes while in recovery for an eating disorder, and general curiosity about what it meant to be pregnant. Due to health reasons, I’d been warned by doctors that my pregnancy would be high-risk and I had to take special precautions to ensure that myself and the baby would be healthy and safe.

Given the alarming statistics and data regarding Black maternal health in the U.S. (according to the CDC, Black woman are three to four times more likely than non-Hispanic white women to die as a result of giving birth as just one concern), I was riddled with worry at the potential for problems. Thankfully, I had a solid support system primarily in the form of an understanding and loving partner who supported me fully. Still, I hoped to find a sense of community or even a small village of people who could relate to my journey as a pregnant person and soon-to-be mom.

I started my pregnancy on Medicaid, enrolled in my final semester of undergraduate studies as a returning student, battling hyperemesis gravidarum—a severe form of vomiting and nausea vomiting—and hoping to have a doula-assisted home water birth. Fast forward eight months to an unexpected hospital birth, after over a day of excruciating but lovingly-supported labor at home, and an earlier-than-planned transition into motherhood.

Despite the last minute drastic changes to my birth plan, any sense of preparedness I had while birthing—and upon returning home with my newborn—was fostered and instilled in me not by any of the conventional pregnancy and parenting books I eagerly devoured early on in my pregnancy, but by a source not available to most prior generations of parents: social media-based forums and pages. I was gifted so many books and out of curiosity and fear of the unknown I read each one cover-to-cover.

I mostly read them with my future doula work in mind, gathering tools and information I could possibly need given the diversity of possible clients in my area. For me personally, though, the book just didn’t help for my unique journey as much as I hoped they would. They lacked the intersectional analyses of different issued related to pregnancy and birth I longed for.

During my pregnancy I experienced racism at my OB office at nearly every visit; I finally stopped going around 35 weeks. Each time I went I wished I had the confidence to advocate for myself and my child. Thankfully, my partner and I were honest and open with each other every step of the way so during moments of stress he would support me. Further, he would respectfully advocate for me if I was on the verge of a breakdown.

The levels of discomfort felt by my partner and I subsequently lead to crippling anxiety. Primarily for me. We would unpack the visits together because the racism we experienced was blatant but we decided to hang in there for as long as possible given the risks of my pregnancy. When we did stop going, though, if we needed help we sought the help of midwives, doulas, and nurse relatives for guidance. As a doula myself, I felt confident in my ability to seek the help of a new doctor if need be or to find other forms of professional, medical help.

Racism During Prenatal Visits isn’t a topic covered in any of the popular pregnancy books so I scoured the internet for people who could relate beyond peer-reviewed articles and academic texts about the intersections between institutional racism and the medical industrial complex. Sure I read those as well, but I wanted personal stories and honest narratives written by other pregnant people with relatable transparency.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach: dealing with misgendering as a non-binary femme, choosing a parenting style that no one else in your family takes seriously or will most likely criticize, opting to raise gender creative children, planning for a home water birth with a doula in New York City, coping with body image issues as someone in recovery from bulimia, issues regarding receiving different physical exams during pregnancy as a survivor of sexual assault and rape, addressing intergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother. The list went on and on (and on) but luckily I eventually found exactly what I was looking for.

About halfway through my pregnancy I saw a shared post on Facebook that led me to a private group for pregnant people suffering from hyperemesis gravidarum. This was the first space I felt I could be open and honest about my experiences because the thousands of other people in the group could genuinely relate to me and I didn’t have to worry about suggestions for ginger or crackers. They, too, knew the struggle of wanting to take just a sip of water only to have your body reject it. Not eating for days, vomiting more than ten times a day, emergency room visits.

There were other issues I yearned to talk with other pregnant people that the popular texts simply didn’t begin to broach like theintergenerational trauma as a soon-to-be Black mother.
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Having found a sense of real community and understanding in that group I began to search for more solace, more solidarity. In time I was a member of about ten different groups that focused on the issues I was dealing with. I would discuss different topics everyday and eventually I made close bonds with people around the world by becoming friends on Facebook, texting, and following each other’s journeys on Instagram. Everything I couldn’t find and would never find in traditional parenting books I found online at all hours of the day.

Something that most traditional parenting books leave out are the effects that structural, institutional, and systemic forces have on lived experiences. Race, class, gender (or the lack thereof), nation of origin, disability, sexual orientation, region, and so much more impact our lives in ways that make experiences like pregnancy and childbirth truly unique.

Our bodies alone, and their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience, but so do things like the food we have access to, the way we are perceived by others, the type of insurance we have (if we have insurance at all) whether or not we work, whether or not we have a partner or partners, implicit biases medical professionals have toward us based on our race—there is so much silenced and overlooked.

But thanks to the internet, there are online spaces for people with shared experiences to connect, bond, and offer each other support. I’m thankful I found those spaces because they made my journey feel less helpless and made me feel less alone. I didn’t feel silent, I felt understood. My experience wasn’t erased. I, and thousands of others, could be seen and heard in those spaces.

Those spaces helped me see that for some pregnant people and parents, or people considering starting that journey, the most helpful guides to turn to for advice, useful information, and necessary guidance won’t be found on your local bookstore shelf (or online shopping cart). Instead, it’ll be found on social media, most likely Instagram or Facebook. And while we all navigate these journeys in our own way, if you’re like me and enjoy a sense of community with others who genuinely understand you, then I highly recommend you find an online space you consider safe.

Our bodies alone — their differences and histories, make pregnancy and childbirth a unique experience and there is so much silenced and overlooked.
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Sometimes you can’t always turn to family and sometimes the books won’t have answers to your questions. If you go into these spaces knowing you can learn, as a supplement to whatever level of professional and medical advice from doctors or other specialists you seek out, then your journey as a pregnant person or parent can be deeply enlightened and maybe, just maybe, less stressful.

It’s comforting to know that you’re not alone and it’s empowering to feel affirmed. Online communities offer that and I’m grateful I found them during such a major transitional and transformative time of my life.

I used to go on long walks when I was pregnant. I’d lace up my snow boots and zip my barely-fitting winter coat over my belly and just walk for hours around the neighborhood. I loved it. I loved how I waddled, my hips expanding to accommodate the baby’s drop. I loved how my stomach strained the zipper, pocket seams bursting, as if even my clothes were excited with anticipation about my daughter’s arrival. I loved how strangers smiled and asked when I was due and told me, “Congratulations!”

I loved being a pregnant person.

It felt easy to be a “good” pregnant person. Yes, the details were hard – a screenshot of safe fish to eat lived on my phone, consulted before every sushi order that always ended in California rolls anyway; I sat on an inflatable birthing ball at work to try to encourage the baby to go into proper head-down position; I didn’t sleep on my back; I learned infant CPR; we squirreled away money for future childcare.

But overall, I was lucky. For me, moving through the world as a pregnant woman was simple. I felt so sure of my choices, so sure I was doing it right. It was the first time in my whole life I felt truly at home with my identity, that I wholly embodied within what was being projected outwardly. It was the first time I felt confident in myself.

Motherhood is not like that. Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly. Things that had once seemed stupidly obvious stop me in my tracks. I spend a ridiculous amount of time standing in the grocery store, paralyzed at the thought of choosing the wrong baby water. I agonize over what is the proper type of onesie to put her in (Fleece? Cotton? Flannel?). Old episodes of ER play in the background as she cluster feeds and my mind hums with screen time recommendations.

Everything, every choice, every decision, every moment, is heavy with consequence.

My daughter sleeps in her bassinet next to me. I lay in bed, having checked to make sure she’s breathing. Once. Twice. Three times already. I close my eyes, satisfied.

She shifts.

Don’t do it, I reprimand myself in my head. She’s fine. Don’t do it. She just moved a little. Don’t do it. Embarrassingly, she has not one but two life-detecting monitors (a motion sensor pad under her mattress that came with the video monitor, and a Snuza clipped on her diaper that is supposed to beep should she stop breathing.) Don’t do it. Neither is going off. Don’t do it. She’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine…

I lift my head, scootch to the side of the bed, peer over. I check on her. I watch her diaphragm move up and down. I make sure her nose and mouth are clear of anything that has the minuscule chance of blocking her airway (the sleeve of her onesie positioned in a one in a million chance in the throes of her sleep, the fitted sheet somehow coming up from the secure hugging of the mattress corner and tangled over her face in her tossing…) She is fine. I pull the covers up, I close my eyes, I wait for sleep.

She shifts again.

Motherhood has shaken my confidence to the core, chiseled away my decision-making skills, left me puddled and wobbly.
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I don’t want to be this mother. Double-checking, triple-checking that the car seat is clicked in properly (did I hear two clicks? I don’t know. Do it again). Nerves frayed after a bad night of sleep (why did I rock her to sleep, she will never learn to sleep on her own, I’ve ruined her sleep habits forever and committed my husband and me to a lifetime of interrupted nights, 2 a.m. wake ups). Thoughts from long ago, news stories of dangers lurking in every corner fill my head (infants accidentally left in hot cars, dead after their first day at daycare, stabbed by the nanny…).

I’m sorry, I didn’t get it, I want to say to the mothers of eons past. I used to think, “Why is it so hard? Why are you so worried? If your baby is hungry, she will eat. Tired, she will sleep. What are you fretting, obsessing, agonizing about?” I’m sorry I didn’t understand until now.

The love for my daughter took time to come in. We don’t talk about that much, but maybe we should, the assurance offered to new moms that their breast milk may take time to come alongside a “don’t worry, that love everyone talks about, it will come too.” It snuck up on me, weeks after she arrived, but when it came it was enough to stop the world. I would lay in bed after a middle of the night feeding and listen to her shallow breaths, listen to my husband’s deep slumber beside me, everyone at peace, and I would think if the world had to end, please God let it be now because there would never be anything more perfect than this moment.

I’m sorry, I didn’t understand how your child is everything and nothing all at once. Like Sandra Cisneros describes in her short story Eleven, how when you’re eleven you’re not just eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. My daughter is everything right now in the moment, but she is also nothing but potential, events yet experienced, lessons yet learned, a life yet lived.

It’s here where the anxiety nestles itself, feeds off itself, this crux of past and future.

The heat rattles to life and fills my New York City apartment with an oppressive warmth. Is she too hot in her swaddle? “Cold babies cry, hot babies die.” Pinterest notifications illuminate my phone during nighttime feedings, alerting me to pins I might like: “5 Hidden SIDS Risks” and “Newborn Safety Checklist.” Clickbait promising to make me a better mother lures me in.

“It’s because you click on them,” my husband says as I show him the ad for the weighted sleep sack that promises three more hours of sleep in just three nights, the gripe water that cures colic and stops crying, the teas and bars and cookies that will boost my dwindling supply of milk. “It’s targeting you because it wants you to buy things.”

