Fear, Love, Gender and Feminism: How mothers are primed to fight the wrong enemy, and why it hurts us all

Looking to read something light-hearted and fluffy? This article isn't it! This piece has taken me over two years to write, and is not something I publish lightly. Nevertheless, it is important, and I would ask you to read on with the knowledge that I write from a place of deep love and care. 

This article is written from my perspective, that of a white, straight, cisgender biological mother who is passionate about both birth rights and children’s rights, and is written primarily for other people with similar backgrounds, characteristics or interests to me. It addresses the ways in which loving mothers, nurturing birthworkers and passionate parent supporters are exposed to and radicalised towards anti-trans beliefs and trans-exclusionary activism, and how it is a danger to us all. 

This article discusses anti-trans arguments raised, feminism and its appropriation, parenting and healthcare. It closes with a discussion of why I'll be blogging here exclusively, as subscription newsletter and social media platform Substack is an unsafe place for myself and my audience to be. A collection of resources that inform this piece are linked throughout for you to explore at your own pace, should you wish to do so. 

It is long, I intend to record and publish an audio version on the Anna Asks podcast soon in case that is more accessible to you. I ask you to take the time to read or listen to the end (even if that is over multiple reading bouts) so you see the full picture I am painting. It might just save your child’s life.

Fear, Love, Gender and Feminism: How mothers are primed to fight the wrong enemy, and why it hurts us all

Have you ever watched a documentary about birth in the healthcare system? In such films we see the horrifying inner workings of a maternity care system where pregnant women experience a predictable, demoralising sequence of tests, interventions and medicalised birth processes. 

In the Australian doco Birth Time, the imagery of a conveyor belt is used to visually represent the depressingly well-worn path of standard, obstetric-led care. Individual women with individual histories, bodies, needs and desires are reduced to notes on a page, numbers on a scale, foetal heart traces on a screen. 

In another US-based film, The Business of Being Born, a group of hospital nurses gather around the labour and delivery ward whiteboard. Every patient is reduced to a bed number, a nameless vessel for their baby, and calls to “pit her” [i.e. commence pitocin, also known as syntocinon, a drug to speed up labour] or “keep upping the pit” echo as they review the list. A nurse tells viewers that 90% of the patients who labour on their ward have “some kind of augmentation”. Anyone who knows anything about birth physiology will know where this is leading, and it’s not pretty.

It is no surprise many of us enter motherhood feeling dehumanised, traumatised and discarded. So many mothers feel their dignity has been stripped from them by the very people they had been led to believe would care for them in a time of great vulnerability. Many mothers justifiably ask “Why did this happen to me?” 

In doing so they need only scratch the surface to realise that maternity care processes are generally less interested in upholding the individual autonomy of patients than they are about serving overarching financial interests (i.e. keeping costs down or making money, and doing as much testing, monitoring and intervening as possible to avoid paying out claims for negligence). 

Some women, understandably disenfranchised after a traumatic pregnancy, birth or postnatal experience, lose trust in the medical system and the doctors within it. Healthcare workers are seen as “bought” by pharmaceutical companies: after all, drug companies, anaesthesiologists, surgeons and operating theatre staff don’t make money from physiologic birth, do they? We are sent home with next to no formal support and the dawning realisation that we have been tasked with a 24/7 job from which we can not escape.

And then, right when our bodies are aching, hearts are broken, nipples are bleeding, heads are a mess and sleep deprivation is high, mothers are told by child health teams that it’s time to vaccinate our children. Vaccination safety information is delivered to parents by the same public health-backed resources and staff pregnancy information was, and look how that played out! Why, many of us think, should I trust doctors with my child’s health, when they screwed me (or perhaps both of us) up so badly at birth? 

