Interrogating the Effects of Technologies of Pregnancy Surveillance on Queer, Trans and Nonbinary Midwifery Service‐Users

ABSTRACT

Queer, transgender and nonbinary (QTNB) people access midwifery services, yet little is known about their experiences of midwifery care. Our qualitative study used critical narrative inquiry to examine how QTNB midwifery service‐users in Ontario, Canada, experience cisheteronormativity in healthcare. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 14 participants, our analysis examines the effects of biomedicalisation on QTNB people who navigate these systems. Our findings show that QTNB people access and participate in technologies of pregnancy surveillance, which deploy information‐seeking practices that collect information about the genetic makeup of the baby, conception and paternity. These ‘lines of inquiry’ present in mundane but insidious ways, embedded within cisheteronormative assumptions about paternity and conception. Stemming from broader biomedical discourse that views sex and gender as one and the same, genetically determined and binary, the discursive effects of lines of inquiry render invisible QTNB identities, family building processes and kinship structures. We explore this tension, showing how lines of inquiry have unequal effects of surveillance across queer family building, kinship and identity, and how QTNB resist dominant discourse around sex, gender and sexuality. Findings can be used by perinatal health professionals to better care for QTNB perinatal service‐users as they navigate technologies of surveillance during pregnancy.