But it doesn’t feel that way. I don’t feel targeted; I feel like I’m being sent clues to a puzzle. That writhing, wailing newborn you can’t figure out? We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong. You’re doing it wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

I feel like a good mom only when I’m not responsible for her. When she is with Grandma or Dad I wash and change her crib sheets. I scrub her clothes free of spit-up stains. I sanitize her bottles and pacifiers. I organize her toys. I buy more formula. I tick off all the things she needs, stay on top of the concrete, hard details of keeping her alive and happy. But she always comes back, and with her the unknowns.

But are they unknowns, or are they just things I haven’t learned? How could I live with myself knowing the information was out there that could’ve saved us both and I was too lazy to click it? That the research existed but I was too tired to read and evaluate it thoroughly? That I was too overwhelmed, it was four in the morning, I’d been up half the night, I knew the recommendations of flat on her back in her own space but I just needed to sleep so I put her in the swing, in the bed, in my arms, as I rocked her, rocked her, rocked her, my eyes snapping open in panic after dozing off, dawn light teasing the corners of the window.

The model of motherhood is there, it’s right there, I shout in my own head. In millions of mothers doing it right, doing it better.

My daughter raised the stakes too high in a game I don’t have the constitution to play. Thoughts of being younger, begging and begging to watch a scary movie and then huddling by a nightlight, every night for weeks, both terrified and ashamed, in equal measure, of the fear I’d brought on myself.

You wanted this, prayed and pleaded and cried each month when one line appeared instead of two.

Now she’s here. You protect her. You keep her safe.

She would never exist again. This soul made of stardust. It would never form again.

It’s maddening, it’s exhausting, it feels viscerally unfair, being forced to exist like this: repeating the same mundane steps of caring for a newborn over and over, the numbing repetitiveness sliced sharp with the knowledge that if you don’t do the steps right, if you let your guard down for a moment, if you lose focus on the task at hand, if you take your eye off the ball…like the bright yellow posters in factories warning workers of the dangers on the assembly line that do nothing to break through the haze of monotony until an accident shocks everyone awake again.

We know how to fix it–here’s why your baby isn’t sleeping; here’s why your baby isn’t eating; here’s why your baby won’t stop crying, here’s what you’re doing wrong.
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My daughter grows. She reaches developmental milestones. At five months she scoots forward on her knees and elbows in a combat crawl and I lay out circus-colored safety mats to cushion the hardwood. At seven months, I turn around to see she’s pulled herself up on the side of her crib — that night we drop her mattress to the lowest setting. Now, at nine months, the mats have been replaced with carpet because she cruises along any furniture she can reach, legs shaking when she lets go to test her limits. She gobbles down the food we put on her highchair tray, bits of cheese and mashed banana and bread balled as small as my fingers can make it.

The old fears lessen their grip around my heart but instead settle like a cold in my bones, and are replaced with new fears that cause the blood to rush in my ears each time she stumbles while she learns to walk or chokes as she learns to eat. I doubt they’ll ever go away completely. This is parenting, I think, your breath always one moment away from being knocked out of you.  

A grape not cut small enough. A dresser not properly secured.

My mind remembers, listening to a news brief when I was so young I was standing on a chair to reach something in the kitchen cabinets. The grandmother had wanted to surprise her infant grandchild with a stuffed bunny for Easter. She put it in the crib next to the girl while she slept. The tape holding the wrapping paper somehow came unstuck, the paper somehow covered her mouth and nose in the night.

Everything would be nothing.

I raise my head, peak over the side of the crib. Check to make sure my daughter is still breathing.

I pretty much always planned to breastfeed. It seemed like a given—not even a choice, really, but something I had to do. I knew that breast was best, because that message is everywhere from billboards, to magazines, to social media, to the posters on the wall of my doctor’s office. When the nurses asked me, “how do you plan to feed your baby?” I told them I was breastfeeding. Their smiles made it clear I had answered correctly.

When she was born, the first thing I did was nurse her. As a “Baby-Friendly” hospital, they encouraged all new moms to breastfeed exclusively. I carefully logged her feeding sessions on the chart they provided—30 minutes, 45 minutes, 15 minutes. When the nurses came to check on me, they said things like, “you’re doing such a good job, mama” and “everything looks great.”

After the first 24 hours of motherhood, I felt like a rock star. Everything was going exactly as planned. Then the next 24 hours were brutal. My daughter alternated between nursing and screaming. She couldn’t stay awake to nurse, but wouldn’t stay asleep if I put her down. She cried; I cried. I was too exhausted to think.

The next morning, I called the La Leche League. They told me to “just keep breastfeeding.” Everything would work out, and my baby was fine. Then I called the hospital lactation consultant, who said the exact same thing. My milk likely hadn’t come in yet, the baby was fine, and I shouldn’t worry as long as I kept nursing. She scheduled an appointment for me to come in the next day.

I didn’t want to fail at breastfeeding. It was not an option. As I reread my worn copy of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, I started to panic. I knew deep down something was wrong, and she wasn’t getting enough milk, but I was doing everything right, and I wanted it to work so badly.

Everyone said that breast was best. My friends, family, midwife, and the brochure they gave me at the hospital. When I had my baby, I worked for a women’s health provider, where we talked about breastfeeding with our clients, as if it was the easiest thing in the world. Public agencies like the Centers for Disease Control promote exclusive breastfeeding, as if it’s a simple problem of awareness. The truth is breastfeeding is hard, and sometimes not even close to possible. This pressure is not only unfair, and misguided, but parents and babies end up getting harmed in the process.

At the time though, I thought I just had to try harder to make breastfeeding work. I mean, obviously the problem was me. I met with the lactation consultant. She pressed my breasts into hamburger shapes, and squeezed my nipples to produce drops of milk. I felt my daughter’s tiny mouth latch on like a snake. I felt pressure in my chest, as I saw that the number on the baby scale had dropped. My daughter was starving. I was starving her.

My baby was admitted to the hospital for jaundice and dehydration. As I watched her gulp down formula, I felt like a failure. I told myself that I would just have to try harder, to do anything it took. There was a “breast is best” sign on the NICU wall. I asked for a breast pump and left her lying there under blue lights. When I returned with less than an ounce of breast milk, the nurse said, “is that all?” I felt the weight of her disappointed gaze.

I didn’t want to fail at breastfeeding. It was not an option.
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When my daughter was discharged, I started the impossible routine of breastfeeding, supplementing, and pumping 10 times a day, to boost my supply. I don’t really remember much about the next few weeks, aside from the pressure and pain of trying to make breastfeeding work. I should have spent the so-called fourth trimester loving my baby and learning how to be a mom. Instead, I was so preoccupied with breastfeeding, that I didn’t get a chance to really be her mom. I don’t really remember things like her first smile or laugh. I just remember the pumping.

I felt so much pressure, not just to breastfeed, but to breastfeed exclusively, as though my entire existence depended on increasing my supply. My midwife secretly prescribed me expensive prescription drugs that aren’t approved in the U.S.  I drank breastfeeding tea, took herbal supplements, and ate food reputed to increase supply. My nipples bled and cracked. My supply increased, only to dip again, and never became enough for my baby. I continued for months, not taking time to sleep, eat, or bond with my baby.

I felt shame. Rather than be seen in public giving her a bottle, I would hide in the bathroom to feed her. My identity was so wrapped up in how much milk I was making. I thought I was selfish, lazy, and a bad mother. Other people thought this too—the woman in the formula aisle said, “don’t you know that breast is best. The relative at my grandpa’s funeral said, “oh, you stopped breastfeeding? That’s so sad. My breastfeeding friend said, “you should just try harder.” Strangers on the Internet went so far as to tell me that formula was like feeding my baby McDonald’s or that it would make her sick. Hell, even the can of formula has the phrase Breast Is Best on the side.

As a woman, I’d spent my life under pressure—to be pretty and thin, to be pleasant, to succeed, to get married and have babies. I had been molded by society and myself into a perfection-seeking missile, never wanting to miss the mark. After 30 years of living up to expectations, there was no way I was going to fail to provide the best for my baby.

Eventually, I cracked under the pressure. I started to think my daughter would be better off without me. I made plans for her, once I was gone. I figured that my husband would be fine. He would have help from my parents. Or maybe someone else could care for her. A breastfeeding mom could nurse her. I wasn’t able to think straight, to really process what I was feeling or how the pressure to breastfeed was making me hate myself. My daughter was thriving on a combination of formula and breast milk, but I still thought I was not enough.  

Hell, even the can of formula has the phrase Breast Is Best on the side.
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Now, I have breastfed and formula-fed three babies to varying degrees, and I learned there are so many more important parts of being a mom. The constant refrain of “breast is best” made me hinge my success as a mother on something I couldn’t control—the physical ability to exclusively breastfeed—which I later learned was never going to be possible for me. It actually isn’t possible for a lot of new moms.

As human milk researcher Shannon Kelleher, PhD notes on themomvist.com, between 10 and 15 percent of moms can’t produce milk, and many more cite supply issues as the reason they stopped breastfeeding. While organizations like the World Health Organization and the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) recommend exclusive breastfeeding for at least six months, only 22 percent of moms in the U.S. meet that goal.

Recommendations like this sound awesome, but fail to acknowledge how physically challenging breastfeeding is. Not to mention other pressures moms face in our society to “do it all”—working jobs with no parental leave, and not having enough support to raise babies, let alone exclusively feed them with our bodies. For many of us, the pressure to breastfeed contributes to postpartum depression, which impacts an astonishing one in seven new moms.

In July, Trump Administration rejected a breastfeeding resolution at the World Health Assembly in Geneva to promote exclusive breastfeeding worldwide and fund initiatives like the BFHI. And while people largely dismissed this move as patently bad, I had a moment of relief. As a culture, we’ve set the bar so high, and put new moms under so much pressure to achieve the impossible, that they are literally dying.

When you consider that in the U.S., babies do just as well on formula as breast milk, it’s time to take a step back from the “breast is best” rhetoric, to support all new parents in choosing to feed their babies in a way that works for them, and relieve some of the pressure of new motherhood, which is hard enough as it is.

As a culture, we’ve set the bar so high, and put new moms under so much pressure to achieve the impossible, that they are literally dying.
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I still remember the day the pressure started to dissipate for me. In the middle of my panic over breastfeeding my first child, I called a friend, the only formula-feeding mom I knew. I don’t know why I called her that day, but she came over. She sat with me, while I called my doctor to schedule an appointment. She held space for me to cry and vent all of the worries, and fears I had about formula, and all of the shame I felt about not breastfeeding. She offered no pressure, just support.

Most importantly, she told me about how her kids had done well on formula when breastfeeding didn’t work out for her. As we watched our beautiful children smile and coo from a blanket on the floor, I knew that she was right. Breastfeeding or not, I was enough. Formula was enough, or maybe even best for us. It was like being reborn as a new mom, without the crushing pressure to breastfeed. Slowly, but surely, I began to thrive, and my baby thrived, too, without another ounce of breastmilk.

Violet* is at home with her daughter and boyfriend when she hears a knock at the door. She opens it to find five police officers and a social worker. “They went through our laundry, our bag of adult toys, all of our cupboards,” she tells me over the phone. “They said that my mom called and told them that I am a prostitute and that I am subjecting my daughter to it.”