And it is on this background we sit, alone, in the very darkest of wee morning hours, when the scary world outside is even scarier, feeding and settling a baby over and over and over again. Already on the precipice of collapse and brink of spiralling, so tired yet unable to sleep, we reach for Google. The nature of the internet means it’s not hard to find anti-vaccination content designed to scare the shit out of you. And it is scary! I have a postgraduate health sciences qualification and have worked with countless patients who were permanently harmed by diseases we are now able to vaccinate against, yet when it came time to book six week old needles for my own baby, all this meant nothing. I went down an internet wormhole, became convinced that if I had my child vaccinated she would have seventeen strokes, and needed to be talked down from the edge of a panic attack about it.

This is not an article about vaccination though, it is about where anti-vaccination content and ideas lead. Anti-vaccination content is one of the key ways I see loving parents exposed to anti-trans rhetoric. While seeking information to guide decisions regarding whether or not to immunise their children, parents will find resources that claim “Big Pharma” is trying to harm their children by vaccinating them. They suggest this is a strategy so they will need further medications, and make them drug-dependent customers for life, to increase industry profits. 

Anti-trans activists use these fears to platform their assertion that “Big Pharma” (and all the medical and governmental spheres they have influence upon) is on a mission to brainwash children and young people into hating themselves and their bodies. They claim drug companies are using shadowy means to convince kids they are trans, thereby creating a new market of customers to whom they can sell hormone drugs. Surgeons providing gender-affirming care are also implicated in the supposed ruse. Like obstetricians can be seen to do in the sphere of birth, they are framed as inventing problems that don’t exist, in order to do surgeries that aren’t needed. Gender affirming treatments, anti-trans activists claim, will cause irreversible harm, mutilate and sterilise children, and be regretted by the children themselves in years to come. [I will address these points later in the article, so hold that thought for now.]

The birth trauma-to-anti-vaccination pathway isn’t the only way well-intentioned mothers find themselves marinating in subtle (and not-so-subtle) anti-trans ideologies. Those of us who seek to raise our children respectfully will often find our social media feeds quickly fill with “gentle” and “natural” mother ideals. The stereotypical image here would be a homesteader-type mother, with a gaggle of linen clad children at her feet, picking their organic homegrown vegetables for dinner while waxing lyrical about the joys of being in touch with the rhythm of life’s seasons, and surrendering to motherhood. The momfluencer setting is one in which we can imbibe gender essentialist messaging [i.e. the idea that men/boys and women/girls have specific immutable personality characteristics, skills and social roles] multiple times a day. Repeated exposure to heavily gender-conforming presentations of motherhood, particularly when coupled with inaccurate messages about young children requiring different parenting styles according to their sex or disproven theories about young boys having hormonally driven behaviour patterns, can make it harder to notice and question when more overt anti-trans ideas are presented.

Hang around the “natural parenting” places (on or offline) for the briefest of moments and you will find yourself starting to worry (for better or worse) about other things too. Plastic containers, commercially grown and prepared food and household cleaning products are the usual (often reasonable) soft entry points for concerned parents. A momfluencer’s post about something as plain as replacing her children’s plastic water bottles with metal ones can easily be derailed by anti-trans activists who see an opportunity to express concerns about what certain chemicals are “doing to our kids”, including “turning them gay” or “making them trans”. Efforts to keep such conversations on track are not helped when powerful public figures like vaccination disinformation megaspreader and former US presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy make unfounded claims on some of the biggest podcasts in the world that herbicides in the water supply are behind “a lot of the problems we see in kids”. [By “problems”, RFK was in this instance implying the herbicides were causing children to become transgender.]

Back to the mothers themselves though. What’s going on for them? I could say “a lot”, but that would be an understatement!

When we become pregnant, the bodies that were once our own become inhabited by another being. From the moment we conceive (or begin trying to conceive) our lives, which used to look pretty similar to our husbands’, are turned upside down. Pregnancy and birth are experiences that are deeply rooted in the body, ones that our cis male partners cannot and will never fully understand.

Even if we are lucky enough to know about matrescence when it happens to us the first time – which most of us don’t – the transition to motherhood can hit like a ton of bricks. Even if we are managing alright through the hard moments, enjoying the good ones and absolutely in love with our new baby (and let’s be clear that not everyone feels that way from the get go, building relationships can take time), many mothers experience an unavoidable drop in status in the wider world.

