Uncertainty and luck discourses in intersex/VSC reproduction and family-building journeys

Are we "lucky" to live in an era of rapidly expanding medical technology? Drawing on qualitative interviews with people with Variations of Sex Characteristics (VSC), their partners, and medical professionals across multiple national contexts, this article examines how "luck discourse" is mobilized in narratives of family building. Participants frequently invoke luck, often in contradictory ways, to describe their experiences of pursuing parenthood in technoscapes that include uterus transplantation (UTx), surgical sperm retrieval (TESE/MicroTESE) and other assisted reproductive technologies. Rather than treating such inconsistencies as error, we ask what luck discourse does and reveals. We analyse invocations of luck as sociolinguistic acts that mediate tensions between agency and constraint, autonomy and medical authority, hope and despair across medicalized life courses. These invocations often index broader concerns surrounding inequality and medical authority, while providing a flexible language for uncertainty. Building on this analysis, we propose a sociological typology of luck that conceptualises it as a dynamic, non-binary, and indexical resource. We identify three primary domains of luck discourse: temporal, statistical, and structural; alongside a cross-cutting agentive dimension through which individuals negotiate responsibility and control. Attending to luck discourse offers a valuable methodological and analytical entry point for understanding how people navigate uncertainty and how broader social dynamics, inequalities and conflicts are reflected and negotiated through luck discourse.