TY  - BOOK
AU  - Malcolm Belc,Krys
TI  - The natural mother of the child: a memoir of nonbinary parenthood 
SN  - 9781640094383
PY  - 2021///
CY  - Berkeley, California
PB  - Counterpoint
KW  - Motherhood
KW  - Surrogate mothers
KW  - Adoption
KW  - Law and legislation
KW  - Parenthood
KW  - Gender-nonconforming people
KW  - Transgender parents
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (pages 285-287); The machine -- First seen in print -- Breasts: a history -- How to photograph your newborn -- In the court of common pleas -- Wild life
N2  - "Essentially this book is a heavily visual memoir-in-essays that explores how the experience of gestational parenthood-conceiving, birthing, and breastfeeding my son Samson-eventually clarified my gender identity and allowed me to project a different more masculine self. Ruminating on how the experiences contained under the umbrella of "motherhood" don't fully describe my experience amplifies the outsiderness the speaker, who is almost always addressing a cis "you," sometimes his mother, sometimes strangers, mostly his cis female partner. Instead of using a straight narrative, the book circles around this concept of motherhood and of my relationship to it. The book is also an archive of my queerness, of childhood photos of me smiling impossibly wide, of my original birth certificate and the legal documents surrounding Samson's adoption. It's a direct engagement with the documentation we think constitutes a record of one's life. The book ends on an exploration of how much we can really know when we enter into parenting a person, and of my ambivalence about the "before" and "after" that is so prevalent in trans stories and that feels so outside my experience as a nonbinary transmasculine person"--
ER  -