Full Moon: Fertility in extinction

It's Friday. Hello. An opening warning: although this isn't a Last Quarter post, it will bleed into heavy, Last Quarter-like material at points, as well as reference some things like medical and financial impediments to pregnancy — things with which I've been grappling for a decade and even now find it difficult to speak about directly. I can only imagine that it could be challenging reading for someone who has dealt with miscarriage, abortion, clinical infertility, forced pregnancy, forced sterilization, reproductive dysphoria, and similar.

I've tried to write this with sensitivity for all the perspectives I can think of, but ultimately it's volatile material and I've had to take care of myself in writing it as much as I recommend other people take care of themselves in reading. The structure here is also as contained as I can manage but still fairly explosive in scope — a series of meditations more than a centrally driven thesis.

If you feel ready, then here's the rest.

An ecofascist, a forced-birther, and an antinatalist walk into a bar graph

In setting Salt for the Eclipse on its proper course I've struggled to approach and define fertility — half of the heart of my ritual life, the inverse to ecstasy, the making rather than the unmaking, the miracle of genesis  — because this half of rite is the troubled half, plagued and beset and suffering.

When I think of fertility these days, I think of fertility in extinction:

1. Fertility in extinction (the choice or persistence of fertility despite an ongoing extinction event)
2. Fertility in extinction (the possibility of fertility discontinuing amid the extinction event)

Which must it be, and which will it?

There are those who imagine a future altogether barren, not worth creating new things to inhabit it, perhaps not able even if it were worthwhile. Barren, comes the warning. No future. Live only now. Do not hope for legacy. It is too late.

A dichotomy here: not fertile vs. ecstatic, but fertile vs. sterile; not opposites that contain each other, but opposites that form a total, perfect binary. I flinch at it because like other binaries, this one is too simple.

When a body can make children, this is never for the body's whole life — the body is not mature right away, and then there are the many bodies that lose this kind of fertility with age, and then there are inhibiting medical conditions that may arise (or disappear), and then there is the simple fact that for menstruating animals every month has a moment nearly like miscarriage and even when an egg is fertilized it creates such a resource burden for the parent that miscarriage frequently happens regardless (about 1 in 5 human pregnancies self-terminate, especially in the first trimester, and so in all likelihood you know someone who has miscarried even if they've never spoken about it, and perhaps even you have miscarried without realizing it). And then there is the other simple fact that if you do not have access to the gametes that are the opposite of yours, then no matter how fertile you are on paper, you are not going to make children any more than someone with all their reproductive organs completely removed.

Reproductive fertility is often the default sense of fertility that people imagine. It's how I just began above. What other fertilities are there for queer, trans, and/or intersex bodies, all of whom tend to experience obstacles to reproduction, whether anatomical or social? What other fertilities are there for bodies which could make children in the future, but not yet, or which have made or could have made children in the past, but not anymore? What other fertilities are there for people who do not want to make children in the first place, who might even medically sterilize themselves on purpose, but who would rightly revolt at anyone treating them as though all their creative energy were now destroyed? Why are "other ways to be fertile" tacked on as afterthoughts? Let me plainly name some ways, and consider how even these are not absolutely divisible into fertile vs. sterile statuses. All humans may grow plants and breed animals, but some will have better luck, skill, and wisdom in these activities. All humans may make art, but some have natural talents, and even these vary by the art type. All humans may make community, but the kind will vary, and some communities will be healthy and some will not. All humans may invent, but some inventions are gifts, and some inventions are terrors.

Fertility is not always a good. Not all created things, whether children or gardens or artworks, will be welcome or helpful. But of course in these times there are some who complain about fertility, specifically of the reproductive kind, in chilling ways. The ecofascist vocally decries overpopulation as code for the wrong(ly colored) people reproducing. Often this goes hand in hand with declaring, alongside other reactionaries, that the white race is shrinking and it's the duty of white women to stay eminently and constantly fertile. Fertility in extinction is, for these people, a matter of extinguishing some bodies' fertility while simultaneously forcing other bodies into fertility in order to prevent extinction of a hallucinated variety.

