Merve Emre presents the stories of her interviewees as evidence that all reproduction is, and should be, assisted, not “natural.” But these stories are equally proof of just how hard it is to give up nature as an object of desire. Even queer theorists are sobered to learn the sex of an embryo. So when Emre proposes we expose the lie of nature, I’m not so sure. I’m alienated by the discourse around the natural, sure, but only the same way I’m alienated by the skinny white girls with dead eyes and bare midriffs who herald, like dandelions, the arrival of summer in New York City. Unfold my political critique at its creases, and you will be left with nothing but flat, blank envy. That doesn’t mean nature isn’t a lie. It just means that we never believed in it because it was true; we believed in it because we wanted to.

This is my way of saying what I think Emre means when she writes, “people’s bodies are unruly sites for politics.” It’s an observation she makes of micha cárdenas’s Pregnancy (2009), to which it applies if only by accident. cárdenas does indeed perform the ambivalence of reproduction, but not without arming herself with political buzzwords clearly intended to pack a moral punch. “oh the privilege of / cis-hetero reproduction!” the poet exclaims, a laptop sticker of a line sure to win righteous snaps from the mostly cisgender queers who are spending their Tuesday night at this independent bookstore in Oakland. I prefer Joanne Spataro, who longs in the New York Times to make a baby with her trans fiancée “the way fertile cisgender people do.” She makes no attempt to justify this desire politically. She wouldn’t be able to, anyway.