We wouldn't have the Shrek sequels if we'd just abolished the family

What kind of person makes a movie about an ogre learning to love and thinks, “this creature is fertile”?

An urge I often struggle to fight is the urge to domesticate. While many people grew up using The Sims as an elaborate Final Destination simulator, I was entering each premade family’s home like Ty Pennington in the role of a feudal lord, giving everyone makeovers and planning their marriages. I also acted out this impulse on my toys; every doll had a spouse, a parent, a child, a sibling, any kind of connection that could bring them into a legible home (case in point pictured above). So I do understand to some degree why in the years following the release of the original Shrek we ended up with several sequels in which Shrek did such hetero things as meet the in-laws and fret over becoming a father. While the first Shrek remains one of my favorite childhood movies for its “we barely got a PG rating” humor, the sequels turned him into a kind of fantasy Dan Connor.

This year has been one of the most radicalizing of my life, as I think it has been for many people. Thanks to the many wonderful queer writers I follow on Twitter, I’ve learned a lot about abolishing the family. Intellectually, I am committed to this. Beyond the fact that the concept of a traditional family is poisonously entangled with colonial capitalist practices, it is so untenable that it doesn’t even exist in those families we perceive to be united nuclear units. Every family I have ever known, no matter how “traditional” they seem, cannot uphold the form of a biologically tethered in/dependent cluster. They are all “dysfunctional,” a word used in TV Guide to describe families like the Connors and the Bundys, which led me to understand that the word meant both “real” and “fun.” I didn’t need to read the manifesto twice; I got it because I already knew it to be true, and here it was in words.

Instinctually though, whether it can be blamed on messages I absorbed as a small girl-child gifted baby dolls and other homunculi, I still fight the impulse to consider anyone, including myself, incomplete without children. And here we arrive at introspection.

I saw myself as a future parent until it became clear that reproduction would not be so simple. If I decide I want children it will be a battle. In one year, I will reach the point at which the leading health recommendation is that I get a hysterectomy. It’s not so much that testosterone causes cancer, but rather that “we don’t really know what it does but hormones… cancer… best to just chuck the whole thing” with a whispered side of “and it’s not a bad idea to go ahead and sterilize you anyway.” Though pregnancy is not my favorite vision for myself (at five I decided my kids would be adopted because childbirth is not appealing), I will not be having a hysto. Is this my natural inclination to spite? Hmm; that and I like to leave my options open—who knows what the landscape will be like when I feel ready for kids? Though adoption is my preferred mode of becoming a parent, it may not be available to me as easily as I think it could be (there’s also the fact that in the event of a hysterectomy I’d be fully dependent on prescriptions for my hormones until I die).

I worry about what this reluctance to give up my innate child-bearing capacity says about me. Is this a shamefully internalized symptom of compulsory cishet-ness that I'm too weak to crush? Selfishness? Overconfidence that my genes are worth propagating, or that I’d even be a good parent at all? If I go through with child-having in any capacity, am I going to do the straight dad thing of having nightmares about my bumbling manchild's inability to keep my kid from slapstick demise?

In these troubled times, I look to Shrek.

Shrek is a swamp-dwelling, eyeball-eating, earwax-chandler whose burps are known to cause ripples in the wind. His wife is a human-born ogre who knows martial arts. Their lives were plenty rich without children, and yet Shrek the Third sees Shrek and Fiona become parents to triplets: Fergus, Felicia, and Farkle (an honest Scottish name). Is this compulsory heterosexuality? Yes absolutely. But I also think that as with many trans readings of media not intended for us, you can willfully deny the filmmakers’ purpose—spite is a mainstay of trans joy—and consider that perhaps what Shrek’s family is showing us is that a family can literally be anything.

Maybe a family can be two ogres and their triplets. Maybe it can be a donkey, his dragon wife, and their chimera babies. Perhaps a family can also be a white couple, their daughter, Shrek, tiny human Fiona, and another, smaller Shrek.