I now mentally prepare my answers to the question “why don’t you just adopt?” when talking about childbirth by Trisha Faye

a) a trans woman in America has an easier time dragging herself over broken

glass | b) cryo freezing my sperm is often much cheaper, and I’m broke | c)

answers a and b are both correct | d) I am a deeply, deeply selfish woman who

would rather have no kids at all than adopt when faced with the sad reality she

will never have a functional uterus; I go into this social contract fully

acknowledging these truths about me and the judgment I will incur for not

upholding the nuclear family structure, different from the judgment I incur from having

kids, being known to much of my country as “a man in a dress” (see: your

weird uncle who thinks he knows everything despite never leaving his

hometown), “physiologically a boy but identifies as a girl” (see: the Supreme

Court), and other awful labels put upon me like masking tape so I shut up and go

away, thereby stopping a future weirdo mom who will corrupt her kids into the

almighty “transgenderism agenda”; as party to this contract, I further

acknowledge I am taking away a loving home from a child I would do anything

for because I would love them like my mom loves me and her mom loves her and

every mom should love their kids because kids are going to do what they will and

that’s okay we can’t forget that we were kids once too and punishing them too

harshly for smoking cigarettes once or staying out past curfew or questioning their

gender identity will only push them away from us making the emotional gulf of

their teenage years last longer and longer when they become an adult and realize

yes I can move out of my childhood home and find people who accept me even if

my parents do love me they’ll find that might not be enough sometimes I am

terrified of doing that to my own child somehow that is selfish too because I am

projecting decades into the future I will be a fuck-up mom when I might never be

a mom at all and that makes me want to cry more than the highest court in the

country soon deciding I am not a person I cannot marry I cannot be safe from

eviction firings violence death and that scares me most of all | e) haha, I don’t

know, I guess I just always pictured myself getting to hold my baby after giving

birth, you know, like in movies and tv?

Trisha Faye is a trans poet and writer whose poetry has previously appeared in Gyroscope Review and Variant Literature. She has also published poetry under a different name.