Abstract
Finding inspiration in embodied life writing methodologies, the essay explores the fraught slow intimacies of mothering a trans child, now a young adult. The essay engages an experiential familial, in the sense of ‘family’ relations, but in seeking to process the uneasy forms of m/othering through trans allyship, the paper turns to a range of intellectual repertoires, both old familiars and newer strangers, hoping to shape ways of responding that re-home family gender troubles within wider communities of scholarly and creative thought, and reading. Wanting comfort in ideas, the author grapples and drifts, trying deliberately to open her heartmind to unbecoming methods and messy, queerying adjacencies that elude polarities, even push me aside, and admit to never completely representing the subject. Alongside conflicted negations/negotiations of mastery, then, the essay tries muted moves into intimate geographies of mutter, martyr, mater, matter, meta, all in a lived struggle ‘to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations’ (Halberstam, 2011: 2) in search of deliberately fugitive, blurred intimations that place m/othering in difficult, witnessing relation with a transmasculine life lived at assertive gender variance.
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