In planning for parenthood, we might have intended to share the care evenly. How can we execute this in practice though, when parental leave policies and social norms cement our role as default parent from the get go? Even after maternity leave finishes, our caring responsibilities make it hard or impossible to go back to the work we were doing before, at least in a full-time capacity. Plus, we’re different now, and career aspirations might not have the same draw for us they once did. 

We used to go to work. We used to have people to talk to. We used to be respected (or at least treated with less contempt) in our positions in society. Now our biggest tasks in life are unpaid, which in this society means un-valued. We are told solid maternal attachment and “good” mothering is paramount to growing defenceless infants into functional adults, while being given no support in our efforts to provide them with the level of responsiveness we’re told they need. We are irreplaceable, but we are also invisible. 

If we breastfeed, that is one huge job that could go for years that our partners literally cannot contribute to. Everything that is happening to us feels connected back to the root cause: that our body parts were the ones used to grow the baby, not our husband’s. As women, we feel this all consuming experience belongs to our bodies, and to us alone.

Isolated as so many mothers of babies and young children are, many reach out online to express difficult feelings. He doesn’t understand me. I feel violated from my birth. He can just leave whenever he wants, but I am trapped in this endless cycle of feeding, soothing, not sleeping and doing it all again. I cannot handle being touched so much.

Like an evangelist springing into action to convert those down on their luck, the internet is a place where anti-trans activists are converting some vulnerable mothers to their ideology. This practice is well-documented in the UK forum Mumsnet, and is observed in other forums and social media settings worldwide, and it’s influence should not be underestimated.

After all, anti-trans activists suggest, what could be more “feminine” than the reproductive journey we have just traversed with our very own bodies? How can anyone born without the body parts to conceive, carry and birth a baby be a woman? How can anyone with the body parts to conceive, carry and birth a baby be anything other than a woman?

And I can see why this strategy works! Indeed, the majority of us have really only been exposed to the types of “feminism” taught in schools or workplaces, precisely because these are the ones unlikely to shake the foundations of our social systems and preserve the power of the people holding it. Such feminisms (because there are multiple kinds of feminist frameworks) might be a “corporate feminist” story about how we can do anything a man can do at work, or a “choice feminism” narrative about how we have the power to control our own destiny through our decisions. Both of these seem completely irrelevant as we watch our previous ideas around “sharing the load fairly” and “men and women are equals in child-raising” being seemingly tossed out the window. Without a robust education about feminisms and what the aims of true feminist movements really are, the anti-trans or “gender critical” alternate (and I would argue appropriated) version of “feminism”, defined in a way that connects to our bodily experience of reproductive labour as the source of oppression, feels much more pertinent.

The crux of anti-trans arguments is that gender is determined by sex, such that trans people simply do not exist [spoiler: they always have, and always will]. This leads to assertions such as:

• Trans women aren’t real women, but men who are either perverted, predatory or both.
• Non-binary people do not exist, but are men or women who are “confused”.
• Trans men and trans masculine people are not men at all, but women.

In many birth work and maternal support spaces (and let’s remember that most people who work in these spaces are mothers who have walked this path of isolation first before turning to support others) these beliefs have been extended to black-and-white sentiments like “every person who gives birth is a woman and therefore a mother”. 

Anti-trans notions such as this nestle in nicely with already popular ideas in doula, prenatal yoga and birth preparation-adjacent spaces. These include birth being both the defining rite of passage for women and the ultimate prerequisite for “true” motherhood (never mind that some cis women don’t or can’t give birth, and may or may not become mothers by other means such as adoption, surrogacy[1] or their partner giving birth). Another commonly held view is that of birth being the epitome of “sacred feminine energy” (rather than enshrining birth itself as sacred, and leaving people to ascribe their own gendered or non-gendered energy of choice to it). These ideas might seem relatively harmless, but they create a platform from which we may subconsciously view ourselves and our own experiences as “normal” and others as “abnormal”, and create a platform for more explicit trans exclusionary ideas to take hold.