Violet does work in the sex industry, but she isn’t a prostitute; she is a cam girl. And, though this work may be highly stigmatized, it is legal. So, she was shocked when the judge granted Violet’s mother full custody of her daughter. She says, “It blows my mind that you can lose a child like this. I haven’t been charged with anything. I’ve never been arrested.”

Violet’s story stands out to me because, as an online sex worker who is also a mother, this is my worst fear. I started doing a mix of phone sex, cam modeling, and clip production when I was going through a divorce. Online sex work offered a flexible schedule that allowed me to take care of my kids. Divorce, as it turns out, is time consuming and expensive. Sex work was a good fit for the circumstances. It was also a good fit in many other ways that I didn’t anticipate: The work, while challenging, can be interesting, rewarding, and meaningful. But beginning a sex work career while in the midst of a divorce made me particularly attuned to, and afraid of, custody issues such as Violet’s.

This fear is not unfounded. Sex workers who are mothers often find themselves in the middle of such battles, even if they’re engaging in perfectly legal behavior. Juniper Fitzgerald, a former erotic dancer, and author of How Mamas Love Their Babies, understands this all too well, having faced her own custody battle related to sex work. “Not a day goes by that I don’t hear of a sex working mother crowdsourcing funds for a custody lawyer. It’s heartbreaking,” she said.

Your Guide To Surviving In Society As A Wannabe Sex Worker
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The fact that sex workers who engage in legal work face these challenges points to something important regarding attitudes toward sex work: Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work. Mothers who engage in sex work are perceived to lack the judgement and boundaries needed to be good parents. This stigma is injected into our legal system. While the law may not forbid stripping or cam work, judges have a lot of discretion, and if doing stigmatized work leads them to believe that we have poor judgment, they can slap us with consequences that, for mothers, can feel worse than being arrested.

Fitzgerald notes that she has it easier than most in her position. “I have a great deal of privilege as a white woman with a PhD,” she said. However, “Even given those privileges, the court wanted detailed explanation of my work and a good faith testament that I was no longer engaged in sex work.” This becomes an even bigger problem for those who do not carry such privilege. suprihmbé, an online sex worker and artist, observes, “As a Black woman who has run into many problems with the law, I avoid the court.” And in the case of prostitution, Bella Robinson, executive director of COYOTE, a sex workers’ rights organization, remarks in a phone conversation, “You are more likely to go to jail for prostitution than you are for drugs.”

Our fitness to parent is seen through a lens of the stigma that surrounds sex work.
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And yet, despite the fact that society portrays motherhood as incongruent with sex work — scrutinizing our judgement and credibility — sex working mothers continue to parent our kids in a way that is not only appropriate, but radical in its power to destabilize these narratives and destigmatize our work for future generations. In other words, sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, as these front lines begin in our own homes. Because we occupy professions that are highly stigmatized, sex working mothers are pushed to parent with a thoughtfulness and a courage that undermines the perceptions of unfit motherhood that society wants to insist upon.

For myself and the other mothers I spoke with, this begins with figuring out how to talk to our kids in an age appropriate way about both sexuality and sex work. But more than this, we also have to talk to them about the stigma we — and, they, by extension — face. This is never simple. suprihmbé notes that while she is not secretive about what she does, her son is only 5 and she hasn’t yet decided how much she will tell him. Part of her worry is that other parents aren’t having the same conversations with their children about the nuances of sex work. She says, “Probably once he’s a little older we will discuss it more, but I don’t know how in depth I want to be? Because I’m a single mom, and I don’t want him running off at the mouth to other kids’ moms and dealing with their bigotry.”

Fitzgerald describes the way in which she has talked to her 4-year-old daughter about sex work. “I have told her many times that I used to dance naked for a job. My former work is very normalized in our household.” Porn performer Lotus Lain hasn’t yet told her children what she does for work, but is laying the groundwork for these conversations. “My kid is still elementary age, but they have a healthy view of sex, they know what sex is,” she says. “They’re not judgmental at all. I’ve talked to them about different types of sexuality and gender and they’ve completely understood without challenging the concepts.” She hopes this will set them up to be understanding when they’re old enough to learn more.“I know that once they’re high school age they will be able to fully understand the type of sex work I have done and why.”

Why We Must Protect Sex Workers At All Costs During The #MeToo Era
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Yin Q, a dominatrix, writer, and educator, says that she is also preparing her kids to understand sex work as they grow older. “My kids are too young to understand sex work at this point,” she said, “but I raise them to be accepting of different sexual lifestyles and orientations and am already very careful not to slut shame.” Yin Q has also written and produced a series based on her career called Mercy Mistress, and her kids have seen some of the footage of the main character, a femme domme, in fetish gear. “They’ve asked me what she does, and I answered that she helps people face their darkness. ‘So she’s a superhero?’ they said. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘Sex workers are superheroes.’”

This conversation seems to capture what many sex worker mothers are doing in their parenting. Because I have older children, I was able to have very direct conversations with them about my work, and this became more urgent when I started doing sex work writing and local activism. When I explained to my pre-teen what phone sex is and why people call phone sex lines, he responded with, “So you are like an online therapist but you talk to people mostly about sex.” I laughed, because it is closer to the truth of what this kind of sex work looks like than what most people realize. I was proud to have raised a kid who could see past the sensationalism of the sex in sex work (unlike most adults) and see the bigger picture. But for this to happen, a foundation had to be laid: a sex positive foundation which included a respect for personal autonomy and for women, including those who have made choices that fall outside of cultural norms.

Sex working mothers are at the front lines of a radical sexual politics, because these front lines begin in our own homes.
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Indeed, Ramona Flour, an art model and sex worker whose mother also worked in the industry, exemplifies this, tweeting, “I have been advocating for sex workers my whole life because my my mother has been a sex worker my whole life.” On the phone, she expands, “The thing I want people to understand is that there are a lot of single mothers [in sex work], mothers who are struggling to take care of their children.” Of her own mother she says, “I am thankful, above everything else, that she was so selfless and provided for me and took care of me. She used sex work to take care of her kid and that is so commendable.”

While the image that we have of sex work activists is that of the most public and most visible sex workers — those who march on the streets and stand at the forefront of political action — sex working mothers are also engaged in a radical activism at home. They are teaching their children to see sex workers through their own lens, and not through the filter of shame and stigma. This is important political work. “We need more representations of sex workers that are authentic, complex, and generous,” says Yin Q. “Culture change happens before policy change.”

*Name has been changed to protect privacy since this custody case is still open.

Both my parents are the oldest of three, with two younger brothers. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she thought the talk of “their son” was due to this: that they had both experienced babies as being boys, and thus defaulted to the idea that so, too, would theirs be.

But while this was true for why my mother originally believed that she must be carrying a son, I don’t think this was true for my father. When my mother happily called her own father to tell him the news — that she was pregnant, that it was going to be a girl — my father turned to her and said, “Is he excited?” When my mother replied that yes, of course he was, that both he and my grandmother were shouting in excitement over the phone from Poland, he scoffed. “He must be lying. He’s got to be disappointed it’s not a boy.”

Because to my father, this was the tacit code among men: that a daughter was fine and good, if she preceded or succeeded a son. Daughters were sources of “daddy’s girl” affection, and procurers of son-in-laws with whom one could barbecue and bond. A daughter will care for you in old age, fret and fuss about you taking your vitamins, while a son will be out in the world spreading your (however puffed up or imagined) legacy.

This is not so much bitter postulation as it is a direct recounting of what my father would often say on the topic. A male family member had had three daughters, and divorced his wife when she refused to find out the sex of the baby before having an abortion; three children was enough. How dare she: If it was a boy, she had no right.

My parents divorced a few months after I was born. I don’t have many early memories, or many memories of childhood at all. In the classic family unit, children arrive into a domestic universe that is well-established: the family home, the family dynamic, the external support structure of extended family, the rules, the beliefs, the time dinner is served. However, when you are born into a time of extreme upheaval in two people’s respective lives, you join them in the upheaval, and participate in two completely separate laws of physics. In the land of my mother, my girlhood was celebrated in the socially dictated gender-role ways: Spice Girls cassette tapes and funky dresses. In the land of my father, there was anger and confusion.

In all of my baby photos, I am covered in frills and ruffles. But while no one can refuse a baby girl, teenage girls are different: further away from lap candy and closer to nuisance. So by the time I approached the 4th grade, as the awkwardness of adolescence was slowly approaching, the lovable pigtails of babyhood were over. There was a shift: Suddenly, my hair had been cut short and I was in corduroys and rugby polos at all times.

No one can refuse a baby girl, but teenage girls are different: further away from lap candy and closer to nuisance.
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One day, on the last day of school in June, there was a fair of sorts on the asphalt basketball court. I got my hair spray-painted blue. I had eaten a firecracker popsicle, because I remember going to the bathroom and sticking out my blue tongue in the mirror and hissing like a blue dragon. My dad had planned a camping trip on Bull’s Island as the first order of summer; we pulled out of the parking lot of the fair and drove straight there. A few hours later we were on the rocky beach, and my dad threw a towel at me and gestured to kids playing in the water. I rummaged around in the bag he had packed for my swimsuit. It wasn’t there.

“Where’s my swimsuit?” I had asked.

“Guess I forgot,” he shrugged. “Just go in with your shorts.”

I paused, unsure what he was suggesting. “And a shirt?”

“No,” he said. “You don’t need that yet.” He pointed to my flat chest. I was 9.

“I’ll wear a shirt,” I said.

“No you won’t.”

I still don’t know why he obstinately refused to let me cover up my chest, as much as I still don’t know if he actually had forgotten the swimsuit. I just remember crying. I remember being pushed onto the beach in only shorts and my blue bowl cut; a group of boys my age wading up to me, excited to see a new friend. “Hey, man! Cool hair.”

I remember my chest tightening and tears stinging my eyes, feeling utterly mortified and so dysphoric I forgot my own name, which is completely unisex and did nothing to prove that I was actually a girl. (It’s important to note here that not everyone assigned girl at birth identifies that way, or as one or the other gender, but I always have.)

I remember looking over at my dad, and seeing him beaming. His son. Being boys with other boys.

Something had settled in me by the time I was 13: I didn’t like women, and I didn’t want to be like them. There were millions of inane things women were simply bad at: like directions, my dad would say. They have no sense of a map. A step-girlfriend came into my life: a woman who seemed to sway slightly as she stood straight on her skinny legs, with a constant look of wide-eyed bewilderment, a pixie puff of golden curls, and always bright pink lipstick. She looked for all the world like who would be cast as Big Bird’s wife in the live cast version of Sesame Street.

Sandra had her eyebrows and lip-liner tattooed on, and she said things like “serviettes” instead of napkins and “do you want to set the table?” instead of “could you set the table?” She put flax powder on everything she ate and made tea by dipping a tea bag once into hot water and setting it aside. Her favorite things to do were to go out dancing, and watch me scrub the bathroom and point out spots that were missed. She was, as my father said, “the icon of femininity: submissive and demure,” or as my grandmother put it, “a Barbie doll with no self-respect.” These were, allegedly, the same thing. Meanwhile, I was a chubby middle-schooler with frizzy hair and glasses. I often felt like a Semitic goat-herder next to her.

