The Natural Mother of the Child

About This Book

As a nonbinary, transmasculine parent, giving birth to his son Samson clarified Malcolm Belc's gender identity. Yet when his partner, Anna, adopted Samson, the legal documents listed Malcolm Belc as "the natural mother of the child." In this visual memoir in essays, Malcolm Belc documents and addresses his deep ambivalence about the "before" and "after" so prevalent in trans stories, and explores how much we can ever really know when we enter into parenting.-- adapted from jacket "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"--