Within the space of birthwork, we don’t have to look too hard to find these. Outright transphobia can be heard in some of the most influential birth-related podcasts, from highly respected people who understand far more about physiological birth than most medically trained care providers. Having come to trust the wisdom of our favourite educators and hosts in the arena of birth physiology, it can be difficult to pause and consider whether what they are saying about other areas they do not necessarily have theoretical expertise in (like gender studies or trans healthcare) or lived experience in (like what it’s like to live with gender dysphoria) is true.

Transphobic messages also align with what we’re hearing more and more in the mainstream media, which primarily serves conservative interests and therefore leans towards publishing pieces that preserve the current power of certain groups over others (e.g. men over women, cis over trans, landlords over renters). In Australia, a number of anti-trans organisations (many founded since 2021 by the same rich and powerful individuals, or those with ties to hardline religious-backed organisations) have been drumming up controversy around trans healthcare and rights. Their aim is to spread doubt in the public consciousness about the validity of trans people and in turn influence legislation to restrict the lives of transgender people and consolidate the power of those who already have it (i.e. cis people, but particularly cis men). These tactics mirror those of the scarily successful Evangelist-backed anti-abortion lobby in the U.S.A., which has turned a healthcare practice hardly anyone really cared much about into a political wedge issue, hot media topic and human rights legislative bonfire. 

Within this already fraught context, a common outrage I see within birth-adjacent circles is around the use of gender-neutral terms (e.g. “birthing parent”) in pregnancy, birth and postpartum resources. Anti-trans activists (and the mothers who adopt their beliefs) argue inclusive language is redundant at best (because trans people don’t exist) and harmful at worst (because “women are being erased”). The “trans people want to erase women” line is an effective rallying cry, particularly on social media and in other online spaces. As we’ve already seen, after we’ve carried and birthed our babies and had our lives turned upside down by motherhood in ways that our co-parent fathers haven’t, to read that maternity services plan to remove words like “mother” or “breastfeeding” from their resources and replace them with “parent” can seem like painful dismissal of what we have just endured. But largely, erasure is far from what’s actually happening within the health services themselves. It is also far from what the majority of trans birth supporters are agitating for, and even further from what we really need to be getting hot under the collar about in the first place.

Some context here: trans people already report “total erasure” in pregnancy, birth and postnatal care systems. The fact we have research on this is a pretty clear indication that trans people are not a work of fiction, they exist. With this in mind, requests to be recognised as simply existing are reasonable, not radical. 

In their book Supporting Queer Birth, birth and postnatal doula AJ Silver shares their opinion that “completely removing woman, women, feminine language and so on [from birth-related care forms] isn’t the right thing to do.” Upon being asked his opinion, father Freddy McConnell agrees, suggesting complementary strategies like continuing to use existing forms for cis mothers accessing care, and also keeping a set of alternative forms with gender neutral language for trans parents to use when they access care. 

In the same book, Silver discusses inflammatory and hateful media reporting on a document created by midwives at Brighton and Sussex University Hospital (BSUH). The midwives created a resource that aimed to help other trusts improve their care of trans and non-binary service users (‘trusts” are kind of like our local health districts in Australia). The document states:

“The vast majority of midwifery service users are women, and we already have language in place they are comfortable with. This is not changing, and we will continue to call them pregnant women and talk about breastfeeding. Adding to the language we use, and that people are comfortable with, ensures we are providing individual care for every person.”

Silver noted the “misleading at best, and violent at worst” news media and journalistic response to this adjunctive document fitted with the press’ “long history of creating division against marginalised or oppressed communities, and the defaults of the world.” They explain that headlines like:

“‘Brighton Hospital tells midwives to use terms like “birthing parent” and “chest-feeding” instead of “mothers” and “breastmilk” because they risk offending transgender people’ will sell more papers than one reading ‘Brighton Hospital creates sorely needed guidelines for caring for trans and non-binary parents.’”

