Attack Helicopter Mother (Essays Toward Transgender Motherhood)

An agile, deeply personal essay collection that argues for an inclusive, trans-informed definition of motherhood centered on care work and autonomy.

Subverting the anti-trans slur “I identify as an attack helicopter” and the overbearing stereotype of the “helicopter parent,” Attack Helicopter Mother roams through language and experience in search of a new definition of “mother” that sidesteps political debates about biology, arguing instead for a vision of motherhood dedicated to giving a person the care they don’t yet know they need.

In wide-ranging essays, Kassanda Jo Tomaras, the transgender mother of two transgender adolescents, examines her own life, relationships, and activist history as well as her work to give her children autonomy, affirmation, and safety in an increasingly hostile United States. Celebrating trans literary and activist foremothers like Cecilia Gentili and Camila Sosa Villada, the queerness of the Yiddish language, the joys of biohacking, and trans mothers, parents, and kids everywhere, Tomaras finds new paths through the ambiguity of motherhood that will be relevant to anyone, trans or cis, who claims the title of mother.