That is the right. Turn to the left, where I align myself and form most of my connections now. We have antinatalists here[1]. It doesn't take much to write an accurate pastiche of their views: Don't you have to admit that having children increases your personal "carbon footprint," and that the more people who reproduce, especially the more people who reproduce in a carbon-spewing society of the Global North, the worse that is for the planet? Besides, isn't it a painful reality that that those of us who reproduce right now, or imminently, are already doing so amid the eco crisis which may make the planet uninhabitable for future generations? Why not at least adopt children who already exist and need parents? How dare we continue to make even more children right now, simultaneously destroying the environment further and condemning our offspring to even greater misery?

I'm not an antinatalist, to some extent because I have trouble taking this rhetoric seriously. Noble premise, useless result. All theory and no viable praxis. Supposing that everything said above were really accurate and argued in good faith, I've always seen the problem that humans, like all life, do have an instinct to reproduce, even though it's not the calling or desire or capability of each individual human, and even though there are diverse social forces that make some people less inclined to reproduce than others, and even though there are social constructs that sometimes encourage overemphasis of the reproductive instinct. Once we account for everyone who would can't and/or don't wish to make children, it's self-evident that a plurality of humans would still like to have at least one or two children during their lifetime, and go through with that, probably in enough numbers to at least prevent permanent population decline regardless of any actual population growth.

Another way to put it is that no matter how much it may seem to some people like lots of humans only have children under pressure or ignorance (whether this is viewed as a bad or good thing), in the long run many humans genuinely want children just because they want them, and so they make them.

Whenever the contemporary left can't acknowledge or account for whatever truly exists of the human reproductive instinct, it lets the patriarchal, white supremacist, forced-birth movement claim a little more of that instinct for themselves. In an ecofascist context it cedes ground to people who would like nothing better than to live in bunkers with a white pregnancy cult while the rest of humanity burns. This is all to say nothing of how most people curbing their own individual carbon footprints would still have nowhere near as significant an effect as destroying oil companies and curbing the emissions of the wealthiest 1% of our species; I will have plenty to say here in the future about sustainability politics and the benefits I see in trying to live on less carbon as an intentional ethos, but reproductive rights are, to me, absolute in both directions. If at least one person in a sexual interaction does not want to have children, especially if they would be the person carrying the child, then there should be no child. If two people want to have children together, no one should stop them.

I am speculating, cerebralizing, abstracting myself away from my own trouble. I would like to be pregnant and raise a child. My owner and I have intended to try at some point. At the same time, poverty and medical mysteries have kept me devastatingly far from this goal until quite recently, and even today I am staring at a mental list of mushrooming reasons why things might need to wait something like another 6 to 18 months. Ironically, there was once a time when the idea of me getting pregnant was immensely dysphoric, and now — I still don't know how to reconcile my hopes for personal fertility with the hard, hard world that would, or will, face any child I might have.

Why does this matter? Could I ever make it stop mattering?

There really are many ways to be fertile (and yet)

I do not want to get pregnant and have and raise a child for lack of other ways to feel creative and abundant. I am a writer. I am slowly becoming a visual artist. I have been, and could be again, a singer and a musician and a dancer and a theatre person and a filmmaker. I am a slow but patiently learning gardener. Last month I took up knitting and I will have plenty of things to write here about that in the future. I have been ritually, symbolically pregnant in the course of sex magic. I help in my own way with kinky community building. I have a nibling born in 2021, with another due to be born this summer, and I'm proud to occupy a nonbinary auncle/ent role for them.

My gender at the moment lies somewhere near woman, close enough that I sometimes accept the term even if I prefer witch. But I do not want to experience pregnancy in order to "confirm" my gender. Women are not defined by their ability to become pregnant, and I say this even to people who believe in defining women purely by sexual anatomy. Again, like reproductively-capable people of all anatomies, not all people with uteruses want to use them or even keep them; not all people who would like to use uteruses have one in the first place. When I first started considering that I might want to deliberately make children instead of deliberately avoiding them, I first thought about this in the context of being a trans man. I imagined becoming a pregnant man. I could still live that life if I chose. I abandoned manhood itself for other reasons.