Angry, clickbaity headlines like the one above spread like wildfire on birthie social media, but it is the uptake of anti-trans ideas by prominent academics that has really added fuel to the fire. In research papers like this one, the authors argue for the prioritisation of “sexed language” in birth-related research, asserting it will help to obtain more accurate data. Calling everyone who gives birth a “woman”, “female” or “mother” will not achieve this aim however, because trans birthing parents actually have worse outcomes than cis gestational mothers and their babies. This is due to transphobia deployed against them in healthcare settings and broader society at large, not because of some inherent defect. Suggestions like this also fail to account for the fact that some cis mothers do not birth at all, some mothers are biologically related to their child even if they did not birth them, some mothers birth children they are not genetically related to, some women who give birth are not the intended mother at all, and so on. 

When identifying populations for health initiatives and collecting data it is of benefit to provide as many descriptors as possible, not fewer. This includes gender identity! Far from lumping everyone in the birthing suites or on the postnatal ward into the same category of “mother”, cis women and trans people who give birth need to have their data recorded and studied separately in order to assess what each group needs to attain best health outcomes. It is disappointing academic anti-trans bias is getting in the way of what should be pretty easily recognised as best practice research and care provision for all.

As individuals and as a community who care about birth rights, we should be pushing for individualised care in all respects. Why waste our time arguing whether people are wrong about who they are and the words they use to describe themselves, when we could be addressing the actual issue - a birth system that is chewing up pregnant women and birthing parents, spitting them out as one big homogenous mush, and failing to deliver anywhere near adequate postnatal care and support for any of us? After all, if trans people, who have to date been marginalised and even demonised in the birth space, were receiving high quality care, just imagine how excellent the individualised, patient-centred, respectful care cis women were receiving would be too! [2]

On healthcare, let’s look at that topic in relation to our children. The idea of any medical processes involving a child is understandably frightening to parents, and we all want to protect our children from potential danger. One of the main supposed goals of anti-trans activists is to prevent children being exposed to transgender voices which could lead them to “catching” transgenderism and subsequently being harmed by a gender transition that is dangerous, irreversible and shouldn’t be happening at all (because trans people supposedly don’t exist, remember?).

While it’s not my intention to bust every anti-trans myth, I do want to make seven key points in relation to gender affirming care for trans youth. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into each of these in detail, but I encourage you to follow through to the linked resources for more information if you’d care to take a look or listen.

1. Trans people have always existed and will always exist, and despite the hysteria, transness in children is nothing new or contagious.[3] 
   
   
2. Gender affirming care for young people is neither new nor experimental. It has been happening for over a hundred years (and studied for much of this time) and drastically improves mental health for those who need it. This is essential considering the grim reality of 43% of trans Australians surveyed by the University of Melbourne having attempted suicide. (Again, this is due to the way trans people are harmed by society, not because they are trans). 
   
   
3. Transition is not an overnight process amongst children and young people. The reality is that transition is a gradual process that generally takes place over many months and years. Waitlists to get medical appointments are long, and thorough, age-specific assessment processes are in place to determine the young person’s decision-making capacity before commencing any treatment at all. There are also legal safeguards in place if anyone in the parental or medical team suspects a young person is being pressured into any decision relating to their healthcare at any point along the process. [You can read more about this here and here.] Despite the fear-mongering of shock pieces online, there is simply no way a fifteen year old could just rock up to a GP without their parents knowledge, get a script for testosterone and undergo a hysterectomy that renders them permanently infertile six months later. 
   
   
4. The majority of gender affirming care for young people is reversible. More about this here and here. [I would also like to pause for a moment to note that anti-trans activists claim Big Pharma are out to mass sterilise trans youth with puberty blockers and hormone medications, while also positioning trans people as a dangerous group who are threatening to “take over” maternity systems and birth care. These arguments are both contradictory and nonsensical.]
   
