Woman and child running

in a field A man planted

on the horizon

– Adrienne Rich, “Mother-Right” (1977), The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (1978)

The subjection of women, embodied in the subordination of the mother, seems to be the root of all dehumanization, with any disembodiment of our common humanity as its herald. Human bondage has been a breaking of the most fundamental bonds from the mother to her child. Although an aspect not as foregrounded in analyses of slavery, it nevertheless remains awful in its aftermath on all of human relations.

Past and present, we see in all sorts of slavery the breaking of the mother-child bond. With femaleness being seen as the property of the male sex, as money becomes the measure of all things, eclipsing humanity, the human body becomes a commodity to be consumed. Put simply, we see manifested in reality what, in her 2020 book Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy, Susan Hawthorne refers to as “biocolonialism.”

Mothers and their children tend to be subordinated together, brought into bondage. With this shared condition in mind, it matters to hear more women, especially mothers and grandmothers, talking about transgenderism as an ideology, an industry, and an institution. There seems to be a deep and distinct personal and political impact on not only the lives of women but also the lives of their children, which the transgender rights movement has made into mere collateral damage for its cause.

Males dominating female experience matters to what we do make of the mother. That is, the social meaning of woman in relation to motherhood seems to be, as it has been, the dominion of man, under the false premise of a distinctive human objectivity, man defining woman for himself. It has been seen as such in the codes and creeds of (male) culture, both male-defined and male-identified. “All western culture,” Luce Irigaray tells us, “rests on the murder of the mother.” And, in recent years, it has seemed to be maybe even truer, if not at least more naked to our sight, this matricide beneath the skin of the self-made man.

Women Are Human reposts the following post from a mother who first wrote it on her Facebook blog Female Human Being, dated April 30, 2021.

Intro by Donovan Cleckey

 

How the days went

while you were blooming within me

I remember each upon each

the swelling changed planes of my body

– Audre Lorde, “Now That I Am Forever with Child” (1963), Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (1992)

My daughter’s birthday was a few days ago. Wherever she is or how she spent the day, there is likely waitstaff traumatized by her outbursts at her sex being correctly identified and the proper pronouns used. I know I’m not being told off for the imagined offense of ‘outing’ her. Because, she doesn’t ‘pass’ as male – and that is not because of me.

She checked out books on how to dress ‘like a man’ from our local library, despite buying all her clothes from the boys’ section; she’s too petite to shop in the men’s section. Even despite having an artificially lowered voice and sparse facial hair, she clearly presents as a diminutive woman with a hormone condition people are too polite to address.

I don’t know what she did to celebrate her thirty-first birthday, because, late last year, she basically ran away from home. She didn’t discuss it with me, even though her name is on the lease for the home we shared. And she didn’t tell her sisters, who were her employers, not even bothering to tell them goodbye once she discovered that I hadn’t told them for her. She left for a three-week vacation and then disappeared.

Well, not entirely disappeared. Soon, after she left on her sudden vacation, notices of her change of address started arriving. Still, she never told us she wasn’t coming back. She took keys to the front door as well as the spare key to my car, letting me entertain the unlikely possibility she might want that door left slightly ajar. In any case, I’ve asked for the return of the keys, and, months later, she still hasn’t sent them.

Four years ago, I realized I had heard my daughter’s voice for the last time when she called me after another long vacation with her friends. I was confused who was calling me on her phone; I knew, then, that she had started taking testosterone. Her voice changed, followed by terrible acne, then the body hair. Then she became nearly impossible to be around, short-tempered and angry. I do not miss that about her at all.

Once, her acne became so bad that she rarely even left home because of it; it became her obsession. She ordered every product promising to clear her skin. Then I ventured to say: “There’s a surefire way to get it under control.” She looked at me, as if hoping I had the Holy Grail, the solution to her problem. So I said: “Stop taking testosterone.” It was the first I had ever brought it up. She chuckled and walked away. We only spoke of it one other time, with her, again, complaining about her acne. As before, I said: “Well, you know my solution.”

Shortly before she left, she cut out all fat and salt from her diet, making me suspect that she had become concerned about the effect the exogenous hormones she was taking had been having on her health. She didn’t disclose anything to me, though. The last time we communicated was a brief conversation about―of all things―turmeric. That was the last I heard from her. Text messages showed as “failed.” I sent her Christmas gifts. No acknowledgement. I mailed her a check that came here for her, along with another request to return her keys. No response.

I doubt I will ever see her again. She’s changed her name, taking on the first name of a male Cardassian from Deep Space Nine and the last name of a male Bajoran from Enterprise. Her sisters, her former employers, say they’d never trust her again. Her younger sister wouldn’t put her stocking on the fireplace at Christmas, nor put her basket out for Easter, saying she was ‘dead.’

She, however, is not dead; she’s out there, somewhere. The daughter I carried, gave birth to, fed, changed, cared for when she was sick, the child I loved from conception to this moment, but I’ve lost her. All I have are photos and memories, the detritus she left behind for me to dispose of.

I’m unsure how much I dare talk about this loss. If I talk about her, will that seal the shut door, making it impossible for her to ever reach out if things change and she needs me? Or, will it assure her, even at this point, that she’ll be welcomed back? I don’t know. That’s why I prepare myself for never having her back in my life, hoping, one day, I’ll be able to hold her and tell her I still love her. I always have. And I always will.

You are not

absent anymore

you

never were.

– Susan Griffin, “Mother and Child” (1975), Bending Home: Selected & New Poems 1967-1998 (1998)