FTM in the Fertility Clinic:Troubling the Gendered Boundaries of

Reproduction

K.J. Surkan

AbstractThe assumption of heterosexual reproduction andfertility as a ‘natural’ part of what it means to comeof age as a (feminine) woman has been deeply calledinto question by an increasing number of non-normatively gendered and/or queer individuals seekingto reproduce. Most famously, female-to-male ThomasBeattie stunned many with his pregnancy announcement in2008, although he was neither the first transgender manto be pregnant or give birth. The media and publicresponse to Beattie’s pregnancy, however, remains avery good indication of how inseparable reproductionand the very definition of womanhood are, and thechallenges facing trans and genderqueer people introubling gender roles understood to be the foundationof the nuclear family. This paper is an examination ofthe implications of new reproductive technologies(including IUI, IVF, and cryogenic preservation of ova,sperm, and embryos) on the conceptualization ofpregnancy and the traditional family, in both socialand legal terms, as medical practitioners and familycourts attempt to respond to the challenges these newtechnologies pose to conventional binary thinking aboutsex, gender and sexuality in relationship toreproduction.

Key Words: Male pregnancy, FTM, fertility, IVF,transgender, genderqueer, reproduction, queer families.

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1. Sex, Gender, and Pregnancy Pregnancy is one of the most highly gendered medical

conditions, most obviously because of its inherent needfor reproductive organs found in the female body, theovaries and uterus being the most essential. But thesexed body is not synonymous with the gendered body, asgender theorists1 have pointed out, leading us to lookmore critically at the social construction of pregnancyas undeniable proof of womanhood, and what that mightmean for non-normatively gendered people intent onreproduction. Indeed, the pregnant body is socially andculturally tied to the association of woman withmotherhood, an association that often seems inviolableeven today.

In 1976, Adrienne Rich distinguished between what shecalled ‘two strands’ of motherhood, ‘as experience, onepossible and profound experience for women, andmotherhood as enforced identity and as politicalinstitution.2’ It is the latter that has been the focus ofresistance for feminists seeking to defeat theprescription of ‘biology as destiny’ in the fight forwomen’s rights to reproductive freedom. ‘Under thatinstitution,’ Rich wrote, ‘all women are seen primarilyas mothers; all mothers are expected to experiencemotherhood unambivalently and in accordance withpatriarchal values; and the “nonmothering” woman isseen as deviant.’3

The presumption of heterosexual reproduction andfertility as a ‘natural’ part of what it means to comeof age as a (feminine) woman has been deeply calledinto question by an increasing number of non-normatively gendered and/or queer individuals seekingto reproduce and raise children of their own. Newreproductive technologies have played a major role in

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the rise of this phenomenon, troubling the genderedboundaries of reproduction as trans and genderqueerpeople utilize reproductive medicine to achievepregnancies that are socially challenging thecategories of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ in the constructionof new queer families.

This paper takes up the question of transgenderreproduction through the figure of the ‘pregnant man,’a term which has been deployed in relationship to manydifferent configurations of male reproduction,including but not limited to female-to-male andgenderqueer pregnancy on the masculine spectrum, thefuturistic imaginary of male abdominal pregnancy4, andexpectant fathers of all kinds, among them gay menundertaking surrogacy arrangements5, trans mapas, papas,and babas, butch dads and lesbian fathers6. Theseunconventional parents and parents-to-be are stakingnew claims on a domain viewed by many as belongingsolely to women: pregnancy and birth.

2. Family Planning, or Things ChangeIn the mid-1980s, when I was a teenager, my mother

remarked that she thought the year 2000 would be agreat time for me to have a baby. The prospect of agrandchild arriving at the start of a new centurysomehow appealed to her. Her own mother, mygrandmother, had been born in 1900, and my mother oftencommented on how easy it was to calculate her agebecause of that fact. At the time, I wasn’t at allcompelled by her logic – I was a tomboy in the processof coming out as lesbian, and pregnancy was thefarthest thing from my mind. ‘Oh, no, I’m never havingchildren,’ I told her, wanting to dash any hopes of therequisite husband and millennial offspring she might beharboring on my behalf. She however, refused to be

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dismissed. ‘You never know,’ she said. ‘you mightchange your mind.’

