My ultimate goal as your birth doula is to help you feel empowered to make decisions surrounding your care as you transition into parenthood (whether it's your first or your fourth or beyond). I want you to feel holistically seen and held during this time, and part of the way I do this is by being aware of how certain individuals may need to navigate healthcare differently. I am not a medical professional, nor a licensed therapist. I am someone who has been educated on pregnancy, labor, and birth in a supportive sense. I am specifically concerned with doing this work in alignment with anti-racist, disability justice, and queer and trans affirming values

Rather than try to define this in a new, revolutionary way, I’m going to rely on the knowledge of my disabled kin and give a few resources for understanding Disability Justice.

Disability Justice - a working draft by Patty Berne — Sins Invalid 

Moving From Disability Rights to Disability Justice - World Institute on Disability (wid.org)

10 Principles of DJ: 10 Principles of Disability Justice — Sins Invalid

At its center, DJ values access, self-determination, and an expectation of difference. This is relevant to you as a birthing person because your experience will be unique every time, even across multiple pregnancies. An expectation of difference from your support team benefits you because it allows for variance in the experience. You don’t have strict expectations you must adhere to in order to have a “healthy” or “normal” pregnancy. There’s a natural ebb and flow to all things, embrace that! In that variation, you deserve equitable access to healthcare as well as the right to bodily autonomy. In other words, you deserve to decide when to embark on your fertility journey, what that looks like, and the capacity to determine and make decisions along that path.

Additionally, “It is important to acknowledge that pregnancy itself can be a disabling event for the birthing parent, and pregnancy-related complications that threaten the health of the birthing parent can also cause death and disability for newborns.”

This is a network between pharmaceutical companies, medical personnel, and healthcare conglomerates that aim to make profit through medical care. The term is used to describe the larger medical system that has been shaped foundationally by capitalism. This system is described by healing justice organizers and practitioners as an “extension of policing and state violence to control the biology and healing practices and to define the line between ‘normal’ and not” (Anjeli Taneja, Cara Page, and Susan Raffo, The Care We Dream Of pg. 98)

Essentially, this is a way of thinking about medical and healthcare institutions as a larger network that is foundationally oppressive because of its roots in colonization. The MIC’s primary motivations can be recognized as eugenics, charity and ableism, population control, and desirability. While many people access life saving and life sustaining care through this system, it cannot be ignored that it also is a system/institution that must transform and we must develop alternatives to, as it does harm so many people under the guise of care. For more on this, see Mia Mingus’s work on mapping the MIC (Medical Industrial Complex Visual | Leaving Evidence (wordpress.com) ). 

A term to describe someone who may offer support to individuals transitioning in a myriad of ways through gender. The Gender Doula says: FAQ — The Gender Doula

I have been navigating my own transition since I was a child. I pretty much immediately upon coming out took it upon myself to be as loudly supportive as possible to my peers, who were also discovering their own transness. Together we fumbled and figured out how to find supportive doctors who would prescribe us our hormones and do our surgeries, how to get it all covered on insurance, how to change our names on legal documents, and more. We also did the fun stuff: dressing each other, giving each other haircuts and dyes in the bathroom at 1am, holding each other's hands through tattoos and piercings. All the things that made us feel more like ourselves, that people might not immediately think of when we talk about transitioning. I taught my trans femme friends tips about makeup I learned from playing around with it over the years, and they in turn taught me about how to shave the sensitive skin on my face. We tip shared and loved and cared for each other. After training and working as a CNA, I became the go-to person in our friend group for post-op care at home. Not that I was any more qualified than anyone else, and I certainly am not in the business of providing professional medical care, but nonetheless I have helped my friends and greater community heal from a variety of transitional surgeries. 

All this to say, I am not formally trained as a gender doula. Notably, it is a developing field that has been practiced informally over generations. There is not an accredited certification or license one can obtain to be a gender doula, though there are many educators out there teaching us how to do this work. I have over a decade of experience supporting people in gender transitions of all kinds. I hold a great deal of care and do my best to continue reading, learning from others doing this work, and growing my practice as a careworker. 

A term coined by the late Stacey Park Milbern to describe the often invisible work Disabled people do to share knowledge and support other disabled people in their transitions into disability. What are disability doulas? People provide support through isolating life transitions (19thnews.org) 

Like gender doula’ing, this capacity to do this work does not necessarily come from a formalized training. No one gave me a crash course on how to be disabled. However, a lifetime of being disabled and learning how to make this world more accessible for myself and those around me has given me unique knowledge. I am not all-knowing when it comes to accessibility, but am perpetually learning and listening. I am intentionally centering the most marginalized among us, the incarcerated disabled folks, Black and Indigenous disabled people, Mad people, and beyond. Their perspectives teach all of us so much about how truly inaccessible this world is and how we can crip it to increase access.

Ultimately, I care about positive outcomes for all birthing people and babies. I am someone who may have a different lived experience than you but that is a benefit, as I have unique knowledge about navigating the bureaucracies that have the potential to make any pregnancy difficult. For example, have a nontraditional family dynamic that doesn’t fit neatly in the “married mother ___ & father ____”? I have learned how to read and understand each states laws surrounding birth certificates and the ways to list parents to ensure the appropriate people have parental rights out of necessity because I don’t fit that normative definition either. I have learned to think very critically about navigating medical settings and legal procedures surrounding birth and could be an ally to your family as you start to navigate them yourself. 

The Sliding Scale: A Tool of Economic Justice — Worts + Cunning Apothecary | Intersectional Herbalism + Magickal Arts (wortsandcunning.com)

This link takes you to the original creator of this model of financial justice work. Sliding scales are used to help lessen the financial burden and increase access to care and support. I personally use a self guided method of sliding scale, I will not ask you to prove any need to qualify for sliding scale. Instead, I ask that you make an honest assessment of your circumstances financially using the guidelines listed in the image. This helps me continue doing the work I am so passionate about by supporting me financially, and allows for those in most need of lower costs to access it. This work is based on mutual trust.