WE ARE CHILDFREE

I am a thirty-year-old person on the masculine spectrum living in a small Polish town hollowed out by the post-transformation era, still operating on the basis of basic gender division and manual labor.

One of those roles is giving birth to and raising children – which, despite all the idealistic framing, is still primarily a form of labor meant to justify the usefulness of these women and allow them access to resources, either from the state or from the man to whom the children belong.

The refusal to have children and be a mother – something I’ve loudly protested since I was little – is tied to my identity and my place in society, though for a long time I didn’t understand that the problem wasn’t children themselves, but the forced care work associated with them.

Children were just a tool adults used to push me into those roles – we were both victims of the same family-values propaganda.