I didn’t think much more about it for another tenyears; by then I was a young queer academic gravitatingtoward a transgender identity. At that point, my ideaof what a family could be had dramatically changed. Ibegan wondering how I might become a parent. My searchfor a partner had not been going too well, and myprospects for adoption as an underemployed trans gradstudent weren’t looking great either. I had notfinished my degree, and was in no financial position tosupport a child. The year 2000 suddenly seemedunrealistically close at hand. Still, I realized, I hadbegun to desire a child of my own.

3. (Trans)Male Pregnancy as Self-Surrogacy

1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1-47, and JudithHalberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1998), 1-44.2 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose (NewYork: Norton 1979), 196-197.3 Ibid.4 Lee Mingwei and Virgil Wong, ‘POP! The First MalePregnancy’. Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.malepregnancy.com>.5 Darren Rosenblum et al., ‘Pregnant Man?: AConversation’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 22:2 (2010):208.6 Polly Pagenhart, ‘Parenthood Is a Very GenderedThing’, Lesbian Dad, last modified 25 January 2008, Viewed5 May 2013,<http://www.lesbiandad.net/2008/01/parenthood-is-a-very-gendered-thing/>.

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The very public spectacle of female-to-maletranssexual Thomas Beatie’s pregnancy announcement in2007 stunned many worldwide, primarily because of thecirculation of the image of an exceptionally masculineBeatie, complete with facial hair and post-mastectomymale-appearing chest, sporting a protruding pregnancybelly. Displayed in a classic pregnancy pose, Beatienevertheless read as male, confounding viewers withwhat looked impossible: the figure of a pregnant man.Beatie was able to become pregnant and give birthbecause despite hormonal treatment and a doublemastectomy, he had kept his uterus and ovaries.

After the 2008 delivery of his daughter, he went onto carry two more pregnancies to term, welcoming histhird child in 2010. Many bloggers and commentersreacted negatively to the news of his pregnancies,insisting that by definition he could not be a manbecause ‘men don’t give birth’:

SHE SHE SHE SHE is not a man. Men do not getimpregnated in their WOMBS and deliver babies.She did not have a sex change just doublemastectomies. I have absolutely no issue withtransgender, but, this is not a male, with orwithout genital reassignment, because, MEN DO NOTHAVE BABIES and I'm sick of this fraud and herneed to have attention all the time. –SHELL07247

7 Joyce Chen, ‘Pregnant Man Thomas Beatie Reveals BuffBody, Ripped Abs in New Photos After Baby NumberThree’, NY Daily News, 27 July 2011, Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/pregnant-man-thomas-beatie-reveals-buff-body-ripped-abs-new-photos-baby-number-article-1.159543>.

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For his part, Beatie has consistently rejected thisposition, arguing that ‘wanting to have a biologicalchild is neither a male nor a female desire, but ahuman desire,’8 and that his choice to become pregnantought to be best understood as the path taken by atransgender man working with the functionalreproductive organs he had been given at birth.

Shortly before the birth of his first child, he madethe following statement:

I am transgender, legally male, and legallymarried to Nancy. . . How does it feel to be apregnant man? Incredible. Despite the fact thatmy belly is growing with a new life inside me, Iam stable and confident being the man that I am.In a technical sense I see myself as my ownsurrogate, though my gender identity as a male isconstant.9

From his perspective, Beatie’s pregnancy did not recodehim as female, because he understood his masculinityand pregnancy to be completely independent of oneanother. Following a flurry of criticism after Beatie’sfirst announcement was made in the Advocate, RobertHaaland defended the concept of male pregnancy with agesture toward other species:

Even some transgender people [are] wondering howsomeone can identify as male and yet be pregnant.Some have even gone so far to suggest that by

8 Thomas Beatie, ‘Labor of Love’, Advocate, 14 March2008. Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.advocate.com/news/2008/03/14/labor-love?page=full>9 Ibid.

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bearing the child he is less, or even not, male,despite Beatie’s declaration that he continues toidentify as male.

But nature is full of pregnant males. Male seahorses, pipefish, and weedy and leafy sea dragonsare examples of males that can get pregnant. . .The argument that it is unnatural for him to havea baby flies in the face of real, live examplesfrom nature where males get pregnant.10

Still, what might it mean, in social terms, to be apregnant male seahorse? The gender trouble we seem tobe into here has everything to do with the culturalconstruction of pregnancy and reproduction as beingfemale/feminine, not so much the actual mechanics ofconception, gestation, and birth – which surely, in anincreasingly technological age of reproductivemedicine, posed the least interesting part of theproblem. Beatie possessed a working uterus and ovaries;achieving pregnancy, then, was a (simple) matter ofhalting testosterone injections and proceeding withconception with donor sperm, given that his partner wasa woman who had undergone hysterectomy.