My Father, The Oppressor, The Immigrant, The Patriarch, My Hero
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One time, I went with Sandra to the grocery store. She had only lived with us for two weeks at this point. We passed by an outdoor clothing sale, and she gasped at a long black number, holding it up to her body. “What do you think?!” She squealed, swishing it around. I shrugged. I was moody and contrarian and hardly knew the woman. Of course, she bought it.

Back home, she instructed me to sit and wait for her to try it on. She emerged two minutes later in the clinging dress, which consisted of a sparkly black slip underneath an ankle-length sheath of fine mesh. It was nice, and I said so. All of a sudden she gasped, then clapped her hands and squealed with delight. “I have an idea!”

She quickly shut the door behind her again. This time, she emerged in only the long sheath of mesh, without the slip underneath, or underwear. Nipples, stomach, ass; all dimly lit under the column of tight mesh. Whenever I encounter the phrase serpentine smile, I recall this moment. “Do you think your dad will like it?” She said, twirling.

This is the first time I understood that this was power.

Now that I was 13, my dad was over the desire to make me a tomboy and was now interested in fostering the future woman in me. He encouraged me to take “makeup lessons” with Sandra, to buy colorful clothes and more dresses. He wanted me to lose weight. He said that when I was 18, he would get me lasik surgery, and that when I was 21, he would pay for teeth whitening, and breast implants. He continued to lament my lack of affection toward him.

“When I heard the baby was a girl, I thought, at least she’ll be affectionate,” he’d say every time I’d swat away his hand from the back of my neck, where he liked to control where I looked while we walked.

I became aware of my father’s preoccupation with women’s bodies: When I would comment on a shirt a passing woman was wearing that I thought was cute, my dad would respond with, “I like what’s underneath it.” He had a critique for every woman we encountered: “She’d be attractive if she lost five pounds,” or “Why is her husband with her with an ass like that? She must come from money.”

I became aware of my father’s preoccupation with women’s bodies.
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This served his relationship with Sandra well. She was a stay-at-home Body, retired and tasked with only one duty — maintenance. Her days were spent eating slowly and carefully, and executing day-long exercise regimens. My father would often try to convince her to go to a fertility clinic to impregnate a Y-chromosome fertilized egg. At school, I would eat only bell peppers and cubes of watermelon for lunch. In nightmares of failure, I would often dream of a slowly rotating petri dish.

More and more my father pushed for me to be more effusive, eager, and skirted. There were two opposing categories for a woman’s appearance that were negative ends of the spectrum: “like a lesbian” and “like a prostitute.” Where fathers wanted their daughters was somewhere safely in the middle. For my father, the main source of power any woman could possess was her sensuality.

I think, in some deeply misguided way, this was his most genuine expression of love, as well as his most perplexing directive. At once, he wanted me to have power (read: sexuality) while remaining modestly pure and virginal. This was confusing for him. I was his child — he wanted me to command attention and be heard — yet the only way for a woman to accomplish that was to be enticing. “You want to be pretty, but not beautiful. If you’re plain looking, then you’ll be overlooked in life. If you’re beautiful, life will always be very difficult for you.” By “difficult” he meant: experience violence at the hands of men who will want you.

My Dad Wanted A Melania Wife And An Ivanka Daughter
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By 14, I was at a prestigious all-girls school. I wore baggy clothes and focused entirely on books, being angry, and debate club. At school, I was immersed in a culture of women I respected, but I was not pretty or enticing, so I defaulted to the only other method of power I knew: my father’s.

As the emotional abuse of Sandra increased at home, in which she would be elaborately punished for hours for absent-mindedly leaving a burner on, the flame of my own resentment for her weakness and meek toleration grew. I would dry-heave in the train station when it was time to go home. I was condescending and abusive in conversation. Every time I spoke to someone who threatened me with vulnerability, I would think of Sandra’s most pathetic expression — her wide-eyed teariness and profuse apologizing for the most inane crime — and export that disgust upon anyone in my vicinity who dared to be a “pussy.” I wanted, more than anything, for that pitiful woman to punch my dad in the face in defiance. But that concept didn’t fit into sensuality or tyranny, the two forms of power, the yin and yang, the Mars and Venus, that I knew of. Every day this failed to happen, the gentlest parts of myself shut tighter.

From there, it is a poorly edited film. Image: many stills of my father screaming, at me or Sandra, or anyone. Stopping the car, kicking on the highway, locking us in rooms, withholding school or medicine. Scene: the day the judge announces that I am finally emancipated. Scene: Sandra visiting me at my mother’s house and squeezing my arm urgently to say, “I’m leaving him too.” Scene: Sandra taking it upon herself to visit me at college a year later to tell me she is back with my father. Scene: my grandmother telling me that my father has “adopted” a 23-year-old woman as his “daughter.” Scene: finding out he has broken off contact with his “daughter” after she flirted with men in his presence. Same scene: realizing that my father has never seen me past the age of 17. Image: wearing a dress, image: feminist theory!, image: challenging and changing, image: loving being a woman, loving myself.

Every time I spoke to someone who threatened me with vulnerability, I would think of Sandra’s most pathetic expression.
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There is much more that happened than I could possibly cover, but what remains are the questions — how do we reconcile with what has happened to us, from the broadest way we must reconcile with the most vicious histories of our foremothers’ treatment to the barest facts of our childhood? What does it mean for the clinical toxicity of the patriarch when his only reflection is found in the pool of a daughter? In which no woman is willing to bear him a son, in which no daughter is willing to be his, in which female dissent has dictated the dissolution of his most profound desire: an heir?

I have his hands, his chin, his sense of humor, his love of apples, bluegrass, and compulsive need to share articles. I have never seen him cry. I am the only child he will ever have. I entertain the thought that my father really did know that there was more to women, to life, to me, and that he just didn’t know how to deal with it.

A few months ago, my father and I talked on the phone for the first time in six years. He asked if I remembered when he would lock me in the bathroom in five-hour increments. He reminded me that I was in there so long because every time he would open the door to tell me time-out was up, I would stubbornly say, “No worries, I’m enjoying myself just fine.” This was infuriating for him, this way in which I would turn the power trip on its head. He explains that I have the same problem as my mother, who would pretend it didn’t hurt when her father beat her, which made my grandfather so angry he would keep going. On the phone, my dad said to me, “Can you blame us? How else do you deal with a girl like that?”

I can’t answer this because in truth, I have only loved and celebrated girls like that. I have only tried to tell girls like that that loving others does not make you weak, and resisting mistreatment does not make you a delinquent. I have only dreamt of a girl like that whose spirit is made neither for sex nor breaking, who knows she is complex, dynamic, and wanted, who exists beyond the fears and insecurities of those who aren’t able to imagine the universe of her.

When engineering teams aren’t diverse, only certain people’s problems get solved.

On April 27–29, MIT Media Lab will host its second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon. The aim of the hackathon, the first iteration of which took place in 2014, is to bring technological equity to the table, to develop improved lactation devices, to fight the stigma of breastfeeding, and to brainstorm services that better support women who want to breastfeed their babies in a society that often shuns the practice. Centered on collaboration over competition, the hackathon brings together top CEOs of women’s health companies, teams of doulas, mothers of color, and LGBTQ parents and families to help generate better solutions for the breast pump.

Even for people who are not mothers, the hackathon highlights the need for collaborative innovation that reflects a wider community, making room for equity by design. But, breast pump? For many, that’s still a hard pill to gulp down, at least at first.

I’ll admit that I don’t think much about breastfeeding and I think of breast pumps even less. I’m a 48-year-old, unmarried, unpartnered woman. It’s more likely that I’d be struck by a bolt of lightning inside my own apartment than become anyone’s biological mother. And basically, a hackathon is like spring break for nerdy white dudes, so why should I care about what they’re doing? I have no tender mound of nipped flesh in this game. I’ve no breast in this pump.

The thought of breastfeeding conjures mythological images for me, like the 13th-century sculpture La Luna Capitolina, the Capitoline Wolf, nursing the frozen forms of Romulus and Remus. The lean she-wolf grimaces as the greedy twins, mouths and hands open, wait for her milk to rain down. My mind skips ahead 400 years to 1977, when Buffy Saint Marie breastfed her then baby, Dakota “Cody” Starblanket Wolfchild, on Sesame Street, while Big Bird observed.

In a recent television ad, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Kelda Roys not only challenges Scott Walker’s reign, but takes on the stigma associated with breastfeeding by nourishing her baby while delivering her campaign message. This seems like a revelation, so infrequently do we see breastfeeding in our culture.

Until last week, I didn’t know my own mother breastfed me. She never told me, and I never asked. I never even thought about it. This revelation just slipped out during a conversation between commercial breaks while watching Scandal. I thought about my bond with my mom, how strong it is, and how important it must have been to her back then, as a politically active, working mother and wife in 1970, to create space to breastfeed me in a time when women were also boldly expanding the territories of feminism and the meaning of womanhood.

The Troubling Erasure Of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed

Today, we treat breastfeeding as a solely natural occurrence. I mean, you don’t ask grass how it grows, right? We expect all mothers to be capable of breastfeeding, and to disappear from public life to breastfeed behind closed doors, or in dirty toilet stalls. Insurance companies give free, but subpar, breast pumps to poor and working poor mothers. But when those break, they suggest mothers have failed to adequately use said breast pump, which seems to have as many moving parts as a pocket watch, and then pressure them into feeding their baby factory-made formula when that’s not their preference, often as a result of their “failure” to express their milk using the pump. (It’s important to note too, of course, that women should have the freedom to decide the best way to feed their children, be it breast or formula or some combination of the two.)

We gaslight mothers by saying things like, “breast is best,” while ignoring the need for an equitable infrastructure, like paid family leave, so they actually have time to bond with their children. We tell women we value them most when they become mothers because, “[we] believe that children are our future,” and then we rob them of the time to actually parent their kids. How is this all supposed work?

Catherine D’Ignazio, an Assistant Professor of Civic Media and Data Visualization Storytelling in the Journalism Department at Emerson College, and co-founder of the Make The Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, was a graduate student with a newborn pondering the answer to this question while dealing with the complications of feeding her third child and getting to class. Using a breast pump became an essential part of her life and routine when she faced a medical crisis. This need for a breast pump also revealed many of the problems women face in the pursuit of using the machine.

We gaslight mothers by saying things like, ‘breast is best,’ while ignoring the need for an equitable infrastructure.

“A couple months in, I couldn’t breastfeed for 48 hours,” D’Ignazio tells me in a phone interview. “It was a little insane I couldn’t find any help. I was a privileged person, I could pay out of pocket, and I literally couldn’t find anyone to help me. It was fine, he didn’t die, but the experience was traumatic.” D’Ignazio explains that while she possessed the affluence to obtain high-quality health care, key elements of postpartum support, like an efficient breast pump, and the infrastructure of time and space to use it was lacking.