   
5. “Transition regret” is a theoretical issue more than an actual one. In this episode of You’re Wrong About, Tuck Woodstock explains that such arguments about trans youth later coming to regret gender affirming treatment are usually raised by cis people, who can’t imagine what it’s like to live with gender dysphoria, and would therefore regret having such treatment themselves, because they are not trans. This theoretical worry then gets bandied about by all the cis politicians and media pundits, rather than anybody stopping to look at the research or ask trans youth or trans adults themselves about their experiences of gender affirming care. Those who do detransition often do so due to how they are treated in society for being trans or other reasons such, not because they suddenly realised they were cisgender.  [This research paper published in The Lancet showed 98% of people who took puberty blockers before age 18 went on to later add gender-affirming hormones. That is to say, people who knew they were trans as teens and had access to supportive healthcare during adolescence continued to know they were trans as adults.]
   
   
6. Surgeries on trans minors are rare, with genital surgeries exceptionally so. For those adults who decide to have gender affirming surgery when they are old enough to do so, regret rates (around 1%) are lower than basically every other kind of surgery you can think of (for reference 18.7%, that’s almost 1 in 5 people, who undergo a knee replacement operation are dissatisfied or regretful regarding their procedure, and no one is up in arms about that).
   
   
7. As per point 6, no one is out to sneakily sterilise trans kids with rushed surgeries. Trans adults (again, not children because these surgeries are done when people are adults making adult decisions about their bodies) are not being unwittingly sterilised or rushed into anything either. Options around future fertility, gamete preservation (freezing) and lactation are important topics that are discussed when trans children and adults are making decisions about any kind of gender affirming treatment, and particularly if that treatment is surgery on breast, ovarian, uterine or testicular tissues.

I can see why it could feel easier to say “hands off our kids!” to gender-affirming care physicians than it may be to accept that the child you love so much is going to face an uphill battle to live the wonderful long life you want them to live. I can also see why, as cis women who have likely experienced some kind of harassment or abuse at the hands of cis men, it could feel like a more protective response to say “get those liar boys out of my daughter’s school bathroom!” than it would be to look deeply at how addressing both violence against women and girls and transphobic violence in educational settings requires significant action to address the dual root cause, being misogyny (and in turn, transmisogyny). 

The truth is though that some children are born with body parts that do not reflect what social convention dictates their assumed gender identity should be, and nothing you or I say, do or believe will change that.[4] These are children who, just like all other children, are worthy of love, acceptance and the individualised care they need to live well. Some of them will go on to get pregnant, give birth and experience postpartum. Everyone navigating pregnancy, birth and postpartum is worthy of love, acceptance and individualised care.

The crux of truly radical feminism is the acknowledgement of oppressions, and working to dismantle them so that every marginalised person (including women, trans people, people of colour, disabled people, and other groups) get what they need. Those who seek to exclude or vilify trans people, titling themselves with names like “gender critical feminists” are merely appropriating the use of the word “feminist”. Any movement that undermines trans people works to further entrench conservative power structures built upon male domination and misogyny, forces that harm all women and all children, two of the groups most vulnerable to oppression under patriarchy. 

With this in mind, I would like to conclude this article by letting you know that I will be posting here only from now on, rather than on Substack where I have been writing for over a year. On Substack, it is all too easy to start at one of my pieces and be fed transphobic content within a click or two. Maybe if I was writing about baking sourdough or architecture or astronomy it wouldn’t be quite so pressing to leave the platform, and I am not critiquing the decision of any other writer to use it or not. However my readers are primarily mothers, doulas and aligned professionals interested in birth rights and responsive parenting, and therefore more primed towards body-based, exclusionary (non)“feminism”, and I can’t abide writing there any longer.

Someone will undoubtedly tell me we can’t keep just fleeing platforms because no better ones exist, but my answer to that is to simply ask, “why?” If your friend was dating her third shitty boyfriend in a row, would you tell her she can’t keep fleeing harmful relationships, that every man is “a little toxic” so she might as well suck it up and settle down with him? I would hope that you would tell her to run, that she is better off on her own than with someone dangerous.