What is perhaps more interesting is Beatie’sdescription of himself as ‘his own surrogate’ – aphrase which seems to belie his earlier disavowal ofpregnancy as inherently female, with no ability toresignify his gender identity as female/feminine. Forwhat does it mean to be a surrogate – a substitute –here substituting for what? The role of the natural

10 Robert Haaland, ‘In Response to “Labor of Love”’,Advocate, 1 April 2008. Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.advocate.com/news/2008/04/01/response-39labor-love39>

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mother, perhaps? The womb his wife Nancy no longerpossessed? But Beatie said he is his own surrogate,meaning that he carries his child for himself, implying atthe least some sort of psychic separation betweenhimself in his role as intended father of the childpost-birth and his biological role as a kind of‘surrogate mother’ in carrying the pregnancy to term.

His statement, then, is a speech act in which hesimultaneously embraces male pregnancy and denies it;his path to fatherhood is one of surrogacy rather thana straightforward pregnancy that might confer upon himan unwanted female or feminine identity by associationwith the conventional biological path to motherhood.

4. Reproduction and the Transitional Trans Body

There is a great deal of social anxiety about theinstability of the transgendered body, and aspreviously demonstrated in the widespread reaction toThomas Beatie’s very public pregnancy, nowhere is thismore apparent than in the insistence on congruence ofthe pregnant body with female/feminine sex/genderidentity. Because reproduction is conventionallyunderstood as both natural and fundamentallyheterosexual, it has always been positioned asincompatible with queer and/or trans identities, whichare seen as both deviant and non-procreative.

However, this perception has little to do withbiological reproductive capacity, and the existence ofreproductive technologies ranging from cryopreservationto IVF has made it possible to conceive withoutengaging in procreative heterosexual sex. Thesetechnologies have also extended the reproductive windowfor both male-bodied and female-bodied transindividuals, by enabling people to remove and

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cryogenically store gametes outside the body for use ata future time, post transition. Medically, there arefewer barriers than ever to queer and trans baby-making; the question now becomes one of knowledge,access, and the reconciling of one’s given anatomicalmakeup with the desire to create and/or carry a childto term. For a trans man (or person who identifiesanywhere on the transmasculine spectrum) in particular,the biological possibility of pregnancy persists aslong as he retains a functional uterus, regardless ofhow masculine his external appearance may be.

Why, then, are queer and trans people consistentlyseen as inherently non-reproductive? The seemingcontradiction between transgender identity andreproductive potential is much more a product of socialforces than biologically-determined mutual exclusivity.The meanings of pregnancy, parenting, and the desire tohave and/or raise a child, are all socially constructedand highly correlated with conventional binary ideasabout gender, either from the perspective of men aspresumed fathers or women as presumed mothers. But themeaning of “being transgendered” is itself equallyconstructed, relationally constituted as it is to theconventional perception of gender as binary and thenecessity of understanding transsexuality in particularas a movement from one sex to the other. Therelationship of reproduction to constructions of transidentity is therefore complex and circular, sincefertility and the reproductive impulse are read throughgendered assumptions about the proper function of the(essential) sexed body, while at the same time theyperversely also serve as a counter-measure of how trans(read non-gender normative) one actually is. The resultis that trans people are expected to rejectreproduction as something that will always be

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incongruous with their desire to change sex, andreproductive failure is demanded as evidence of theirauthenticity as trans subjects.

