Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media, reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Abstract

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mother's Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.

Keywords::

• transgender
• intimate citizenship
• reproductive citizenship
• blogging
• citizens' media

Acknowledgements

The work on this article was conducted mainly as part of my postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Ethnology, Religion and Gender Studies at Stockholm University (2009–2010). I would also like to acknowledge the importance of my time within the collaborative research project Feminist Media Production in Europe (funded by the Austrian Science Fund, project no. P21187-G20), within which some initial ideas for this chapter were developed. In addition, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on this text. I would also like to thank David Payne for thorough proofreading and valuable intellectual comments. Last, but certainly not least, my sincerest thanks goes to Amanda Brihed, Immanuel Brändemo and Signe Bremer for their generous and initiated feedback on previous drafts of this article. Needless to say, all remaining mistakes and shortcomings are my own.

Notes

^1. In the Swedish context, the contemporary liberal movement includes a wide range of political standpoints, ranging from ‘social liberals’ who argue that the welfare state plays an important part in maintaining individual freedoms to ‘neoliberals’ who advocate for a deregulation of markets, a minimal state and an increased role for private alternatives also in the welfare sector. In the Swedish sector, self-identified liberals generally position themselves as center-right or right wing.

^2.Liberati was a liberal activist network that existed between 2008 and 2010. The network was started as a reaction against the so-called FRA law, a legislative package aimed to facilitate Swedish authorities to wiretap telephone and Internet traffic crossing the Swedish national border, and continued to criticize the Swedish Liberal Party (Folkpartiet) specifically and Alliance for Sweden (Alliansen) for betraying important liberal principles with regard to several issues. As a part of this more general criticism, the network came to engage actively against sterilization as a requirement for people undergoing gender transition. (Bard 2010)

^3. All extracts from blog entrances, newspaper articles, press releases and law text have been translated from Swedish by the author.

^4. As such, the medical diagnosis of transsexualism is inextricably linked to the issue of citizenship, as it becomes a nodal point in the constitution of the relationship between the individual, state and society (see Yuval-Davis 1997, p. 4) – not only by regulating access to surgery and medical care, or changing ones name, but also, for example, by seriously restricting or actively preventing the possibilities of intimate citizen rights such as the right to marry, or the right to reproduce (Hines 2009, Davy 2011, Hines and Davy 2011). In line with Ekins and King's argument and following Sally Hines (amongst other scholars), I shall be using the concept of ‘transgender’ throughout this article as an umbrella term covering a wide range of practices and modes of identification that ‘call into question traditional ways of seeing gender and its relation with sex and sexuality’ (Hines 2007, p. 1). As such, the concept of transgender includes, but is certainly not restricted to, preoperative or postoperative transsexual and intersex people. Although the issues discussed here largely concern the reproductive rights of postoperative transsexuals, I have chosen to discuss this in terms of transgendering reproduction for two reasons. First, the two Swedish trans-activists and bloggers whose texts I am analyzing themselves both tend to use the more inclusive term ‘trans-people’ (or ‘trans-persons’) in their blogs. Second, and of equal importance, I argue that the reproductive rights of transsexual people raise questions that in and of themselves call determinist notions of gender into question, for example by making it possible for a woman to reproduce by using her own sperm, or for a man to be pregnant and give birth. By denaturalizing hegemonic norms of who can become a mother (or a father) and how, the very claims for transgender reproductive rights that are raised here can be understood as a ‘transgendering’ of reproduction and reproductive rights (see also Bremer 2011, pp. 207–212).

^5. Although this list should by no means be considered complete, a few noteworthy examples does, however, include: Leslie Feinberg's pamphlet Transgender Liberation (first published in 1992), Virginia Prince's long-lived magazine Transvestia (since December 1969); the zine Trans-Feminism: Exploring the Connections Between Feminism and Transgender, by the Feminist Activist Forum, UK, in July 2008; and, Danish zines Queer Jihad and Queer Power.

^6. While Mother's Day in contemporary Sweden has been considered an apolitical celebration, it is important to note that this has not been the case throughout its history. On the contrary, its history in the Swedish context reveals that it has previously been an object of discussion in gender political debates. For example, the instigation of a Swedish Mother's Day was proposed in 1919 and highly interlinked with lively debates on peace and national unity, in which ‘the Mother’, amongst other things, served as a unifying symbol for the latter (cf. Herlitz 2007, pp. 64–65).

^7. Needless to say, the connection between state power and the regulation of the biological existence of its citizens is not specific to late modern societies, but has its genealogical roots in earlier modern periods. As Foucault has convincingly argued, the supervision of citizen's bodies has been ‘effected through an entire series of regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population’ since the seventeenth century (1976 [1989], p. 139).

^8. One major goal of his seminal work The Transsexual Phenomenon, was to establish a Sex Orientation Scale (S.O.S.) of seven categories so as to formulate a tool for diagnosis of transvestism and transsexualism, ranging from people who identify fully and unambiguously with his or her assigned sex by birth, to what he called ‘true’ transsexualism (Benjamin 1966, p. 15).

^9. More specifically, the article was signed by Jenny Ottosson from the network Intersexuella i Sverige (INIS, Eng. Intersexed in Sweden), Mikael Hansén Goobar representing FTM-Sverige (Eng. FTM-Sweden), Sophia Eriksson from Kön, Identitet, Mångfald (KIM, Eng. Gender, Identity, Diversity) and Nadja Karlsson representing FPE-S (Swedish national organization for trans-people).

^10. Please note that the Swedish original is using the gender neutral possessive pronoun ‘sitt’, which is not entirely translatable to the English language. Its closest translation, however, would be ‘one's’.

^11. It should be noted that the issue of pregnant (trans-)men has also been acknowledged by Swedish media in relation to the internationally acknowledged media narratives around Thomas Beatie, a trans-man who has been pregnant and given birth. Beattie was also invited to speak at Stockholm Pride in 2011. In Dagens Nyheter's report, a reference to the issue of sterilization was made: ‘Had he lived in Sweden, he had not had the same opportunity’ (Karlsson and Lundberg 2011).