Today we’d like to introduce you to Ash Dasuqi
Hi Ash, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Interview questions
I first realized birth was going to be a part of how I contributed toward my community and how I’d do my work toward liberation when I observed a birth during nursing school. I was dreading it until I saw this incredible person, amidst all these machines and wires and artifice, give birth to a child. When that baby emerged, I realized I was in the presence of the most alive, raw human thing I’d even seen. I hadn’t know there was reality like that during life on this teeming planet. There we so many attempts to control the process by the staff, both technologically and procedurally, and yet this baby did not care. Nor did the birther! Like dandelions springing up through concrete, they just did what their animal bodies knew to do.
I spent a lot of time studying birth and technology and the ways settler colonial violence has evolved, seeping into the medical system. I learned about the unbelievable amount of interventions happening in medicalized birth contexts that are directly contrary to evidence, that are causing both increased rates of death and poor outcomes for birthers and babies as well as a significant disparity in the outcomes white birthers experience compared to BIPOC birthers. I observed how much birth in Western medical models brought separation between birther and baby, both literally and emotionally, hampering essential hormonal processes at birth that affect the long term connection, stability, attachment, and developmental wellbeing of children, as well as ongoing mental health for birthers and parents. I wanted to become a midwife so I could provide folks the opportunity to birth as humans have been birthing for millennia, allowing them to trust me to guard the safety of that birth should anything take a left turn so they could just focus on doing the hard, rewarding, cosmic work.
When I became pregnant as a nonbinary person in 2013, the entire experience was wonderful when I was on my own, but profoundly dysphoric in every public sense. Feminized language surrounded me and I felt like I was being forcibly inducted into some sort of goddess woman cult, when I just wanted to enjoy gestating and birth apart from all the harmful gender constructs and the harmful pathologized, medicalized frameworks of birth. I knew humans had been doing this for over 200,000 years, humans of many diverse sorts, and while I had an incredible homebirth midwife I adored, I recognized the severe lack of gender affirming birth guidance. I also felt weary of the home birth community at large which often tended to be TERFy and occasionally anti-hospital, an overreaction I didn’t want to be anywhere around.
After I went to midwifery school a couple years later, I became more drawn to the educational side of birth because with each client I assisted through pregnancy and labor, I continued to accumulate many things I’d wished they’d discussed and learned about in their prenatal care that could’ve helped make their labors so much easier, safer, literally shorter and more effective, less traumatic, an experience that could actually be healing, and so much more connecting to their baby/babies, family and selves. That led me to sit down one winter break and write my first Embodied Birth curriculum! It was initially 12 hours long (it’s not 18h) and for any pregnant folks, but after about two cohorts I realized I only wanted to be teaching other trans and queer people because straight cis folks have so many great resources and an entirely gestational health system designed to service them, and I wanted to center the language and topics and dialogues and culture of my class around trans/queer folks! Most people who take my class say they didn’t even realize how painful the experience of pregnancy has been related to the feminization and “mama”ing and “woman”ing going on all around, until they are in this space that strips all that silly junk out and lets people be exactly who they are. If they’re mama’s, great! Papa’s, lovely! Parents or surrogates or solo parents or auncles or friends or family or whatever, great! This space get’s into all the incredible and really critical nitty gritties of pregnancy and labor and postpartum and newborn care and baby feeding and parenting while including all these diverse ways of existing in gender, sexuality, race, family structure, body size, and so on.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Building my business has been challenging because I’m an anticapitalist and would prefer to be doing what I love to do without the exchange of finances if I could. I’d love for my community to grow me food and upkeep a home for me while I catch their babies and prepare them for labor and early parenting! But because I live in a society that has chosen this oppressive economic structure which requires global poverty, repeat genocides and an underpaid working class even here in the heart of the beast, I do obviously try to make a living with this work. I have a relatively abundant sliding scale that is meant to make the class accessible to people with a variety of incomes, and I find that most people pay the highest rate possible even still! But with my ethical barrier around schmoozing and selling myself as a product, and just a generalized distaste for marketing, getting word out is my biggest challenge. Most of my clients come through word of mouth because I can pretty confidently say that all 200+ folks that have taken my class so far leave me raving feedback at the end, and many folks end up sending their queer friends my way when they get pregnant.
We’ve been impressed with Embodied Birth, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
This birth class is an experience I have passionately crafted over many years for trans and queer birthers, labor support people, and birth workers. It is decolonial in foundation but also steeped in evidence based research and science. We get nerdy into how hormone physiology works in labor, the stages of birth, conflicting evidence and how to engage it, and, I think perhaps most importantly, we cover how to advocate for yourself in a variety of healthcare birth settings (hospital, birth center, home).. Very tangible self-advocacy tools are really critical in an environment where birth outcomes are steadily worsening as they are in the US, statistics that are directly contrary to the idea we’ve been sold that “birth is safer than ever before” due to modern health care. This class is a community- we get to know each other well and get to processing gender and our fears before labor, queer divisions of labor, restarting testosterone therapy, nursing after top surgery, binding postpartum, inducing lactation, and so much. Several past cohorts have made whatsapp group chats to keep on, and one in particularly still meets every month on Zoom a couple years later, watching each others babies grow up together.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
I love Evidence Based Birth, that is a resource I rely on heavily. There are countless others!
Pricing:
- Trans/Queer Embodied Birth Class: base rate is $385, sliding scale options self selectable. Next cohort is March.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.embodiedbirthclass.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/embodied.birth
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/embodiedbirthclass