And so, I am going back to writing and publishing articles exclusively on my own site.

Again, some will say this is an overreaction. Certainly, the signatories to an open letter against content moderation titled “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read”[5] argue that:

“Unless you actively try to find it [harmful content], you won’t.” 

As opposed to other social media platforms, they assert:

“You are no longer exposed to the niche worldview of whoever says the most outrageous thing or influenced by media outlets profiting from your attention—you are only exposed to the voices you follow and trust online.” 

This is simply not true. 

Even if you have subscribed to only one writer, Substack still sends a list of publications and previews to your inbox each week that its algorithms think you might like. Also, whenever a writer you follow “recommends” another writer, an email lands in your inbox telling you all about how great it is, with a personal testimonial from the writer you originally followed so as to build interest and transfer the “trust” you have in one writer to this new person. This is how I ended up receiving a direct link to scientist-turned-public-anti-trans-mouthpiece Richard Dawkins newsletter one Sunday morning, despite following only parenting-related writers. 

If you use the Substack app (as I trialled in my quest to get off Instagram), it’s even worse. 

Firstly, whenever I open the Substack app, I see notes (kind of like tweets) where writers I follow (mostly about parenting and motherhood, I might add) share snippets of other articles they have read. This exposes me to voices they follow or trust, not voices that I personally sought out. This is how I started seeing seemingly benign reflections from Charles Eisenstein written about “love”, “light”, “peace” and “truth” in my notes feed. If you’ve never heard of Charles Eisenstein, he is a political advisor to our previously discussed vaccine and anti-trans disinformist mate Robert F. Kennedy. Eisenstein is also a paid subscriber to a publication with a pinned post promoting the highly problematic, right wing, “Great Reset” conspiracy theory.[6]

Secondly, within the app I also see notes published by writers who, based on their algorithm, Substack suggests I might like, not only those I am already subscribed to. If I scroll down beyond these notes, the app recommends four articles each day in a certain topic area I have shown interest in. On the day I began writing this article, the list I was offered was from the “Culture” section. The third recommendation on their list was for an overtly racist and transphobic article, in which a trans woman was said to be “not actually a female, but rather a male pretending to be a female, with scrupulous attention to hair and costume”. I checked the Culture section every day for a week, and at least one of the four articles every day included content intended to vilify or harm already marginalised people.

Thirdly, if I press the “search” icon in the Substack app, I will be greeted with a few featured publications for the week, and a list of categories from which to choose my interest area. If I choose “Health Politics” my entire screen fills with anti-vaccination pseudoscience accounts, which as discussed earlier act as a soft entry point to transphobic ideology.

Yes, I could change my email settings. I could also unsubscribe from certain emails and “curate my feed”. But are the vast majority of people who I call across to Substack to read my articles realistically going to take the time to do that in order to protect themself from radicalisation that they’re not even aware is lurking from the get go? No, of course they won’t! 

Substack is a venture capital situation. This means it was funded by investors who put up the cash to get it started, and now want to see a return on their investment. As such, what started as a blogging site has hybridised with social media and its goal is to “Go Big”. It plans to get big by getting you to read more articles by more people in the expectation that you will become a paid subscriber to more of them. The platform (and its original backers) will take their 10% cut from each and every one.

Although the technology exists to block disinformation, vilification and hate speech on their platform, Substack have chosen not to do this. Despite concerns raised by many writers, there is no plan to install central moderators or disinformation screening protocols. Leaving hateful writers to moderate their own comments in the name of “free speech” is the ultimate “fox in charge of the hen house” or “mining company in charge of environmental management” type situation. It simply doesn’t work to keep people safe.

Whenever I publish to the Substack platform, I lend it my implicit seal of approval. As the format and branding is largely consistent from writer to writer, I also lend its other writers credibility. Further, by accruing paid subscriptions on Substack I afford the platform creators a cut of my revenue. And doing this knowing full well that the hateful sharks are not only circling but being whipped into a feeding frenzy, is not something I am willing to continue doing.