But I did abandon testosterone therapy in the process. My choices were distinct, but they were still linked by this one necessity. Although studies on trans pregnancy are woefully underfunded, all signs still point to testosterone therapy preventing periods in people who were previously having them. That's certainly one of the reasons why trans men and other (for lack of a better term) transmasculine individuals choose to take testosterone at all. That's certainly what I experienced for the three and a half years I had testosterone injected into my thigh: no menstruation. And if there is no menstruation, then it's virtually a guarantee that there is no ovulation either.[2]

I do not know what my ovaries or uterus are really capable of now. That doesn't mean I worry that I've been sterilized permanently by hormones I took in the past. So far in trans medical science, testosterone exhibits both permanent and reversible effects, and sterility is among the reversible ones. When I started testosterone I was warned and had to sign forms about how I wouldn't be able to have kids — I was also reminded of the option to freeze eggs — but this was under the assumption I'd be taking testosterone for the rest of my life or that I'd at least be on it for long enough that I might eventually experience ovarian or uterine atrophy, etc. Nominally speaking, now that I'm off testosterone after only using it a relatively short while, every doctor I see tells me I should be able to get pregnant in theory. I show classic indicators of ovulation again. I have premenstrual syndrome again. I bleed again.

But then there are my mysteries. I bleed again not only during my actual period, but also somewhere around ovulation, or just after. The blood is discernibly different from menses, but sometimes there's a lot of it — too much to be classified as the "normal" ovulatory spotting some people experience. This can last several days. Over the course of eight, maybe nine years, I've been investigating this with my gynecologist because besides having to just physically cope with the mess for more days out of a month than I really would like to, more importantly it isn't an encouraging sign to see blood like this during the time of month when pregnancy could be possible. Maybe I can get pregnant, but maybe I am shedding just enough endometrium too soon that this creates an obstacle to implantation. Am I more prone to miscarriages than some people would be? What about other causes of bleeding that might suggest lesions or other things that would irritate my reproductive system and interfere with whatever my eggs are doing? What about something cancerous that would necessitate removing reproductive organs just to stay alive?

The doctor and I have ruled out so many things that I almost can't keep count. I probably don't have PCOS or an intersex condition (though these things would more likely cause light or no periods). I probably do not have endometrial hyperplasia, although I believe that's an occasional side effect for people who have discontinued testosterone therapy. I do not have polyps or fibroids or any tumorous things. My pap smears are normal. I have had a hysteroscopy, two transvaginal ultrasounds, and two endometrial biopsies, the latter of which are virtually identical to a dilation & curettage abortion, only without having a pregancy to terminate. Apart from the ultrasounds, the procedures have very painful and do not use anesthesia. This is on top of me having chronic pelvic floor tension my entire adult life, and on top of my existing PTSD from a traumatic gynecological experience in college that was linked to the sexual abuse I was experiencing at the same time. Despite putting myself through such a gauntlet, I am not done with procedures. I'm willingly doing a sonohysterogram, probably in a month or two, to try and non-surgically diagnose the one remaining likely culprit, endometriosis (my mother's bane and also an explanation for not only my bleeding pattern but my markedly heavy periods and increasingly bad premenstrual somatic ailments).

Why am I going through this? Time and again I ask myself that question because it feels completely absurd to go to so much effort just to make sure I can get pregnant — or can't clearly not get pregnant — before I just try.

But if for some reason I am at higher risk of miscarriage or difficult pregnancy, I would rather know up front, sparing myself surprised agony and grief later. And most crucially of all, I'm investigating so thoroughly because I already know (for reasons I'm leaving very private) that I'm not going to be able to conceive by completely traditional PIV means, which means saving up and spending a lot of money that insurance will not reimburse for, possibly on repeat for many months, to actually get pregnant. My owner and I can't justify making such a fantastic financial gamble unless all signs point to go.

So I have kept torturing myself for information. Maybe it will be done soon. I can only hope.

If it turns out that I can't get pregnant for a medical reason, or that it's at least very ill-advised, I will be able to feel fertile in other ways. This is a good thing. I already feel a kind of preemptive kinship with my literary hero Mary Shelley, who struggled in her early adulthood with both devastatingly dangerous miscarriages and also children who died far too young, and who in the interim poured creative effort into her writing and whose magnum opus Frankenstein is a long meditation on the mysteries and nightmares of creating children. And if I eventually discovered that on some level my body was never "fated" to have children, then I may find peace in knowing that my body is fated for other things instead.

But right now I live in uncertainty and doubt — and paralyzing longing. For as long as it at least feels like my body has the potential to make a child, that is one reason why I want to be pregnant at all. My dysphoria around the notion of pregnancy has transformed into its opposite: dysphoria around imagining the possibility of pregnancy squandered. O sun and moon and stars on high! but I am alive and feel as though I might beget life, and yet I have begotten nothing!

