“their mothers, and their fathers, and everyone in between”: Queering Motherhood in Trans Parent Memoirs by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Trystan Reese
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In their respective memoirs Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (2013) and How We Do Family: From Adoption to Trans Pregnancy, What We Learned About Love and LGBTQ Parenthood (2021), Jennifer Finney Boylan and Trystan Reese illuminate how mother and father are concepts that are varied, mutable, and fluid. Boylan, a university professor at Colby College in Maine and best-selling author, reveals that she is a transgender woman, formerly a husband in a long-term marriage, and father of two. Boylan writes from her position as a second mother to her children, and as the still-married partner of Deirdre Boylan. Reese, a social justice advocate, is a transgender man who not only adopted two children with his husband, Biff Chaplow, but who also gave birth to their biological baby. In my analysis herein, I argue that through narratives that conflate the conventional and the radical, Boylan and Reese normalize trans parenthood while queering normativity. Drawing on scholarship from queer, maternal, and life writing studies, and foregrounding the themes of transitioning, reproduction, and childrearing, I showcase how Boylan and Reese use their memoirs to open up vital spaces for new and inclusive notions of family.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".