Policing Motherhood, Controlling Families: Race, Reproductive Governance, and Trans Women’s Parenting Rights
通过对美国54名跨性别女性的访谈，研究揭示了种族歧视和反跨性别刻板印象如何阻碍她们在收养和监护纠纷中获得育儿权，并分析了法律机构与日常互动如何共同强化对母亲身份的监管。
Transgender people face multiple challenges to securing and maintaining parenting rights, yet most studies on trans parenthood focus exclusively on trans masculine people’s experiences and feature majority white samples. To address gendered and racialized gaps in knowledge, I conducted 54 semi-structured interviews with trans women in the United States, who parent or wish to parent, across race and class backgrounds. Using the intersectional frameworks of racialized transmisogyny and reproductive governance, I examine the barriers to parenting rights that trans women encounter in adoption and custody disputes. I find that judges and case workers use racist and anti-trans stereotypes when evaluating “parental fitness,” which (1) institutionalizes racialized transmisogyny in the law, (2) increases the regulatory power of legal institutions, and (3) reinforces dominant mothering ideologies. I also discuss how everyday people (i.e., partners and family members) co-construct the legal and symbolic meaning of motherhood, illustrating the centrality of trans reproduction to the policing of trans and other minoritized communities.