No other kind of fertility can replace that. And as long as it feels like a kind of fertility that I might have, I desire it and dream of it.

I want to raise a child for the raising's sake, of course. I want the delight of witnessing and aiding a child's growth and development. Children are incredible. I couldn't imagine teaching dozens and dozens of them, but I'd like to parent at least one, maybe two. If I couldn't satisfy this wish through a child of my own body, I might consider adoption, and sometimes I consider adoption for its own sake — I understand the antinatalist position that far, give a child a home — but the adoption system is also broken, especially in this country, and I would fear raising someone's child who was stolen legally or physically from their birth parents without my own knowledge, or lacking the tools to deal with the distinct emotional challenges that adopted children still face in the 21st century. I can't rule out adoption altogether, but it's almost a completely separate concept to think about from birthing and raising a child completely from myself. Whether or not I can ever make a choice about adoption, my yearning for a child of my flesh already exists and will not be slaked by anything but the chance to try or the hard, cold knowledge that my body cannot.

A legacy for Ozymandias

The antinatalist tugs at my sleeve again. Again, look at the state of the world. Why add a child to it? Do you not already resent your parents for putting you here amid potential apocalypse?

As I've grown up, I've gotten closer and closer to thinking that death and non-livingness are positive states of existence, insofar as I can give them meaning. This hasn't come at the expense of finding live positive as well. Given the choice, I would still always choose life over death with only a select few exceptions.

I think of the climate, the rising and boiling and acidifying and plasticizing seas, the wasted forests, the fading birds and frogs and bees, the failing harvests, and I cry, and I cry, and I cry. And I still choose life. I rage and fume at what my parents' generation has contributed to the crisis to end all crises, but at my very core I at least do not mind that my parents put me on a possibly dying planet.

With my being here, I can do more to try and save humanity, or at least life in general, than if I were not here.

If I can have a child, they too might carry on that work when I am gone. I dream of a child to whom I can impart wisdom and integrity, with whom I can share my small portion of the knowledge that humans would benefit from continuing to know in the decades to come. I dream of a child not merely to see what becomes of them but because ideally the coming times need children who understand principles of solidarity, equity, and liberation. Otherwise in the coming times we may see too many children birthed by those white pregnancy cultists. I refuse to cede the reproductive future to those scum.

As the child of one overcritical parent who will probably be eternally disappointed that I don't fulfill their expectations, I hope I do know better than to imagine that any child I have will turn out exactly the way I'd like. Likewise I have learned through my own experience how supremely unjust it is for one generation to leave hard work to younger generations while also watching their own hands of it. I know I shouldn't put a child in this world and give them an automatic responsibility to defeat evil. To grow up that way with such an unfathomable burden — it hurts my heart to imagine.

But leaving aside whether I could successfully raise a child with principles that are hoped for but not demanded, the antinatalist tugs my sleeve yet again.

That's all very well and good. Suppose you could raise a child who didn't resent you, and who came to embody all you did wish for. In a few thousand years, perhaps, or maybe in just a hundred years, would there really be a point?

From Mary Shelley we turn to her husband's "Ozymandias," first published in 1818, the same year as Frankenstein.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The paradox of legacy persists. It might persist even without the threat of imminent extinction. One way or another, all things move toward their end. Children do not really give you immortality. In fact, you will in all likelihood die before you can even see what legacy you've left with them. And when they are gone, and their children's children are gone, and all generations are gone, will there really be any legacy at all?

I don't know. I try only to think in terms of helping fighters in the eco struggle and class struggle and justice struggle to exist beyond my lifetime ability to contribute. That has to count for something.

Doesn't it?

In one of my favorite films, Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón), the lead character Theo has a scene where he talks with a friend, Jasper, about the central crisis of the story setting: that humanity has seemingly become incapable of reproduction for close to 20 years, and therefore it's assumed that humanity is going to go extinct unless anyone can discover the cause and cure for this pan-species infertility. Jasper essentially advocates for such a discovery effort, whereas Theo himself has grown so pessimistic and burnt out that he points out to Jasper humanity already had its chance and blew it, given the state of the planet. "The world went to shit."

