“Flesh of my Flesh:” Trans Bodies, Biological Family, and Interdependent Flesh

On January 28th, 2023 Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced sweeping changes to the province’s policies governing transgender youth. Smith’s proposed policies affect everything from sex education in public schools to transwomen competing at all levels of sport. But the majority of the policies are directly about the bodies and identities of trans youth. For example, no one will be allowed access to puberty blockers before the age of 16. Parents will receive notice of any public school student requesting to be called by a name or pronouns that were not assigned at birth–and for students under 16 parents must consent to any requested change. 

Danielle Smith is a “parent’s rights” activist, part of a movement that is systematically challenging any other authority’s claim to children, even a child’s own right to self determination. A relationship of flesh–”flesh and blood”--gives parents rights over their children. And a relationship of flesh generates love and care. Smith reassures trans youth who are listening, “we know that nearly all parents, even those who may disagree with the decision of their children, will love and care for their children no matter what choices they make”  What about the “rare” case where a student's family is not supportive? Don’t worry, Danielle Smith reassures concerned young people, the government will “strictly enforce” child protection laws. In other words Danielle Smith asked trans youth to have themselves removed from their homes if her policies cause them to be unsafe with their families.

“Flesh of my Flesh,” Adam’s proclamation in Genesis 2, continues to reverberate across contemporary norms and laws defining family. Adam and Eve are connected by their flesh: created as two sexes from the same flesh, connected by heteronormative sex in their flesh, and then reproduced in the flesh of their children. Family, Western society says, is a man, a woman, and 2.5 children. 

Mayra Rivera’s Poetics of Flesh traces the complex, and at times contradictory discourses of “body” and “flesh” in Christian traditions. On the surface to be living “according to the flesh”—an accusation levied at “Jews, Christians, and sexual minorities”—is to be “considered trapped in sinfulness.” The sinfulness of the flesh is complicated by John’s gospel which asserts that the Word became flesh—a powerful description of the incarnation. Of course there is flesh—and there is body. Sometimes sin is attributed to the body. The Apostle Paul contrasts the “carnal” body with the “spiritual” body; the former is sinful and the the latter is, well, not material.

This connection—flesh to sin, body to sin—is manifest in the contemporary idealization of some bodies and the rejection of others. Bodies are morally charged. For example, fat bodies, fleshy bodies, are bad. Protestant Christianity presents dieting as a kind of devotion, a connection to a relational, personal God. And according to historian Marie Griffith, this relational God prefers “fit” bodies—“fitter bodies ostensibly signify fitter souls.” The body and its flesh—its adipose tissue—are a site of connection with God. And God wants a particular kind of body—white, thin, abled, cisgender.

Hortense Spillers’s “mama’s baby papa’s maybe: An American grammar book” explains “the human body” is “a metonymic for an entire repertoire of human and social arrangement.”  The reified body stands in for the history of slavery and violence weighted down on the black body. Spillers, crucially, makes a distinction “between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’”—a distinction “between captive and liberated subject positions.” She describes the physical and sexual violence experienced by enslaved people. And writes, “These undecipherable markings on the captive body render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjuncture come to be hidden to cultural seeing by skin color.” A history of violence, written in the flesh, is obfuscated by the fat black body, who is to be feared. 

And yet, the excess meaning, caught in the hieroglyphics of the flesh, persists, because black flesh–and queer flesh–continues to take up space. Take fat, black, queer author Roxanne Gay, whose memoir Hunger describes the sexual violence she survived as a teenager and her fat as the armor supposed to protect her from violence, and to hide her identity as survivor. At the same time Gay’s flesh causes her to to literally take up space, in airplane seats, bathroom stalls, in a queer family. Roxanne Gay is fat, black, and queer in a world made for thin, white, straight people. 

Bodies are made visible through the obfuscation of flesh. The wild gender creativity of trans youth is hidden behind debates about their bodies. Danielle Smith announced a ban on bottom surgery for people under 18. But there are no kids having bottom surgery. The creation of the young trans body as an object of control obscures the variegated gender exploration of queer kids. 

Yet trans flesh continues to expand. 2000 people came to the first rally for trans youth after Danielle Smith’s announcement. 200 people came to the student bar at my university on Thursday night to hear a drag queer–Karla Marx–lecture about the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany.  

If flesh is the liberative subject position, then flesh is the generative possibility in Adam’s cry “flesh of my flesh.” Shared flesh makes human interdependence visible. Human beings need one another–and all living things– in order to flourish. Flesh as interdependence is not limited by biological reproduction. Nor does interdependent flesh assert the “rights of parents” to determine their children’s body and identity.  In fact, flesh as interdependence persists where the legal or normative relationships of family fail. Interdependent flesh undercuts the assertion of “parental rights” over children as though they are property, because interdependent flesh cares for and depends on the flourishing of others as they are.