Grief,pain and the politics of annihilation in Moms for Liberty

Abstract

Nowhere has the tension surrounding the figure of the transgender child seen a more destructive manifestation than in the rise of the gender critical mom on the American right. Wielding rhetorics of regret, concern and parents’ rights, these authoritarian shock-troops seek to fuse maternal oversight with state power in order to remove the very thinkability of transness from public life and, in so doing, to re-establish the total authority of the parent over the possibilities of the child. I argue that such attacks are fuelled by a kind of grief experienced by the gender critical mom when she encounters the bodily freedom of trans life, a grief born of her apprehension of the coercive social topography that structures her own lived reality. This article undertakes a discursive analysis of the right-wing anti-trans advocacy organization Moms for Liberty to explore how anti-trans activists seek to annihilate trans desires to ameliorate their own bad feelings of grief. In so doing, I show how Moms for Liberty is seeking to cast trans life into the domain of unthinkability such that they can recapture the taken-for-granted nature of a cisnormative gendered embodiment.