Her third time pumping, D’Ignazio says she had a revelation:

“Shit, I’m sitting on this bathroom floor pumping, at MIT, in this super fancy building in the most elite engineering school in the world. Why am I sitting on the fucking floor?”

Her frustrations led D’Ignazio to reach out to her colleague, Alexis Hope, a designer and research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Civic Media, to tackle the problem head on. “That was the starting point of the whole thing,” D’Ignazio says. “We were in a position of power — we could do something about this!”

In 2014, the MIT Media Lab hosted its first hackathon to improve the breastfeeding and breast pumping experience. That’s not to say making the hackathon happen was an easy sell. “[The Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon] was perceived as weird by students, faculty, and administrators at first,” D’Ignazio says. “Like, why are you doing this?” But soon, more people got on board. “One particular group was so moved by the talks and energy of the event that they dropped out of volunteering and formed their own team. They developed this warm pump cover to make the pumping experience more warm and fuzzy.” She recalled some team members said, “I see why this matters.”

Your Attitudes About Parenting Might Be Classist

While 2014’s Hackathon was a fun event that brought together 150 engineers, designers, health-care providers, parents, and so many babies that the event set a Guinness Book of World for the most babies at a hackathon, it was a predominantly white experience that seemed to be designed for a privileged few. Ultimately, the hackathon rendered solutions for the breast pump that mostly only wealthy people could afford, like a $1,000 breast pump — not exactly what D’Ignazio had in mind.

“[Innovators] made a lot of assumptions about people’s job situations — that they had a private office to pump in, access to outlets,” D’Ignazio says. Innovators assumed that they’d provided solutions to serve the needs of all women. But innovation requires equity; otherwise you end up with technology like soap-dispensing sensors that only trigger soap when a white person uses them. Real change comes when the most marginalized in society are able to harness the power of equity to move forward.

That’s why even I, a childless human, am on board. It’s time to create a world that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. The breast pump is as good a place as any to push for inclusion in design, and that can’t happen without equity on all fronts.

Real change comes when the most marginalized in society are able to harness the power of equity to move forward.

Kimberly Sear Allers, author of The Big Let Down: How Medicine, Big Business and Feminism Undermine Breastfeeding, and the Media and Communications Strategist for the team, has been instrumental in the shift of perspective on the hackathon. According to D’Ignazio:

“[Allers’] book was a galvanizing force to think about how we address these things in a more systemic way while maintaining the playfulness and let’s-do-it spirit of the first hackathon, at the same time recalibrating who’s innovating and who’s at the table.”

D’Ignazio says Allers’ research provides a pathway to understanding the power of shifting the narrative of breastfeeding from corporations and insurance companies — with their shitty products and policies that profit from our collective silence — to sharing personal stories that support the expansion of breastfeeding knowledge between mothers, their children, and their families. And by giving nursing mothers a place to share their stories, engineers can hopefully better understand what they really need.

Allers explained that “it’s not okay to have a group of white male engineers designing something that needs to also help low-income white women, and when there are many black and brown engineers who should be at the table as well.” Black and brown voices will also be amplified in the hackathon’s participants and teams.

Bad Advice On Foster Daughters And New Mom Nudity

The Make the Breast Pump Not Suck now hosts four organization communities through its Community Innovation Program Breastfeeding Innovation Fellows. The Boston Team, under the leadership of Nashira Baril, is working on the creation of a free-standing birth clinic to be based in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Harambee Care of Detroit, led by Executive Director Anjanette Davenport Hatter, is developing tools for self-advocacy and to increase the availability of lactation support based on the individual needs of mothers and infant care. Rachael Lorenzo, Founder of Indigenous Women Rising, is working with Pueblo and Apache seamstresses to develop breastfeeding-friendly regalia that will allow mothers to breastfeed while maintaining their sacred practices. And the Tupelo team, spearheaded by Toni Hill of Northeast Mississippi Birthing Project, focuses on breastfeeding equity and culturally appropriate care.

Along with the diverse voices of the teams participating, hackathon organizers will present the findings of their story collection project from the previous hackathon. Many expressed their displeasure with the time it takes to clean the pump, the god-awful sound it makes when in use, the need for more discrete ways to pump when in public, and the pain of having one’s nipple suddenly sucked into a plastic, conical-shaped cup. The story collection also yielded compelling arguments for not only better breast pumps, but improved postpartum services for mothers and families.

“The reason we are doing this again is the immense story collection and analysis process that happened after the last one,” Becky Michelson, Project Manager at the Engagement Lab at Emerson College and the Program Manager of Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon, says. “During the last Hackathon there was an email open to the public that said ‘share your experiences and we’ll share them with engineers, technologists, and researchers.’ People thought a few dozen would come in. More than 1,100 stories came. Some of the findings were…there was a lot of internalized shame, guilt, anxiety , and depression, because people felt they are failing.”

The Tech Bias: Why Silicon Valley Needs Social Theory

According to Michelson, the stories revealed that a better breast pump is a societal issue. Our culture, while pressuring new mothers to breastfeed, is not set up to help women and new parents succeed at breastfeeding and pumping when they need support. “We need to take on a more system-level approach to change and to galvanize creativity, innovation, and advocacy for breastfeeding and pumping support,” says Michelson, “so it’s not just about the pump this time around; it’s about the ecosystem, technology, and program services for the postpartum experience.”

Adds D’Ignazio:

“The stories were about way more than a breast pump. They were stories about going back to work, the stigma of breastfeeding, the places where people were pumping. There were stories of women feeling like failures. That’s what galvanized us to think about how to address this in a more systematic way. We needed to turn that negative energy on the system that was failing us.”

The us means ALL of us — even no-baby-having people like me, because in order to create real change we have to center the most marginalized to see that change.

Included in the latest iteration of the hackathon is the work of Kate Krontiris, Principal Investigator on the Hackathon’s Leadership team.“The design [of the breast pump] itself is an issue of equity,” Krontiris says. “We don’t value parents’ time. If your baby requires triple feeding [to up a mother’s milk supply], if your baby had to eat every three hours — two out of three hours are spent feeding and cleaning the pump, and that’s one hour of sleep every three hours. Designing a pump to be a much better and more efficient process actually has real implications.”

While the need is obvious to hack the breast pump, Kimberly Sears Allers cautions us all to question our reliance on machines, even breast pumps. Allers suggests that we balance innovation, policy, and equity if we really intend on fruitful results of this hackathon.

“I feel very strongly that breast pumps are a necessary evil,” Allers says. “Women actually deserve time to mother. We can’t let the pump enthusiasm distract us from the fact that it is a crime that women are going back to work two weeks after giving birth and that we have to rely on a machine to finish the job that we’re not allowed to do ourselves. We have to not become a Pump Nation and turn the pump into the all mighty thing to save us, when what we really deserve is time to mother, time to breastfeed and be with our kid.”

Even so, Allers says that breast pumps should at least work efficiently if we must use them, and that tied to efficiency, this is the true value of using the machine — the value of a parent’s time.

The breast pump is a tool, and one whose use affects all of us, breastfeeders or not. Let’s make better ones that work for everyone.

In the excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autism Uncensored, that was recently published in The Washington Post, Whitney Ellenby tells us about the time she physically restrained and dragged her 5-year-old autistic son to see Elmo perform at a “Sesame Street Live!” show. She describes fighting off his fists, pinning him down, and inching — her son shrieking and flailing, trapped between her legs — toward the auditorium’s entrance, an effort, she claims, “to save him from a life entrapped by autistic phobias.”

While some parents of autistic children have celebrated the article for showing them that they are not alone, the response from autistic adults to the violent actions in the piece and her book more broadly, has been, deservedly, negative. As Eb, an autistic writer, tweeted, “Meltdowns like the one described in this article aren’t ‘problems to solve.’ They’re communication.” Through his, Ellenby’s son was communicating something important to his mother — and her response was to push him, literally, into doing something he didn’t want to do, completely disregarding his autonomy.

Sadly, this is merely the most recent high-profile example of an allistic (non-autistic) parent, disrespecting and dehumanizing their autistic child then exploiting them by publishing very private, personal details about their life. Judith Newman, author of To Siri with Love — a collection of supposedly humorous stories about her then-13-year-old autistic son — received similar backlash from actually autistic adults last year. Among her various repugnant views, she asserts that her son is unfit to become a parent because he is autistic, detailing her desire to have him sterilized. “I am still deeply worried about the idea that he could get someone pregnant and yet could never be a real father — which is why I will insist on having medical power of attorney, so that I will be able to make the decision about a vasectomy for him after he turns 18.”

As may already be clear, while these types of books and articles may be about autistic people (mostly children who cannot consent), they are not for them. Instead, they are authored by and for parents and other allistic adults — at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized community they claim to be advocating for.

And this trend keeps repeating. On smaller scales, as with Jill Escher, president of Autism Society San Francisco Bay Area, who wrote a cringe-worthy account of the financial and superficial costs her autistic son is causing her. Or larger ones like, Amy Lutz, author and outspoken critic of the neurodiversity movement who said that writing about her autistic son without his permission isn’t exploitation because he’s incapable of providing consent. There are “very few costs” to publicly writing about his life because he “will never go to college, seek competitive employment, or get married.”

Autistic writer Sarah Kurchak refers to this subgenre of writing as the “Autism Parent memoir,” which often overlaps with the realm of Autism Warrior Parents (AWPs) — a term that it is both embraced and rejected by parents of autistic children. AWPs, as Shannon Rosa wrote, “insist on supporting their autistic kids either by trying to cure them, or by imposing non-autistic-oriented goals on them — rather than by trying to understand how their kids are wired, and how that wiring affects their life experience.”

If that sounds like an exaggeration, take Marcia Hinds, whose author biostates that she and “her family survived their war against autism.” According to a review of her book, I Know You’re In There: Winning Our War Against Autism, “She openly writes what we have all felt at one time or another. We love our children, but we do not love the autism.”

Rather than unconditionally accepting her son and seeking to better understand his needs, Hinds believed an autism diagnosis meant “there was no hope” and, diving headfirst into the realm of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories, that “by treating hidden viruses and infection,” autism can be cured. For her, in order for there to be hope for her family and her autistic son, his autism needed to be destroyed.

How ‘Autism Warrior Parents’ Harm Autistic Kids
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Terrifyingly, this is far from an obscure movement. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy have helped bring these harmful conspiracies into the mainstream.

The cumulative result is that many, many autistic children grow up in environments rife with physical confrontations like the one that occurred in Ellenby’s article, or in homes that reject basic, peer-reviewed medical science, or with parents who demonstrate a complete and utter disregard for their autistic children’s autonomy — and all of it is framed as love.

But it is not love; it is abuse.

When I read Whitney Ellenby’s piece, the parallels between her and my psychologically abusive mother were too great to ignore. Just as Ellenby misinterpreted her son’s reluctance, disinterest, and outright refusal to engage in an activity as some sort of phobia to be overcome, my mother forced me into conquering my so-called fears — “for my own good.” She saw the way I interacted with the world as different from other children, and deemed that difference the enemy.

