Seeking Trans liberation through birthwork — Susan Raffo

I have had bits and pieces of this conversation with Jessica over the last few years and each time, I have felt something inside me shift and change. Some of this is the specifics of what Jessica is sharing — how we hold the pre-emergent life of a child-before-birth and how transphobia impacts that period — have changed how I approach those I love who are growing a descendant inside. And it’s also more than that: something about Jessica’s thinking, about how they approach and unpack this concept of attachment, has also generally broadened my sense of what is possible when welcoming a new life into a community. I keep remembering the stories I heard growing up, stories about how we used to wait to name our children until they were a few months old or a year old because we weren’t sure they would survive, and I think that the remembering of the stories is probably wrong. I think that this is the excuse that we might have created for why we forgot what it is to wait for a newly born life to emerge and show themselves to us, their community, before forcing them into a gender or role or name box. From Jessica’s piece, this quote: This conversation is about the possibility of our children, and our willingness or unwillingness to embrace their full possibility. What willingness do we have to engage in ‘not-knowing’ in exchange for possibility? For the fullness of unconditional belonging and the protections of unconditional love?

Much of the psychology of attachment feels like a western way of trying to get at the wound…