Trans Pregnancy and the Affirmation of an Ethics of Difference

Reflecting on the phenomenon of transmasculine reproduction, this chapter offers a philosophical counterargument to origin-centred conceptualisations of motherhood that have historically framed all narratives of birth-giving at various degrees of influence in the political, medical and legal arenas. Generally speaking, these narratives sit on two assumptions: the unquestionable superiority of biology in the economy of our social world (these tie mother and origin together) and the psychoanalytic assumptions that motherhood is the constitutive moment of female subjectivity (these tie mother and woman together). According to these views, pregnancy is a temporal phase that precedes motherhood and birth-giving is an act that naturally sits within the maternal, a domain that encompasses all those biological, psychological, and social experiences that are ascribed to female reproduction. Drawing on Deleuzian scholarship and on the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty, my counterargument questions the notion of the maternal origin as the exclusive locus of reproduction and, instead, suggests that the maternal is only a norm – what is expected –but by no means the sole possible relational model for pregnancy.