And so, I would like to conclude with a few questions upon which you may like to ponder.

If you are a reader, do you care about birth rights and individualised, respectful care for all women, people and children? Do you feel confident in identifying and resisting anti-trans radicalisation? If the first answer is yes but the second is no, Substack may not be a good place for you to read.

If you are a writer who cares about birth rights and individualised, respectful care for all women, people and children, do you feel your audience is primed to be more vulnerable to anti-trans radicalisation? Do they have the skills to identify and resist transphobic rhetoric? Again, if the first answer is yes but the second is no, Substack may not be a safe place for you to write.

And most importantly, if you are a mother or parent, what message will your kids get from you about who they are, and if they are worthy of hate or love? Because here’s the kicker: As a cis mother, or indeed a parent of any other kind, you do not know if your kid will be in the 1-5% of people who are trans. And if they are, the child you are so desperately trying to protect from the dangerous world out there, to help identify and feel their feelings, to soothe, protect, inspire, guide and love, will need you to stand by them. 

In 2021, an Australian study looking at the health and well-being of transgender people reported 63% of the over 900 participants had self-harmed and 43% had attempted suicide. Lifetime diagnosis of depression was reported by 73% and anxiety by 67%.

What effect do you think it has on a trans young person to know their own mother, the very person who is meant to love them no matter what, thinks they are lying, repulsive or dangerous? To hear her say people like them are disturbed or unnatural or simply don’t exist? Just like “banning” homosexuality or abortion doesn’t make these things go away, trans people will continue to exist regardless of cisgender peoples’ opinion on them. This is all to say: we can’t prevent a child being trans, we can only make them internalise our hatred as deep shame and self-loathing.

Whatever their age, however small or tall they are, please look at the babies in your lives. Is it more important to you to enforce what pronouns they use and fight against supplementary paperwork in hospitals for pregnant trans people, or to do whatever you can to make them not want to kill themselves?

I know the answer. If you’ve got this far, I’m pretty sure you do too.

Anna x

I am eternally grateful to Melbourne-based postpartum doula and super supporter Emmeline Tyler for contributing to the planning and editing of this piece. It wouldn’t have made it out of my head and onto the page without you, Emmeline.

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Footnotes

[1] Surrogacy can be another hot topic in birthworker circles. I have previously done a deep dive into the research regarding the ethics of surrogacy and what it means for babies born through it which you can read here.

[2] At this point you may be asking how to write in a way that is inclusive and still recognises cis mothers. I am only one person and my way of writing is not the ultimate or only solution, but when writing or speaking about birth, but I now try to use words like “pregnant women and birth parents may like to consider…” together instead of “expecting mothers may like to consider…”. This addition does not intend to “take away” the language, experience or identity already used by people like me (cis gestational mothers), despite the trolling I receive on every such post. What it does do is add to the number of people who will feel included rather than excluded from my work: biological gestational mothers, non-binary or trans birthing people, surrogates. It also clarifies who the information isn’t for: women who expect to soon become mothers through means other than giving birth themselves.

[3] These episodes may be of interest to you if you wish to explore why media-fuelled fears around rising rates of transness don’t reflect the reality of either current situation, or trans history. "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" Part 1: The Cooties Theory of Transgender Identity and "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria" Part 2: Panic! At The Endocrinologist on the Maintenance Phase podcast, and  What Are You, New? on the Gender Playground podcast.

[4]  This podcast episode begins with a story from podcast co-host Marcelle, who recounts her experience having to explain to her young daughter (an assigned male at birth child who began using she/her pronouns quite independently of parent input soon after becoming verbal) that trans is a word some people would use to describe her. The rest of the episode discusses what transition is, and is well worth a listen!

[5] I have elected not to hyperlink this article as I do not want to direct more traffic to its publishing individual. Of course, you can copy and paste it into your search engine if you wish to read the letter in full.

[6] Again, I am not going to link it as I’m trying to get away from disinformation not spread it, but Josh Drummond touches on this conspiracy theory in the opening of this article, titled “All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour”.