Many scholars affirm the importance of family to everyday survival and how families reflect and reproduce inequalities. My dissertation both extends this literature and addresses its exclusion of transgender women by centering the experiences of trans women who currently parent or want to be parents in the future. I conducted 54 semi-structured interviews with 27 white trans women and 27 trans women of color across North America. Using the concept of reproductive governance, I examine how trans women navigate dominant gender, race, and parenting ideologies as they create and support their families. These ideologies police both the legal and symbolic boundaries of motherhood, providing conditional protections to advantaged white women who fulfill these norms while punishing perceived deviation. However, whereas existing research on trans women often reduces them to victims of violence, my research highlights the families and communities that trans women build despite institutional barriers. My findings also contribute to several debates within gender and family scholarship. The first debate involves the ability of legal protections to minimize intersecting inequalities. My research shows the legal impact of anti-trans discourses that portray trans women—particularly low-income trans women and trans women of color—as “unfit mothers,” whose perceived danger and deceitfulness require intervention to “protect children.” By examining how judges and case workers mobilize these stereotypes, I theorize how anti-trans discourses reinforce the regulation of other communities. The second debate involves the reproduction of inequality via everyday interactions. By looking at how trans women are ascribed or denied motherhood, I argue that when trans people “do gender” they are also being held accountable to dominant racial and class ideologies. A third debate concerns what counts as “family.” Various scholars have argued that trans people form alternate kinship structures as a replacement for the nuclear family. However, I spoke to respondents who have and desire both sets of relationships. I argue that trans women engage is a range of kinship practices that challenge the depiction of motherhood as a “private act” that necessarily maintains the status quo.