From this initial sociopolitical position, the rest of the story is about what happens when, despite all odds and all potential pointlessness, one young woman is pregnant from an unknown father, and she gives the people who find out, including Theo, something to believe in again. Not from a right-wing white pregnancy cult perspective, but from quite the opposite: she's a Black refugee.

Pregnancy in kink vs. pregnancy fetishism

And what of pregnancy cults.

In the world of kink, pregnancy is a dirty word, in two senses of dirty.

There is the nose-wrinkling sense of dirty. Pregnancy? Inconvenient, unfortunate. When kinksters have had kids before entering the scene, scheduling activities and partnerships often becomes a point of contention with kinksters who would rather only be using a shared calendar to track a polycule than to also deal with someone doing parent things. When kinksters enter the scene without having kids but then get pregnant, all too often this forces a retreat from the scene for several years if not also for a couple decades, whether because "the lifestyle" needs to be so hidden from the kids that it doesn't bear trying to practice it anymore, or because kink events are decidedly not child-friendly. Kinksters having children is also more common among heterosexual or hetero-passing monogamous couples, so the choice to reproduce sometimes signals drawing a line between the false dichotomy of heteronormative monogamous (or one-penis-policy) kinksters vs. queer nonmonogamous kinksters.

If I sound slightly bitter about some things I've witnessed secondhand, I am. But at the same time, I understand why a lot of this happens. I myself have been in the position of telling a couple with an infant child that no, a baby cannot be present at a munch. Kink is for adults. It is unethical to immerse an underage person in even just kink discussion, even when they may be too young to understand; you will never know exactly what age they are when they do start to understand. I think it's important for teens and even children to have some awareness of what kink is, as part of understanding what sexuality is; but most kink events just fundamentally have too much actual kink happening, or erotic tension, or what have you, to justify bringing a child with you.

I do think there are solutions to this challenge, but they are more complex than just creating a childcare area outside of a munch or (hell forbid, a play party). There really does need to be more separation than that. I'm more keen on developing childcare exchange programs for kinky parents to rotate childcare among households so that member parents each respectively get chances to go do kink stuff without having to pay a sitter or nanny or work things out with their family. Simultaneously, it takes a proverbial village to raise a child in general, and the biggest reason why new parents so often retreat from kink is the same reason why they so often retreat from numerous other activities they consider important: they lack community or familial childcare options in all respects. Humans did not actually evolve to expect one or two parents to be responsible for their children's safety 24/7 until the age of 18, but under capitalism this is what we keep doing to ourselves. All parents deserve to have lives outside of being parents, but to arrange this means dismantling capitalism or at least starting to knock out some of its support beams.

Until such solutions exist, many kinksters will keep avoiding having children in practice even if they might like to have them in principle. And even if I do feel a little bitter about the way some kinksters speak of children, at the end of the day I don't really care. I have been in the childfree mindset before and I frankly love when people recognize they don't want kids and are happiest not having kids be part of their lives. Better that than having kids by mistake and ruining your life as a result. I think it's possible, and regularly notice, numerous kinksters who don't want children but also don't sneer at children. I'm friends with many. It's lovely. I just have to brace myself a little for whatever might happen to my kink community life, whether I like it or not, if my owner and I manage to have a child and are not able to find or afford sufficient childcare options when we'd really like them.

And then there is the flip side. There are the kinksters for whom pregnancy is a dirty word, but in a sexy-dirty sense.

You know what I mean, probably, even if you aren't in the kink scene. The pregnancy fetishists. The breeding fetishists. A lot of these people have really unfortunate racial politics even if they're not literally obsessed with "repopulating the white race" or what have you. A lot of these people are also very straight — not just heterosexual, straight, a hegemonic and ideological status. A lot of these people even have a particularly concerning tendency toward roleplaying (and maybe not even just roleplaying) incest, so we're talking about incestuous breeding for good measure.

Other segments of the kink scene make fun of and maybe even have an acrimonious relationship with this segment. Pregnancy? The thing that Christians say is the only purpose of sex? What could possibly be more vanilla and heteronormative than fetishizing getting someone pregnant? Also, what could be more reckless and irresponsible than having kids just to fulfill a kink?

In truth, I think the full picture of pregnancy fetishism goes well beyond all this. Despite all the pregnancy fetishists I described above whom I largely want nothing to do with, I have known or encountered plenty of queer and/or trans people who have some kind of pregnancy kink. You see it sometimes in the kinky/furry subculture overlap, and sometimes not.