It has taken years to unravel and untie the clutter of psychological knots and trauma she left me with — and there are, no doubt, more waiting in the wings — but I can say with absolute certainty there’s a stark difference between a professed love and real, unconditional love. Failing to accept and trying to change or attempting to “fix” someone who is not broken — no matter the intent — is not the same as loving them. As writer and disability rights advocate Lydia Brown wrote to Judith Newman, “You may believe you love your son. But we, autistic people, hear what you have actually said, which is that you hate him. You love a version of him that does not exist.”

While I’ve not published a single piece of writing in almost a year due to hyper-empathy and burnout, I have been discovering and healing, coming to terms with the fact that I am autistic, and, contrary to the dangerous message AWPs continually insinuate, that it is nothing that should bring me shame or fear.

Memory and trauma are a mindfuck, but scenes flash before my mind’s eye — having my hands restrained at my desk in grade school, or instead having inside-out gym socks taped to my hands so I couldn’t fidget or distract others, but could still hold a pencil to do schoolwork. And now I’m angry, again, at my mother and all of her enablers for shaming and punishing me for things I couldn’t control or understand. I’m livid at her and my teachers for forcing me to put gross tasting things in my mouth whenever I did something that society deemed weird and unacceptable. I’m angry as fuck for crying and crying while telling the damn truth about not understanding something, not being able to stop doing something, or not being able to adequately articulate why I did something… And then being disciplined for my “rebellious attitude,” for disobedience, or for not trusting God enough because that asshole doesn’t give you any more than you can handle.

And I believed the lies, I believed it was my fault, I believed I was unworthy and failing God and my family every day — so I punished myself and stopped trusting those who professed their love for me and worked diligently to change myself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In the wake of Ellenby’s piece, Sarah Kurchak interviewed her allistic mother, Jane, to get her take on this spate of high-profile Autism Parent memoirs. The interview highlights a wholly different model of autism and parental love. Where Ellenby described her exploitative book as “one woman’s story, my truth and my love letter to my beloved son,” Jane focuses on her daughter’s well-being in a world that too often punishes neurodivergent people for being who they are, advocating that she not read Ellenby’s work: “I see you try to function in a pull-up-your-bootstraps neurotypical world. And I know if you read this book, it will crush you. … So it’s a selfish motive because I don’t want you to hurt.”

Later Jane says to her daughter, “I have always said to you, to anybody that will listen to me, I have learned more about life in the world from you than from anyone or anything else… Watch your child and learn from them. Take your cues from your child.” For her, the relationship she has with her daughter goes both ways. “Just because I’m your parent doesn’t make me right… My reality is that my life is a better life because of you. And I just want you to know that I’m proud.”

Reading Jane and Sarah’s conversation brought me to tears and offered up a glimmer of much-needed hope. Without ever saying the words “I love you,” Jane demonstrated how very much she respects, accepts, and loves her daughter merely in the way she talks about her — and how they’ve navigated their life together, as a team.

By contrast, the only “uncensored truth” Ellenby reveals in her writing is that she sincerely believes her abusive actions are loving ones. But how do things change if the abusers, their apologists, and the exploitive industry that profits off of them, refuse to stop — let alone acknowledge that they are harming others?

We need to be able to speak for ourselves, but instead, #ActuallyAutisticvoices are too often shunned and silenced, while the voices of allistic parents raising autistic children are lifted up and praised. A common retort to the autistic adults who condemn this genre of writing and alleged advocacy is that our viewpoint is inconsequential because we aren’t autistic enough. Our needs don’t compare to the mountain of needs their children require because we are able to raise our voices and organize, and by doing so, we are making things harder for autistic people — like their children — who require more care.

Ellenby herself made this argument in response to the backlash her article caused, writing, “You adults with Autism who are reaching out to me in brilliantly worded protest, you who are capable of self-advocating, organizing, who have children of your own — you in no way resemble Zack.”

This is not a new argument. Amy Lutz wrote in 2013, “So what happens to neurodiversity if its lower-functioning supporters are discredited? The movement is exposed for what it is: a group of high-functioning individuals opposed to medical research that, as Singer puts it ‘they don’t need, but my daughter does. If she were able to function at their level, I would consider her cured.’”

When Allies Say Tragedy Is The Only ‘True’ Representation Of Autism
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Dr. Jennifer Sarrett, Lecturer at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health, carelessly pontificated that broadening the definition of autism, “could divert attention and resources from the people who need it the most — the significantly disabled.” But this mindset only makes it harder forall autistic people, and further stigmatizes many of us as being not “autistic enough,” while doing nothing to counter the ableism we confront every day.

Whether we were diagnosed early and our guardians taught us how to hideour autistic traits (or force them out of us) through harmful applied behavioral analysis techniques, or we learned the concept of masking or practiced self-degradation on our own as a way to “appear normal” to everyone else — existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.

And this is why the themes apparent within the ever-rising tide of Autism Memoirs are so infuriating. Autistic children are given little to no autonomy. Instead of being treated as living, breathing, beautiful, and complex human beings — they’re reduced to a plot device, a mechanism for their parents to exploit and profit from. And even worse, such memoirs frame autism as the thing that needs to be battled — rather than the unjust, ableist world we live in. These narratives center the parents, attempt to sever an important component of their child’s identity, and, instead of making the world a better place for them, force their children to change for the world.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.
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I believe that these allistic parents do love their children, just as I believe my parents loved me. But despite what they say, their actions are not those of love, which, by definition, requires respect and acknowledgment of another’s autonomy. I was told that I was loved every day, and yet I sincerely believed there were parts of me that I needed to destroy in order to be worthy of that love — and so I tried, and failed, and grew up traumatized, without ever understanding what healthy love looks like.

Now I’m almost 35 years-old and still recovering and unlearning the destructive messages I grew up with, as the effects of trauma don’t just disappear when you leave the traumatic environment. Those of us who have survived and are voicing our anger to these parents and their enablers aren’t “internet bullies.” We are survivors who don’t want autistic children of any age to be abused. Listen to us. Believe us. Your child does not need to be cured, they need to be respected, listened to, and above all, loved — truly loved.

In the excerpt from her forthcoming book, Autism Uncensored, that was recently published in The Washington Post, Whitney Ellenby tells us about the time she physically restrained and dragged her 5-year-old autistic son to see Elmo perform at a “Sesame Street Live!” show. She describes fighting off his fists, pinning him down, and inching — her son shrieking and flailing, trapped between her legs — toward the auditorium’s entrance, an effort, she claims, “to save him from a life entrapped by autistic phobias.”

While some parents of autistic children have celebrated the article for showing them that they are not alone, the response from autistic adults to the violent actions in the piece and her book more broadly, has been, deservedly, negative. As Eb, an autistic writer, tweeted, “Meltdowns like the one described in this article aren’t ‘problems to solve.’ They’re communication.” Through his, Ellenby’s son was communicating something important to his mother — and her response was to push him, literally, into doing something he didn’t want to do, completely disregarding his autonomy.

Sadly, this is merely the most recent high-profile example of an allistic (non-autistic) parent, disrespecting and dehumanizing their autistic child then exploiting them by publishing very private, personal details about their life. Judith Newman, author of To Siri with Love — a collection of supposedly humorous stories about her then-13-year-old autistic son — received similar backlash from actually autistic adults last year. Among her various repugnant views, she asserts that her son is unfit to become a parent because he is autistic, detailing her desire to have him sterilized. “I am still deeply worried about the idea that he could get someone pregnant and yet could never be a real father — which is why I will insist on having medical power of attorney, so that I will be able to make the decision about a vasectomy for him after he turns 18.”

As may already be clear, while these types of books and articles may be about autistic people (mostly children who cannot consent), they are not for them. Instead, they are authored by and for parents and other allistic adults — at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized community they claim to be advocating for.

These books are authored by and for parents and other allistic adults — at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized community they claim to be advocating for.
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And this trend keeps repeating. On smaller scales, as with Jill Escher, president of Autism Society San Francisco Bay Area, who wrote a cringe-worthy account of the financial and superficial costs her autistic son is causing her. Or larger ones like, Amy Lutz, author and outspoken critic of the neurodiversity movement who said that writing about her autistic son without his permission isn’t exploitation because he’s incapable of providing consent. There are “very few costs” to publicly writing about his life because he “will never go to college, seek competitive employment, or get married.”

Autistic writer Sarah Kurchak refers to this subgenre of writing as the “Autism Parent memoir,” which often overlaps with the realm of Autism Warrior Parents (AWPs) — a term that it is both embraced and rejected by parents of autistic children. AWPs, as Shannon Rosa wrote, “insist on supporting their autistic kids either by trying to cure them, or by imposing non-autistic-oriented goals on them — rather than by trying to understand how their kids are wired, and how that wiring affects their life experience.”

If that sounds like an exaggeration, take Marcia Hinds, whose author bio states that she and “her family survived their war against autism.” According to a review of her book, I Know You’re In There: Winning Our War Against Autism, “She openly writes what we have all felt at one time or another. We love our children, but we do not love the autism.”

Rather than unconditionally accepting her son and seeking to better understand his needs, Hinds believed an autism diagnosis meant “there was no hope” and, diving headfirst into the realm of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories, that “by treating hidden viruses and infection,” autism can be cured. For her, in order for there to be hope for her family and her autistic son, his autism needed to be destroyed.

How ‘Autism Warrior Parents’ Harm Autistic Kids

And Hinds isn’t the only parent latching onto harmful medically disproven theories linking vaccines to autism. Mary Cavanaugh, author and parent of an autistic child, states on her website, “I now know all three of my children have been vaccine injured.” She is a member of The Thinking Moms’ Revolution, an online community and book, where mothers share tales of fighting to rescue their children from autism. “Suspecting that some of the main causes may be overused medicines, vaccinations, environmental toxins, and processed foods,” the book’s synopsis states, “they began a mission to help reverse the effects.”

Terrifyingly, this is far from an obscure movement. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy have helped bring these harmful conspiracies into the mainstream.

The cumulative result is that many, many autistic children grow up in environments rife with physical confrontations like the one that occurred in Ellenby’s article, or in homes that reject basic, peer-reviewed medical science, or with parents who demonstrate a complete and utter disregard for their autistic children’s autonomy — and all of it is framed as love.

But it is not love; it is abuse.

When I read Whitney Ellenby’s piece, the parallels between her and my psychologically abusive mother were too great to ignore. Just as Ellenby misinterpreted her son’s reluctance, disinterest, and outright refusal to engage in an activity as some sort of phobia to be overcome, my mother forced me into conquering my so-called fears — “for my own good.” She saw the way I interacted with the world as different from other children, and deemed that difference the enemy.

It has taken years to unravel and untie the clutter of psychological knots and trauma she left me with — and there are, no doubt, more waiting in the wings — but I can say with absolute certainty there’s a stark difference between a professed love and real, unconditional love. Failing to accept and trying to change or attempting to “fix” someone who is not broken — no matter the intent — is not the same as loving them. As writer and disability rights advocate Lydia Brown wrote to Judith Newman, “You may believe you love your son. But we, autistic people, hear what you have actually said, which is that you hate him. You love a version of him that does not exist.”