Complete gender transition has historically beenautomatically presumed to result in permanentsterilization through hormonal and surgical treatment;in fact, in many countries sterilization and/orchildlessness was even required for the legal change ofgender markers on identity documents, and still is inmany places.11 The permanence of surgical removal ofreproductive organs and resulting infertility has beengiven as grounds for extensive gatekeeping,particularly with trans youth expressing the desire tochange sex at increasingly young ages. More recently,guidelines for discussing reproductive issues withtrans patients have been revised and distributed thatare framed around notions of informed consent anddisclosure, such as the World Professional Associationfor Transgender Health (WPATH)’s 7th version of Standardsof Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and GenderNonconforming People. The section on reproductive healthstates that ‘it is desirable for patients to makedecisions concerning fertility before starting hormonetherapy or undergoing surgery to remove/alter theirreproductive organs,’ and directs heath careprofessionals to discuss reproductive options with11 See Tris Reid-Smith, ‘Trans People Forced to Be Sterilized Across Europe’, Gay Star News, 30 April 2013. Viewed 30 July 2014, < http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-people-forced-be-sterilized-across-europe300413> and Laura H. Norton, ‘Neutering the Transgendered: Human Rights and Japan’s Law No. 111’. In The Transgender Studies Reader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura. (New York: Routledge, 2013). 591-603.

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patients even if the patients ‘are not interested inthese issues at the time of treatment.’12

The presumption that the transgender population iswholly uninterested in reproduction has turned out,however, to be patently false. A study of 50 Dutch-speaking transsexual men (female-to-male transsexualpersons) conducted in Belgium in 2010 concluded quitethe opposite: ‘that the majority of transsexual mendesire to have children.’13 Noting that ‘many medicalexperts remain critical on the ethical aspects ofpossible procreation after sex reassignment,’ theresearchers nevertheless concluded that since themajority of transsexual men are of reproductive age atthe time of transition and have relationships followingtransition, ‘as any other couple, they might desire tohave children’.14 The Belgian study attributes the risein interest in trans reproduction at least in part tothe international publicity surrounding Thomas Beatie’spregnancies.

Whatever the cause, the topic of trans fertility hasnot only been investigated by clinicians; within thetransgender community there has been a groundswell ofinterest reflected on social media and in theprogramming at the 13th annual Philadelphia Trans-HealthConference (PTHC) in June 2014. The closed Facebookgroup ‘Birthing and Breastfeeding Transmen and Allies,’founded in August 2011, had amassed 200 members withinthe first weeks of its existence, and nearly two yearslater has quadrupled in size. Members routinely share12 WPATH, Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People. 7th version. <http://www.wpath.org>13 Katrien Wierckx, et al., ‘Reproductive Wish in Transsexual Men’, Human Reproduction, 27:2 (2012): 483.14 Ibid., 484.

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information about conception, pregnancy, lactation, andparenting from a transgender or gender non-conformingperspective. Two sessions at PTHC were devoted tofertility issues, ‘Pregnancy After Transitioning: TheMale-Gendered Experience with Fertility, Pregnancy, andBirth Outcomes,” and ‘The Birds, the Bees, and LiquidNitrogen? Fertility Preservation Options for TransPeople’. Both workshops filled their rooms to capacity,as trans people of all ages and stages of transitionsought to find out more about their reproductiveoptions.

The founder of the Facebook group, Trevor MacDonald,made headlines in 2012 when he applied to be abreastfeeding coach and was rejected by La Leche LeagueCanada. The group has since revised the policyrestricting volunteer coaching positions to women. Ofhis own experience as a post-transitional trans man whohas been pregnant and breastfeeds his child using anat-breast supplementation system, he says:

I believe that I am part of a growing trend.Transgender individuals are now oftentransitioning earlier in life than they did inthe past. As our society becomes more aware ofthe need for some people to transition,transgender folks are receiving support to makethis decision in their twenties or even teenyears, before they start their families. This meansthat there will be some transgender men whochoose to carry their own babies and breastfeedthem.15

5. Queer Families As Intentional FamiliesThe biological realities surrounding heterosexuality

are such that many people (and of course especially

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women) fall into parenthood rather than choosing it;this is necessarily not so for queer people. Theinclusion, therefore, of a child in one’sconceptualization of a queer family is something thatrequires conscious thought and planning, and theoptions for welcoming a child permanently into one’shome are rather different for people according to theirgender, age, and socio-economic status. For those whowant a child who shares some biological connection toone or both parents, the project of babymaking becomesa question of fertility, a medically determined termaround which an entire industry has been built.