And in fact, I myself find pregnant people gorgeous, and I find the idea of being pregnant very arousing and sexually appealing. If this were the only or core reason that I wanted to be pregnant one day — I shudder to think of all the different bad places that could lead. But at the same time, imagine wanting to get pregnant for completely non-erotic reasons, while also finding pregnancy anything but arousing and feeling total dysphoria around one's pregnant body in the process. I may be surprised by such an experience if/when I get pregnant for the first time, in which case I definitely imagine I won't ever want to do it again; yet I don't see how I could possibly have a good time with any pregnancy if I went into it already envisioning ugliness and grotesquerie for myself.

Where the earth goes, there go I

All of this is more talk. I can try my best to address my reproductive fertility's uncertainties of medicine, gender, legacy, and fetish. In future posts I can, and will, talk further about the other kinds of fertility that exist. Why else have I already been writing about art? But this is talk and talk and talk. And want and want and want.

What is really going to happen, with all debates being resolved, all mysteries being revealed? Suppose I can and even ought to have a child. Will I?

This is the thing I cannot know, the thing where my heart sinks most. It all depends on money. Not even the money needed for me to conceive in my own situation, but the money needed to raise a child in any remotely comfortable and stable existence.

Capitalism is sterilizing nature. I feel effectively barren alongside the potential future Earth, as capitalism controls my livelihood. It hurts each of us uniquely; my personal lot has been a college major that would never pay me well to begin with, coupled with the 2008 financial crisis and the overall economic aftermath for my entire generation, followed also by bad luck in underpaying jobs and by bouts of insufficient time or insufficient mental wellness to find better paying jobs, and I'm sure I'm not helped by various kinds of subtle hiring discrimination. All compounded further by the wealthy part of my family generally refusing to give "handouts," and the poorer part of my family (as well as my owner's entire family) not really having any significant money to give. Two years ago we broke out of the renter's cycle at the cost of needing to pay for home repairs ourselves, which we can't usually afford; now amid inflation we are also facing rising utility bills and property taxes and a vanishing ability to pay off old debts we've had for years.

Hilariously, I know all too well that I have had things much easier than a lot of people do. I can't begin to fathom how people survive raising children under even worse circumstances. As it is, if I could simply get a new day job that pays me the actual industry standard for the same work I've been performing for nine years, then my salary would literally increase by 50% to 100% and raising a child would immediately become realistic. The trick is in actually getting that new job. I have been trying, and trying, and trying. Nothing yet.

And slowly the sands are running out. I am now 35, the age at which I originally told myself I wanted to have children by, otherwise even without specific medical challenges I will start to have increasing difficulty anyway. I think I still have at least 10 years to manage this in theory, aside from raw income my owner and I more or less have the appropriate living conditions for bringing a small human under our roof; if we at least paid off some of our debt, we might be able to raise a child less-comfortably but still somewhat steadily already. But until then, the sands keep falling down.

I cannot help but dwell on the chance that I will lose my reproductive fertility to sheer age, and that this will wretchedly align with the dying Earth. And I would blame capitalism for both things.

Is my body's fertility in extinction, or do I have any hope for fertility against extinction?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know.

[1] In fairness, the antinatalist (anti-birth) position is actually diverse enough in its manifestations that I think some antinatalists are much more on the right than the left, and some have politics so inscrutable that I'm inclined to just say they're nihilists and leave it at that.

[2] Trans women and other transfeminine people taking estrogen, progesterone, and/or androgen blockers are also subject to reduced reproductive capacity, though my impression is that it's less absolute; the hormones they take drastically lower sperm count and may cause testicular atrophy, but the efficacy here varies by exact hormone cocktail balance. I wonder sometimes if this is why in countries that require sterilization for legal gender transition, surgery is the only thing that "counts" — although either way it's a repulsive, disgusting violation to ever make trans people give up our right to reproduce in order to be gendered properly on a piece of paper.

Thank you for reading. This was very important for me to write, moreso than many other thoughts already shared. And having written it, I've estimated I only have about three more weeks left of "principles" posts that are quite so wide-ranging and verbose as what the newsletter has offered so far. My foundations are almost finished; then Salt for the Eclipse will enter its proper form.