While I’ve not published a single piece of writing in almost a year due to hyper-empathy and burnout, I have been discovering and healing, coming to terms with the fact that I am autistic, and, contrary to the dangerous message AWPs continually insinuate, that it is nothing that should bring me shame or fear.

Memory and trauma are a mindfuck, but scenes flash before my mind’s eye — having my hands restrained at my desk in grade school, or instead having inside-out gym socks taped to my hands so I couldn’t fidget or distract others, but could still hold a pencil to do schoolwork. And now I’m angry, again, at my mother and all of her enablers for shaming and punishing me for things I couldn’t control or understand. I’m livid at her and my teachers for forcing me to put gross tasting things in my mouth whenever I did something that society deemed weird and unacceptable. I’m angry as fuck for crying and crying while telling the damn truth about not understanding something, not being able to stop doing something, or not being able to adequately articulate why I did something… And then being disciplined for my “rebellious attitude,” for disobedience, or for not trusting God enough because that asshole doesn’t give you any more than you can handle.

And I believed the lies, I believed it was my fault, I believed I was unworthy and failing God and my family every day — so I punished myself and stopped trusting those who professed their love for me and worked diligently to change myself.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

In the wake of Ellenby’s piece, Sarah Kurchak interviewed her allistic mother, Jane, to get her take on this spate of high-profile Autism Parent memoirs. The interview highlights a wholly different model of autism and parental love. Where Ellenby described her exploitative book as “one woman’s story, my truth and my love letter to my beloved son,” Jane focuses on her daughter’s well-being in a world that too often punishes neurodivergent people for being who they are, advocating that she not read Ellenby’s work: “I see you try to function in a pull-up-your-bootstraps neurotypical world. And I know if you read this book, it will crush you. … So it’s a selfish motive because I don’t want you to hurt.”

Later Jane says to her daughter, “I have always said to you, to anybody that will listen to me, I have learned more about life in the world from you than from anyone or anything else… Watch your child and learn from them. Take your cues from your child.” For her, the relationship she has with her daughter goes both ways. “Just because I’m your parent doesn’t make me right… My reality is that my life is a better life because of you. And I just want you to know that I’m proud.”

Reading Jane and Sarah’s conversation brought me to tears and offered up a glimmer of much-needed hope. Without ever saying the words “I love you,” Jane demonstrated how very much she respects, accepts, and loves her daughter merely in the way she talks about her — and how they’ve navigated their life together, as a team.

By contrast, the only “uncensored truth” Ellenby reveals in her writing is that she sincerely believes her abusive actions are loving ones. But how do things change if the abusers, their apologists, and the exploitive industry that profits off of them, refuse to stop — let alone acknowledge that they are harming others?

We need to be able to speak for ourselves, but instead, #ActuallyAutistic voices are too often shunned and silenced, while the voices of allistic parents raising autistic children are lifted up and praised. A common retort to the autistic adults who condemn this genre of writing and alleged advocacy is that our viewpoint is inconsequential because we aren’t autistic enough. Our needs don’t compare to the mountain of needs their children require because we are able to raise our voices and organize, and by doing so, we are making things harder for autistic people — like their children — who require more care.

Ellenby herself made this argument in response to the backlash her article caused, writing, “You adults with Autism who are reaching out to me in brilliantly worded protest, you who are capable of self-advocating, organizing, who have children of your own — you in no way resemble Zack.”

This is not a new argument. Amy Lutz wrote in 2013, “So what happens to neurodiversity if its lower-functioning supporters are discredited? The movement is exposed for what it is: a group of high-functioning individuals opposed to medical research that, as Singer puts it ‘they don’t need, but my daughter does. If she were able to function at their level, I would consider her cured.’”

When Allies Say Tragedy Is The Only ‘True’ Representation Of Autism

Dr. Jennifer Sarrett, Lecturer at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health, carelessly pontificated that broadening the definition of autism, “could divert attention and resources from the people who need it the most — the significantly disabled.” But this mindset only makes it harder for all autistic people, and further stigmatizes many of us as being not “autistic enough,” while doing nothing to counter the ableism we confront every day.

Whether we were diagnosed early and our guardians taught us how to hide our autistic traits (or force them out of us) through harmful applied behavioral analysis techniques, or we learned the concept of masking or practiced self-degradation on our own as a way to “appear normal” to everyone else — existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.

And this is why the themes apparent within the ever-rising tide of Autism Memoirs are so infuriating. Autistic children are given little to no autonomy. Instead of being treated as living, breathing, beautiful, and complex human beings — they’re reduced to a plot device, a mechanism for their parents to exploit and profit from. And even worse, such memoirs frame autism as the thing that needs to be battled — rather than the unjust, ableist world we live in. These narratives center the parents, attempt to sever an important component of their child’s identity, and, instead of making the world a better place for them, force their children to change for the world.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Existing as an autistic person in a world that hates us is physically and emotionally debilitating.
Click To Tweet

I believe that these allistic parents do love their children, just as I believe my parents loved me. But despite what they say, their actions are not those of love, which, by definition, requires respect and acknowledgment of another’s autonomy. I was told that I was loved every day, and yet I sincerely believed there were parts of me that I needed to destroy in order to be worthy of that love — and so I tried, and failed, and grew up traumatized, without ever understanding what healthy love looks like.

Now I’m almost 35 years-old and still recovering and unlearning the destructive messages I grew up with, as the effects of trauma don’t just disappear when you leave the traumatic environment. Those of us who have survived and are voicing our anger to these parents and their enablers aren’t “internet bullies.” We are survivors who don’t want autistic children of any age to be abused. Listen to us. Believe us. Your child does not need to be cured, they need to be respected, listened to, and above all, loved — truly loved.

4 Ways Queer And Trans Parents Are Raising Revolutionary Children During The Trump Era

These parents are turning this tumultuous political moment into a teachable one.

Unsplash/Bruno Nascimento

By Neesha Powell

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

Sometimes becoming a parent feels out of my reach. My wife and I both have uteruses, and sperm costs too damn much.

Even adopting feels like an unattainable dream. It can cost upwards of $40,000 to adopt, and LGBTQ couples have previously been barred from adopting and fostering because of their gender and/or sexuality.

Raising kids on working-class salaries here in Seattle, one of the world’s most expensive cities, isn’t exactly ideal. And despite its progressive reputation, this white haven often feels hostile to me as a Black queer non-binary person partnered with a Black queer femme immigrant.

I have enough heart to be a parent, but I have to ask myself: Do I have the will to raise a Black child when our people are being killed every day? In the last week of December 2017 alone, four Black queer women were murdered, and I can’t help but picture me and my wife in their shoes.

Furthermore, what do you tell a child of queer parents when lawmakers believe that businesses should be allowed to use religion as an excuse for banning LGBTQ people? Policies are constantly being put on the table that strip families like mine of their humanity.

Despite my fears, I remain open to parenting because of my friendships with trans, non-binary, and queer activists of color whose parenting is bound up in their quest for liberation. Their existence dares me to dream of parenting one day.

These parents are turning this tumultuous political moment into a teachable one by talking to their kids about oppression: What it is, how it manifests and how to interrupt it. Their parenting is rooted in intersectional feminist and anti-racist values.

White Kids Are Bullying Minority Students Using Trump’s Words

This type of parenting is essential during a time where our president casually calls Africa a “shithole.” President Donald Trump’s blatant racism and misogyny might poison our youth and their futures if they don’t learn about systemic oppression and how to dismantle it.

Selena Velasco, a Chamoru queer non-binary femme artist and community organizer in Seattle, explains Trump and his discriminatory policies to their 8-year-old multiracial son Elijah by bringing the issues close to home.

To help Elijah understand Trump’s recent immigration ban, Velasco asked him to imagine how he’d feel if his grandparents who immigrated from Mexico had to leave the US and couldn’t come back. This allowed him to better empathize with those directly impacted by the ban.

Also, Velasco has brought their son to Black Lives Matter marches and spoken with him about how anti-Black racism shows up at his own school. Their hope is for Elijah to be able to spot and disrupt anti-Blackness on the playground and beyond.

Velasco draws parenting inspiration from their mother, who was never afraid to speak out against racism. They remember their mother once reprimanding store workers for ignoring them in favor of white children. Seeing that was empowering and instructive for Velasco.

“I want my child to feel that same energy, like they have enough strength and power to be able to stand up against oppression,” Velasco says.

I, too, remember my mother pushing back against racism. She called out a white lady employee for treating her as if she’d stolen a pair of pants. It took guts for her to advocate for herself in our small Confederate flag-laden town.

I’m grateful to have seen my mother reject racism. If I have kids, I hope to set a similar example for them. No matter how hateful the political climate, I want them to see value in Black and Brown skin and queer and trans lives because it’s who they are and who I am.

My heart is full of gratitude for trans, queer, and non-binary people of color who are raising children to love and respect people of all races, genders, and sexualities. I look forward to these kids being old enough to lead this country out of the grips of bigotry and oppression.

Parents or not, I believe we can all learn something from the intentional, thoughtful practices of revolutionary LGBTQ parents of color. Here are 4 ways that trans, non-binary, and queer parents of color are raising revolutionary children during the Trump era:

1. They don’t hide the hard stuff from their kids — they keep it real.

Shaun is a Black queer non-binary parent and researcher in Seattle who keeps it real with their child about this turbulent political era. While their 4-year-old daughter V doesn’t know Trump’s name, she knows what he’s doing isn’t right due to her parents’ longtime activism.

Shaun’s daughter, who’s mixed with Black and white, already knows that police are harmful. She learned this after three of Shaun’s friends got pepper sprayed at a protest against the Seattle Police Department’s shooting of Charleena Lyles, a 30-year-old pregnant Black mother.

After seeing their friends in pain shortly after the pepper spray incident, V was confused about why the police hurt them. Shaun told her the truth: Because they didn’t have enough training to keep people safe.

The Troubling Erasure Of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed

And when their daughter asked if the police could hurt them, Shaun told her the truth yet again, “Me and mommy are going to do our best to make sure that we always keep you safe.” Shaun couldn’t tell her “no” because of the realities of our anti-Black police state.

Velasco also keeps it real while parenting, using books to teach Elijah about our country’s long legacy of white supremacy and how history repeats itself. This is their effort to decolonize the education their son is receiving at school.

2. They teach their kids that their bodies belong to them.

Organizing alongside queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) who normalized asking for consent to hug and touch each other shifted Velasco’s parenting in a major way. It led them to teach their son about consent and bodily autonomy at a young age.

When Elijah was as young as three or four, Velasco made it clear to him that he owned his own body. They encouraged him to take space from his parents whenever he needed it.

Because Velasco grew up in a family plagued by abusive dynamics, reclaiming autonomy over their own body and teaching their son about bodily autonomy has proved to be a transformative act. For them, it’s a part of an intergenerational healing process:

“How do I heal, and how do I create space for my child to heal? And then also, how can they go into the world and address so many things that are hurting our Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, and how do we create healing wherever we go?”

3. They expose their kids to diversities in race, gender, and sexuality.

Both Shaun and Velasco affirm their children’s race by sharing ancestral stories and practices with them. They want their kids to be proud of their cultures and where they come from.

They also want them to understand that gender exists outside of the binary. Their kids know to ask others for gender pronouns and that a person’s pronouns may change because gender is a fluid thing. They’re growing up aware of their right to determine their own gender.

It’s not easy for QTPOC parents to find gender-diverse children’s media. Most of it suggests that only boys can do “boy things,” and only girls can do “girl things.” Binary portrayals of gender push Shaun and their wife to get creative when reading books to V.

They want their kids to be proud of their cultures and where they come from.

“When we’re about to start a story, we’ll ask what the characters’ names are going to be this time, what their pronouns are going to be this time, we’ll change up relationships. We’ll just try to queer things up as much as we can,” Shaun says.

Velasco actively creates space and dialogue with their son about things like race, sex, and bodies, and he asks questions about these topics with no shame. This is a big deal for Velasco, who wasn’t able to have these types of conversations with their parents growing up.

4. They create a community around their children.

Shaun strives to build a community around their kid that allows her to see “the rich diversity of the human experience.” They’re collaborating with like-minded parents to create an intentional cohousing community for their families.

Velasco also finds it important to surround their child with a community, specifically QTPOC. This helps Elijah learn about the shared struggles of trans, non-binary, and queer communities of color. He gets to witness these communities working together in solidarity towards liberation.

“I really want to have Elijah present in a lot of these spaces because I think it’s important for him to see me in my own power and to feel that he also has autonomy to be present in movement work,” Velasco says.

Elijah recently asked their parent what “resistance” means because he hears the term in movement spaces. As he grows up around activists, he’s sure to learn more about what resistance is and what it looks like. It’s a good thing there’s a village to raise this revolutionary child.

Maybe, one day, social justice and anti-oppression will be required coursework in all schools. Until then, parents like Shaun and Velasco will continue bringing the revolution home by relying on their ancestries, creativity, and values to raise conscious kids in the face of white supremacy.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-maternal-instinct-is-a-myth-and-weve-got-the-science-to-prove-it-936312b316f0/ Thu, 25 Jan 2018 23:30:31 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=3127 Read more]]> ‘Maternal instinct’ pathologizes women who don’t want to have children. But that ‘maternal drive’ is often cultivated through pregnancy itself.

By Jennifer Neal

When I hear the term “baby fever,” a certain image comes to mind. A baby — literally having a fever — which finds me in the emergency room in the middle of the night right before the deadline of a career-making article is due.

Another vision of “baby fever” is being vomited all over after my child has drunk a large blueberry milkshake. Other visions involve broken bones, infections, antibiotics and allergic reactions, sleepless nights, and living in the twilight stages of permanent anxiety, while my partner is sound asleep dreaming of solid food intake.

Basically, “baby fever” is anything except the desire to have a child.

The concept of motherhood is terrifying to me. Yet my social media feed is inundated with Twitter post after Facebook album after Instagram story of people who may have, once upon a time, tried to convince me to participate in a variety of threesomes — but who now seem to occupy their time with appeals to the public on the consistency of their kids’ bowel movements, and the incomprehensible joy they feel when being vomited all over after their kid has consumed a blueberry milkshake.

So I’ve concluded that, at the very least, the prerequisites to being a good parent have been somewhat sanitized in mass media — meaning, if I want to become a mother, not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later. It’s not an urge that needs to claw at my uterus. It can just be a decision.

In fact, there is one thing that gives me comfort in the road ahead to motherhood: Not a single one of us has a maternal instinct.

It simply, plainly does not exist. Just ask Dr. Gillian Ragsdale, a biological anthropologist who teaches psychology with the Open University in the United Kingdom. She says that the word “instinct” is being misused time and again in the context of parenting, because it’s often confused with a “drive.”

Not particularly liking (knowing how to take care of or even currently enjoying the company of) children now doesn’t exclude me from being maternal later.
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“Instinct is hard wired. You don’t really think about it. A drive is motivating, it gives behavior direction, but it’s not an irresistible force,” she tells me during a Skype interview. In that sense, human beings have very few instincts — even the instinct to eat can be denied (just look at dangerous mainstream diets). If a woman chooses not to become a mother, then the biological changes that happen during motherhood won’t happen either, because there is no need for a maternal drive, something that Dr. Ragsdale attributes to hormones.

“The maternal drive can be hormonally influenced, for example by pregnancy. This is the same in other mammals. Once the offspring is there in front of them, that’s when the maternal drive generally kicks in — but not always even then.”

In fact, pregnancy itself is a common way to cultivate that “maternal drive.”

That’s what happened to my friend of the past 20 years, Amy Spears. We met on America Online when I was 14 and she was 18, and we’ve been internet stalking each other ever since. She says she never planned or wanted to be a mother, but it happened anyway. “I cried for three days when I found out I was pregnant, and another three once I decided to keep him.”

Like most of the women I spoke to, she was worried about how having a child would impact her autonomy and her social life. But unlike others, she walked into the decision knowing that she would be a single mom, because the father had begged her to have an abortion, something which at first, she wanted too. Everything changed when she went to the clinic with her old roommate.

“I saw the ultrasound and something just clicked. It was like, ‘We’re having a baby.’”

Amy says that her maternal drive didn’t really kick in until a year after her baby son was born. “I remember crying while he was crying for no reason one night, and I actually said ‘Who let me bring this baby home? They gave it to me and let me just leave the hospital?’”

Undoubtedly a wonderful mother, Amy nonetheless couldn’t help from scrutinizing herself to the point of exhaustion — constantly comparing her experience with pre-conceived notions surrounding motherhood.

“I never questioned having him. I just remember thinking that something must be wrong with me for not having that overwhelming ‘motherly’ feeling.”

It was through what she calls “going through the motions” (what Dr. Ragsdale calls “grooming”) that this eventually changed, but it still took time. “I did all the things I was supposed to do, but I felt like I was an imposter sometimes. I didn’t get the full on ‘mom love’ until months after.”

The “maternal instinct” casts women as natural care givers, when in fact mothering is not something that comes very naturally for a lot of people. As a result, stories like Amy’s are often excluded from the narrative. There is, of course, a distinctly gendered component to this; for both women and men, parenting requires a lot of work, but society feels more comfortable imposing a standard of innate parental ability onto women — perpetuating gender roles that ultimately support a patriarchal society.

According to the 2012 research paper Emotional Regulation of Fertility Decision Making: What Is the Nature and Structure of “Baby Fever”? by Gary L. Brase and Sandra L. Brase, “Feelings about babies and decisions about fertility could be based on the extent to which people have (or have not) internalized general gender norms of their ambient society.”

In that sense, “baby fever” is an effective marketing tool for baby showers, and a popular (albeit trite) plot for Hollywood rom-coms, but little more. “The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children,” says Dr. Ragsdale. “We have a problem with patriarchy. It’s advantageous to portray women as natural caregivers so that they feel it’s a duty.”

According to the 2012 paper Fertility Preference Inversely Related to ‘Legacy Drive’ in Women, But Not in Men: Interpreting the Evolutionary Roots, and Future, of the ‘Childfree’ Culture by Lonnie W. Aarssen and Stephanie T. Altman, that’s exactly what it was.

They posit that most of reproductive psychology throughout history has revolved around the idea that “men had children because they wanted to have sex or leave a legacy, but that women had sex because men wanted to have sex or leave a legacy (regardless of whether or not it was indeed what women wanted).”

The ‘maternal instinct’ concept pathologizes women who don’t want to have children.
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Very little has changed. Western societies may support the idea of parenting in theory, but often fall short in practice when it comes to supporting women during and after pregnancy. In places like the U.S., where motherhood is often a career death sentence, categorizing women into those who are “maternal” and those who are not hinders a society from looking at ways to make motherhood more attractive, while also punishing women for becoming mothers by stripping them of financial income, and reducing them to antiquated roles that were never a proper fit to begin with.

Contradictions like these are difficult to navigate when a woman decides that she wants both children and a career, and compounds with fears of being unable to meet unrealistic expectations of motherhood.

“Women who preferred to be ‘childfree’ could rarely exercise that choice throughout countless generations of patriarchal dominance over the course of human evolution,” say Aarssen and Altman. There was simply no significant historical precedent for women to develop a “strong parenting drive,” because they were not afforded a choice in the matter.

Dr. Ragsdale believes that, in combination with these strong historical precedents, motherhood has become less attractive because society has replaced supportive, nurturing communities with the internet — an endless list of URLs offering conflicting advice, evangelical mommy blogs, and all the judgment that money can buy. She explains:

“The social isolation of mothers is a relatively new development in human evolution — where women live in small nuclear families and raise their children alone. If you look at other places around the world, children are raised in communities and you’ll find lower levels of depression and anxiety after childbirth as a result.”

By comparison, being at the mercy of the World Wide Web is a nightmare for new parents. Amara White knows this feeling all too well. She had her first baby in Canada with her husband, far away from their homes in New Zealand and Australia.

“There is so much information on the internet about parenting…if you read parenting blogs and forums before having a baby, it is truly enough to put you off the idea,” Ragsdale says.

Not surprisingly, what helped was surrounding herself with the right people during pregnancy, which she spent worrying about everything from sudden infant death syndrome to her daughter one day developing an eating disorder.

“I overcame these irrational fears by steadfastly building my community…building a community of mothers and fathers who parented similarly to me,” says Amara.

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“Those same women I surrounded myself with were there for me when my daughter was sick, when I just needed some adult ‘before we were moms’ alcohol time…they made life so much easier to deal with, especially as I had zero family around for support.”

Amara was nurturing the maternal drive by consciously seeking out the kind of environment that was most conducive to raising a child — something without which she believes would have made motherhood agonizing.

“Cultivating a maternal drive is bit like learning language,” posits Ragsdale. “Children are exposed to that early on and learn language from the people who are speaking it. If children were conditioned to be more ‘maternal’ from an early age then the drive might be stronger as adults.”

While some women appear to have a stronger maternal drive, it’s often because they’ve been cultivating that behavior from a very early age, from toy dolls and games to babysitting for neighbors, a job rarely asked of or imposed upon boys. But for many women, like an ex-colleague of mine, it’s okay if the first question that pops into your mind during pregnancy is “Can I ever have wine again?!”

“Maternal drive can definitely be cultivated in women, but I’d like to see it cultivated more in men,” says Ragsdale. “I think we should be introducing the idea to men at an early age. We have sex education, but no parenting education.”

Perhaps that’s why I have more confidence that motherhood can be a logical decision and still be a beautiful, unique experience where my “maternal drive” can be a journey rather than a destination. But I’ll have to reserve my judgment until, as Dr. Ragsdale would say, my offspring is sitting right in front of me, begging to be held. I will do this — until she starts to regurgitate that blueberry milkshake, and I hand her over to her father.