BOGOTÁ — Every year, Mother’s Day is a celebration of individuals whose task is to care, nurture and accompany. But this familiar date is also an opportunity to see beyond the traditional model of motherhood, as is happening in the affective networks being forged in the LGBTQ+ community.
Here, family bonds are not necessarily based on blood ties but often constructed on the basis of love and affection as protection from outside discrimination due to gender or sexual orientations.
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These are “chosen” families, as members of this highly diverse community would say. They include the figure of the “trans mother”: women who, without biological or blood ties, choose to accompany others living through the stages of a transgender life experience. It is a vocation based in shared experiences and a desire to care for and ease the lives of the “trans child,” even in complex situations. When we speak of trans mothers, we’re speaking of a new spell of hope, and a new form of motherhood.
Providing care and protection
Flora Rodríguez, a trans woman and head of the Rosarista Center of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, told El Espectador that this role typically emerges organically, in response to trans youths’ evolving needs for orientation through a gender reaffirmation process.
Unlike cisgender persons — those whose gender identity coincides with their sex at birth — who can usually count on parents for reference while growing up, transgender people may not know someone who has had similar life questions and experiences.
“When a cis girl reaches puberty and has her first period, she ideally has a mother to explain to her what’s happening, buy her menstrual hygiene products and accompany her in this change. It is similar with cisgender boys,” Rodríguez says, but “in the case of trans persons, they need not only basic information, but also someone with specific information on accessing hormones or on legal procedures. A trans mother can become a second mother through this emotional and legal support, which many trans people cannot find in their biological families.”
These mothers provide a refuge.
Likewise, the figure of “trans mother” emerges in response to broken family ties. In contexts where rejection leaves many trans persons isolated and in conditions of extreme vulnerability, these mothers provide a refuge. Rodríguez says exclusion can easily send trans people into “sexual exploitation networks, onto the street or into risky situations. In these contexts, trans mothers help you survive.”
People we interviewed agreed that the trans mother role questions the very idea of a “natural” form of motherhood. Coming from a place of care and protection, these new maternal formats are helping to break isolation and strengthen ties among trans persons, and giving shape to what many in the LGBTIQ+ community call a chosen family. In Colombia, some eminent maternal figures in this respect include Laura Weinstein, Diana Navarro, Yoko Ruiz, Trina, Martha, Deisy and Coqueta.
Activist Danne Aro Belmont said that many women have earned this status through their resistance, as “they have struggled for a long time, not just for themselves but for the welfare of other trans persons in the regions. They’re not just a symbolic form but a living history that has allowed us to keep walking where we couldn’t before.”
Saving lives
Historically, society has sought to make trans people invisible and better yet, absent. Crossdressing or coming out in public with a different gender identity are traditionally seen as wrong and have been denounced, banned or penalized in many countries. Trans people have been sidelined and confined to society’s precarious margins where sex work was the only option. Only in 2018 did the World Health Organization (WHO) cease to consider transsexuality a mental illness.
In this context, it was always impossible for trans persons — who were often also expelled from their homes — to form a family. They could not adopt, were not recognized as parents nor even assured the right to a safe home. Their exclusion is what has led to the rise of new affective formats or networks built out of trans persons’ need to protect each other. Trans people have chosen or forged new family formats, as society would not let them start a standard family.
A trans person who is alone is particularly vulnerable to multiple types of violence.
The figure of the trans mother emerged as part of these mutual care networks. These are women who were themselves expelled or excluded and chose to care for other trans persons, open them their homes, share their clothes and personal histories, and offer companionship, advice and a roof.
Herd instinct and the need to belong are basic human traits, notes Jhonnatan Espinosa Rodríguez, an activist and executive head of the Ayllu Transmale Families Foundation. He says a trans person who is alone is particularly vulnerable to multiple types of violence, meaning networks are actual life savers.
In time, these new families have come to provide not just lodgings but emotional compensation.
A double win
“We’ve won in two ways,” says Espinosa. On the one hand, he says, “we heal among ourselves, creating new relations. On the other, we pave the way for many people to reconnect with their blood families and even start their own. Today there are trans women mothering their [trans] children and building homes. That, too, is a gain.”
For Belmont, the issue of trans mothers also includes their welfare and right to a dignified life. She says there is an historical debt toward persons who have struggled and given care, both inside the gay communities and in society more generally. They are often overlooked and ignored, she says, in spite of the fundamental role they have played over time.
All our sources agreed on a fundamental need to recognize the principle of a chosen family. This is not just to assure the right to legitimately form affective ties, but also in response to multiple forms of structural violence threatening the trans population. In many cases these networks — whether trans mothers, sisters or close friends — are the ones taking charge of the grieving process, legal procedures or undertaking a search following transgender killings or disappearances. As they themselves were displaced or cut off from their birth families, they can provide company, closeness and information to victims of violence.
Activists agree these networks must be recognized as families, because, quite simply, they can save lives.