Single women and lesbians were the first groups ofpeople to challenge the notion of assisted reproductionas strictly a treatment for heterosexual infertility.In her 2004 book Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination IsChanging the World, Amy Agigian makes a bold claim aboutlesbian use of AI:

Far from being ‘just like’ coital impregnation,the practice of lesbian AI problematizes some ofour most sacred and taken-for-granted assumptionsabout the family and gender arrangements.Alternative insemination continues thedisaggregation of motherhood and fatherhood thatthe new procreative technologies represent. . . .The intentional lesbian family is a postmodernfamily form that emphasizes affinity over biologyand (patri)lineage.16

15 Jes Watson, ‘Breastfeeding Dad Trevor MacDonald StaysPositive’, Bunch Family, last modified 22 August 2012, Viewed 30 July 2014, < http://bunchfamily.ca/breastfeeding-dad-trevor-macdonald-stays-positive/>

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Three years later, Laura Mamo makes a similar argumentin Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age ofTechnoscience, writing that ‘assisted reproduction ingeneral, and lesbian reproductive practices inparticular, make strange or “queer” what is consideredto be known, familiar, commonplace – the natural orderof things’.17

This queer challenge to heteronormative procreationand the resulting nuclear family that began in whatAgigian calls the “lesbian baby boom” of the 1980s hasexpanded with the commercialization of reproductivemedicine and the growth of independent cryobanks andfertility medicine. As single heterosexual women andlesbians, single or coupled, continued to formintentional families through their use of the fertilityclinic, they paved the way for other queer and transfamilies to follow suit. However, cost and accesscontinues to be an issue of pressing concern, and onewhich for many people hinges on the definition of(in)fertility and the extent to which assistedreproduction can be covered by insurance. In BeyondExpectation: Lesbian/Bi/Queer Women and Assisted Conception,Jacquelyne Luce observes that lesbians were oftendenied access to donor insemination, IVF, and donor eggprocedures:

Arguments against providing lesbians with accessto assisted-reproductive technologies emphasizedthat lesbians’ so-called infertility resulted

16 Amy Agigian, Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). 8.17 Laura Mamo, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).22.

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from social rather than biological reasons, andthus, assisted reproduction services were notjustified.18

Given that the single biggest barrier to conception forwomen is age, insurance requirements for establishingmedical need for intervention revolve around a curiousdance of disclosure of sexual practice based on apresumption that heterosexual intercourse is involved.Arriving in a fertility clinic and perceived as asingle woman or as a lesbian, the burden of proof mustbe met by clinical documentation of a year ofunsuccessful insemination attempts; for heterosexualcouples trying ‘naturally’ only their word is needed.As I would later read in the fine print of my healthinsurance policy, I would only become eligible for hightech assisted reproduction coverage (IVF) after aminimum of 12 failed attempts, because I had ‘no knownexposure to sperm,’ the industry loophole for denyinglesbians coverage on the basis of social infertility.

Despite the knowledge that female fertility peaks atage 27, and takes a precipitous drop after age 35,19 Iwas not much closer to actively pursuing a pregnancy asI entered my 30s. But by 2004 a confluence of eventshad taken place: I was partnered, my dissertationfinished and defended, and I had moved to Massachusettsto work on a new research project. I was 35 andgenderqueer; there was no time to lose. And so mypartner and I became queer consumers of the fertility18 Jacquelyne Luce, Beyond Expectation: Lesbian/Bi/Queer Women and Assisted Conception. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010). 162.19 Debora L. Spar, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, andPolitics Drive the Commerce of Conception. (Cambridge, MA:Harvard Business Review Press, 2006). 15.

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industry, scrolling through lists of sperm donors,buying ovulation test kits – and then – failure. I soonfound myself to be, remarkably, the FTM in thefertility clinic.

6. Feminism, Reproduction, and the Genderqueer Body Feminist thought has a long history of ideas about

reproduction and its relationship to women’sliberation. This is because fundamentally women’smovements have always fought against the heterosexualimperative ‘biology as destiny,’ which relegated womento societal roles of wives and mothers by virtue oftheir ability to reproduce. The decision of when andwhether to have children, therefore, has been centralto feminist political thought and activism,particularly with regard to the quest to make birthcontrol and abortion services widely available. In thecontext of patriarchal heteronormative relationships,reproduction effectively signaled the end of (orseverely curtailed) women’s career aspirations and insome early feminists’ view, any chance for the trueemancipation of women. Shulamith Firestone, forexample, famously argued in 1970 in The Dialectic of Sex thatthe use of what she calls ‘artificial reproduction’might free women from the ‘tyranny of theirreproductive biology,’20 thus ending the unequaldistribution of domestic labor and childrearing.

Over forty years later we have not yet realizedFirestone’s somewhat science-fictionesque vision ofreproduction via artificial womb, though one couldargue that medical technologies have moved us muchcloser. But how have these new reproductive20 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for FeministRevolution. (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). 206.

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technologies impacted our perception of gender roles,families, and the desire to have children? Thinkingabout the economy of medicalized reproduction in aqueer/trans context offers a way to revisit basicassumptions about the use of and access to medicaltechnologies in pursuit of the desire for a child,particularly as these technologies have the potentialto destabilize conventional gender roles in parenthood,if not the very notion of the heterosexual nuclearfamily.

Desire in a queer context is usually framed inopposition to reproductive heteronormativity – that is,sex without reproduction. Increasingly, however, queercouples are choosing to have children by utilizing newreproductive technologies in order to achieve pregnancywithout having heterosexual sex. This queer desire forfamilies curiously benefits from the neoliberalprivatization of fertility services and commodificationof reproductive gametes in a capitalist economy, thoughit privileges only those with the material wealthnecessary to afford the high price tags on theseservices and bio-products. The prevalence of spermbanks, egg donation services, and the commercialsurrogacy industry are just a few examples of thiscommodification, creating a growing fertility industrythat is poorly regulated (or not regulated at all) inthe context of a global economy.

It is at this juncture that it becomes useful toconsider how reproductive technology increasinglyenables us to separate the desire to have a child fromthe desire to be pregnant, and to return to thequestion of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenthood in aqueer/trans context. The issue of reproduction is(perhaps necessarily) overdetermined by biology; whatnew technologies enable, however, is the subversion of

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the conventional mapping of motherhood onto the femalebody and fatherhood onto the male body.

In her dissertation research for a project titledGender Identity and In/Fertility, Michelle Walks interviewedpeople identifying as butch, trans, and queer who wereengaged in pregnancy and breastfeeding experiences. Herfindings support the notion that these experiences arenot universally understood as feminine/female. Shewrites:

What I found, is that for many BTQ individuals,reproduction associated with the female body (ie:pregnancy and breastfeeding) is not exclusivelyconsidered a feminine desire or experience. Infact, what I discovered is that BTQ individualswho experience pregnancy and breastfeedingexplicitly challenge the cultural fetishassociating femininity with reproduction(including pregnancy, breastfeeding, mothering,and fertility)21

The articulation of Walks’ research subjects ofpregnancy and breastfeeding as something other than anecessarily feminine experience echoed my ownrelationship to the pregnant and lactating trans body.

7. Occupying the Fertility Clinic as a Fat (Pregnant) Man

I never think of myself as a woman; I never imaginedmyself as a mother. But I did have the desire to be theparent of a child. “Did you always want to bepregnant?” the social worker at the fertility clinicasked. “Not really, I say.”

21 Michelle Walks, ‘Gender Identity and In/Fertility’(PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2013). ii.

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What I don’t say is that I’m trans. My partner has nointerest in being pregnant. This is the body I have towork with, a fairly conventional female one. Not thatit’s working too well; after twelve consecutive monthsof interuterine insemination cycles I am still notpregnant. We have moved from a small clinic in WesternMass to a major research hospital in Boston.

The good news is that by failing twelve times I havenow met the medical criteria for infertility, andbecause I work in Massachusetts, one of four states atthe time with mandatory infertility coverage, I nowqualify for three cycles of interuterine insemination(IUI) with injectable drugs; if those fail I will becleared for IVF coverage.

In ‘Fertile Ground: Feminists Theorize ReproductiveTechnologies,’ Thomson writes ‘involuntarychildlessness is recognized as being one of thegreatest forms of unhappiness and loss an adult womanmight have to endure.’22 I have the feeling that oursocial worker believes I am too masculine to getpregnant, and she cautions me to be in touch with theseprofound feelings of unhappiness and loss I must befeeling. I am annoyed; by now I am 37 and I don’t feelany more or less womanly for having wasted a year oninseminations with a small chance of success per cycle.The process is dragging out and I am sure age isplaying a role in my infertility.

A blizzard strikes on a scheduled insemination day.The nurse calls to say the weather is too bad fortravel and we should just have intercourse at home. Myfemale partner lets her know that we’d be happy to but22 Charis Thomson, ‘Fertile Ground: Feminists TheorizeReproductive Technologies,’ Making Parents: The OntologicalChoreography of Reproductive Technologies, (Cambridge, MA: TheMIT Press, 2005). 55.

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that would definitely have zero chance of resulting inpregnancy. We drive through the storm. The cycle fails.Finally – after two and a half years, 15 months of IUI,and two IVF cycles, a miracle happens. I find out on my38th birthday that I am pregnant. It is February 2007.Thomas Beatie has nothing on me; in fact, I’ve neverheard of him. He is not yet a pregnant man, as hisdaughter will be conceived later that year.

We go to a prenatal appointment in my secondtrimester. The nurse hands the urine cup to my tallslender partner, saying “Your husband can wait overthere.” She looks aghast when my partner informs herthat it is not she but the shorter and fatter ‘husband’who is pregnant.

I go from being a somewhat androgynous guy to adistinctly fat man. About a week away from birth with a9 pound baby, my partner and I go to a plant showsponsored by the local horticulture society. It is latesummer in Philly and a million degrees out and I blendin perfectly with all the other middle-aged fat menwearing oversized shorts and giant button-down short-sleeve shirts over their beer bellies. The womancashier asks me ‘Do you need a bag, sir?’ when I buy asmall plant for our front yard. “Please,” I said. Shedoesn’t look at me twice.

8. From pregnant to parentIn October 2007 our son is born. I have finally made

the transition from pregnant to parent, and am stillsorting it all out. The hospital staff keeps calling mehis mother, but that clearly is a better description ofmy partner’s relationship to this small person whosearrival in the world has just remarkably transformed usfrom a couple into a family.

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Later I find a friend’s blog entry that makes somesense of my confusion:

We all know there are mothers, and there arefathers. And there’s nothing in between,parentally speaking. Female parents are themothers, male parents are the fathers. . . theeither/or, male/female fixity of the basic roles

23 Polly Pagenhart, ‘Parenthood Is a Very GenderedThing’, Lesbian Dad, last modified 25 January 2008, Viewed5 May 2013,<http://www.lesbiandad.net/2008/01/parenthood-is-a-very-gendered-thing/>.24 JB, ‘Baba-Hood’. Lesbian Dad, last modified 1 March 2013, Viewed 5 May 2013, <http://www.lesbiandad.net/2013/3/baba-hood/>

Bibliography

Agigian, Amy. Baby Steps: How Lesbian Alternative Insemination Is Changing the World. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.

Aristarkhova, Irina. ‘Man as Hospitable Space: The MalePregnancy Project’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 14:4 (2009): 25-30.

Beatie, Thomas. ‘Labor of Love,’ Advocate, 14 March 2008.Viewed 5 May 2013, <http://www.advocate.com/news/2008/03/14/labor-love?page=full>

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pretty much goes without saying. Unless, ofcourse, one’s gender itself lies somewherebetwixt and between the poles, as mine does. Thisqueers the do, as they say, highlighting howparenthood is implicitly a gendered binary. Andwoe betide s/he who tries to plot a middle path.23

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Chen, Joyce. ‘Pregnant Man Thomas Beatie Reveals BuffBody, Ripped Abs in New Photos After Baby NumberThree,’ NY Daily News, 27 July 2011, Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/pregnant-man-thomas-beatie-reveals-buff-body-ripped-abs-new-photos-baby-number-article-1.159543>.

Chen, Mel Y. ‘Everywhere Archives: Transgendering,Trans Asians, and the Internet’. Australian Feminist Studies,25:64 (June 2010): 199-208.

Currah, Paisley. ‘Expecting Bodies: The Pregnant Manand Transgender Exclusion from the Employment Non-Discrimination Act’. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36:3 & 4(Fall/Winter 2008): 330-336.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for FeministRevolution. New York, Bantam Books, 1970.

Flynn, Taylor. ‘The Ties That [Don’t] Bind: TransgenderFamily Law and the Unmaking of Families’. In TransgenderRights, edited by Paisley Currah, Richard Juang, andShannon Price Minter, 32-50. Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2006.

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I have the sense that I am embarking on a trulywonderful new chapter in my gender journey. I have anew name – Papa – which is strange at first, not somuch because of its gendered connotations, but becauseit signifies a whole new identity, and one which hassuddenly taken precedence over everything else. In thisexperience I find solidarity with other butch and queerparents; some occupy more middle ground, calling

Haaland, Robert. ‘In Response to “Labor of Love”’,Advocate, 1 April 2008. Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.advocate.com/news/2008/04/01/response-39labor-love39>

Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End ofNormal. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012.

Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1998.

JB, ‘Baba-Hood’. Lesbian Dad. Last modified March 1, 2013.Accessed May 5, 2013.<http://www.lesbiandad.net/2013/3/baba-hood/>

Luce, Jacquelyne. Beyond Expectation: Lesbian/Bi/Queer Women andAssisted Conception. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2010.

Ludlow, Jeannie. ‘Papa’s Baby, Mama’s. . . Papa?:Toward a Faux Gestational History.’ SPECS Journal of Art andCulture 2:1 (2012): 74-89.

Mamo, Laura. Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Ageof Technoscience. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

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themselves ‘Baba’ rather than Mama or Papa, but oursense of priorities seem the same. On “Baba-Hood,”guest blogger JB writes:

Being a genderqueer butch lesbian isn’t asimportant now that I’m a Baba. While I stillstruggle with names, outness, and belonging, Ifind my parent-hood, my Baba-hood has moved

Mingwei, Lee, and Virgil Wong, ‘POP! The First MalePregnancy’. Viewed 5 May 2013,<http://www.malepregnancy.com>.

Norton, Laura H. ‘Neutering the Transgendered: HumanRights and Japan’s Law No. 111’. In The Transgender StudiesReader 2, edited by Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura,591-603. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Ooi, Joanne Li Shen. ‘Mr. Mom: Can We Deliver?’, Journalof Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care. 35:1 (2009): 56-58.

Pagenhart, Polly. ‘Parenthood Is a Very GenderedThing’, Lesbian Dad. Last modified January 25, 2008.Accessed May 5, 2013.<http://www.lesbiandad.net/2008/01/parenthood-is-a-very-gendered-thing/>

Reid-Smith, Tris. ‘Trans People Forced to Be SterilizedAcross Europe’, Gay Star News, 30 April 2013. Viewed 30 July 2014, < http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/trans-people-forced-be-sterilized-across-europe300413>

Rich, Adrienne. On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose. NewYork: Norton 1979.

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forefront. We as parents really do have more incommon with each other than we don’t. Yes, I haveshort hair, wear men’s clothes and go by Baba butwe are all standing here on the playgroundtogether watching our kids introduce themselvesand play together.24

Six years on, our queer family is in some ways veryconventional yet predicated on a fundamental resistance

Rosenblum, Darren, with Noa Ben-Asher, Mary Anne Case,Elizabeth Emens, Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Vivian M.Gutierrez, Lisa C. Ikemoto, Angela Onwuachi-Willig,Jacob Willig-Onwuachi, Kimberly Mutcherson, PeterSiegelman, and Beth Jones. ‘Pregnant Man?: AConversation’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 22:2 (2010):208-270.

Spar, Debora L. The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2006.

Squier, Susan M. ‘Reproducing the Posthuman Body: Ectogenetic Fetus, Surrogate Mother, Pregnant Man’. In Posthuman Bodies, edited by Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, 113-132. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Teresi, Dick, and Kathleen McAuliffe. ‘Male Pregnancy’.In Sex/Machine, edited by Patrick D. Hopkins, 175-183. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Thomson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005.

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to prescriptive gender norms. We are a two-parent,dual-academic family with a heavy emphasis on feministand gender studies: Mama, Papa, son, and now adaughter, born in 2009 after another trip to ourfavorite reproductive endocrinologist at the fertilityclinic. We recently asked our son if he thought therewas anything different about our family. ‘Oh yes,’ hereplied immediately. ‘We don’t have a TV.’

Walks, Michelle. ‘Gender Identity and In/Fertility.’ PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2013.

Watson, Jes. ‘Breastfeeding Dad Trevor MacDonald Stays Positive’, Bunch Family Last modified August 22, 2012. Accessed July 30, 2014.< http://bunchfamily.ca/breastfeeding-dad-trevor-macdonald-stays-positive/>

Wierckx, Katrien, et al. ‘Reproductive Wish in Transsexual Men’, Human Reproduction, 27:2 (2012): 483-487.

Wirth, Michelle L. ‘Semiotics of Parenthood in Legal Perspective: Using Semiotic Tools to Deconstruct Legal Determinations of Who Holds Parenthood Obligations and Privileges’. In The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education, edited by J.M Broekman and F.J. