Good Queer News: In Pursuit of Parenthood

A Guest Post: How discovering my gender allowed me to consider having kids

Good morning, lovely people! I’m still traveling (though almost back to your regularly scheduled programming) and I’ve got another fantastic guest post to share with you all about queerness, gender, and parenting! It’s been so lovely to share my platform with so many different joyful perspectives, and I’ll definitely be doing guest posts more often.

Today’s post is brought to you by Shanley Poole, creator of the Substack Mackerel Skies. Don’t forget to support their work!

Over to you, Shanley!

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Shanley and their husband admiring their new niece.

I realized I wanted to be a parent when I discovered I wasn’t a woman. Not just a woman at least. When initially exploring gender, the closest I got to a definition was the chorus of the Bee Gees’s “More Than a Woman.” Since then, I’ve found genderfluid fits nicely.

My doubts about parenting began years ago, starting while I was sexually closeted and lacked pretty much any gender-expansive terminology. In those days I joked I’d “let my partner decide” whether or not I had kids. The man I would end up marrying rightfully dubbed this sentiment a red flag and one year into our marriage I began to pick apart my feelings about becoming a mother. The more I dwelled on the idea, the more uncomfortable it made me. Gestation and breastfeeding terrified me. I loved my small chest. I’d heard horror stories of folks evolving from Bs to Cs even after they stopped feeding their babies. I desperately wanted to preserve my double As.

My reservations about chestfeeding (a term I wasn’t even familiar with yet) became one of the initial signposts that pointed me towards my gender identity. Shortly after voicing concerns of potential breast inflation, I became attuned to a new phenomenon in my sex life. Some days I loved my partners’ hands on my breasts, but other days my chest became a hands-off zone. Around the time when I first started using they/them pronouns, my partner put two and two together. I was toweling off from my morning shower when he asked me, “You ever think your fear of breastfeeding has anything to do with gender?” While I had danced around the thought, hearing it from someone else’s mouth solidified it. “Yes,” I could say with confidence.

One of my favorite writers, CJ Hauser, has an essay titled “Uncoupling.” I first encountered it in the audiobook version of The Crane Wife, which I would listen to during afternoon walks with my dog. I remember skidding my sneakers on the pavement when I arrived at that chapter. Basking in the sun, listening to Hauser’s words, I again experienced the euphoria of someone else putting words to my sense of gender.

Through the arc of the essay, Hauser splices apart sex, romance, bodies, and parenthood. “What would happen if I thought of these as different things?” they ask. Their question granted permission for me to do the same. What if the expectations I’d set up for my body weren’t fixed? What if my boobs weren’t a prerequisite to my romantic relationship or my potential to be a good mother? What if instead of considering the role of mother, I considered the role parent? Turns out the answers to these questions changed things quite a bit. An intrinsic desire to parent started to flicker within me and the flicker soon burst to full flame.

Shanley with their wild-child pup.

Searching for answers:

My initial queries brought about other curiosities (and new fears). How does one find an obstetrician that will help navigate dysphoria? What should I prepare for if we went the adoption route? What resources were available for the enby/trans parent community? As the questions began to pile up, I craved answers beyond the meager handful of internet articles that I found. A month ago, I posted a request on Reddit to interview parents that are nonbinary and genderqueer. Within hours, a generous flood of DMs started streaming my way.

I’m floored by the generosity of these internet strangers. And after just an hour of talking with these individuals, I usually feel less stranger and more kin. These encounters have quelled (or at least quieted) my fears. These parents’ have offered applicable wisdoms and shared the reality of their hardest moments. But these aren’t their greatest offerings. What I treasure most is the energy that shines through the conversation. Their love for their children and their infinitely resourceful attitudes about raising them charges me with hope for the humans that are entering this world. And it gives me certainty that I won’t be alone in this parenting endeavor.

Someone recently asked me if it was hard to listen to these stories. The implication being that queer stories can only ever be stories of hardship, and therefore sad stories. My answer (hopefully obvious to readers here) was no. These individuals are living into a future that I increasingly want for myself. Each conversation I share puts me face to face with a hero, a role model. I hang onto their every word. After each call, I run into the living room and declare to my husband: “I just had the most beautiful conversation!”

Here and now:

The more I leaned into my gender and its fluidity, the more confident I feel about becoming a parent. Certain? No. More confident? Yes. And for now, I’m comfortable with this lack of certainty. In some ways, it has become just one more embodiment of fluidity. I can fear and hope all at once. Some days I envision my baby against my chest while I feed them a bottle of formula; other days, I imagine them suckling from my body. I ebb and flow between such visions, and know neither is better than the other. My confidence is that if I raise a child, they will be raised by someone who is attempting to know themself and their child just a little bit more each day.

A headshot of Shanley

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That was so lovely!! Please don’t forget to give them a follow on here:

And if you’d like more guest posts and good queer news, don’t forget to stick around!

All my love,

Ben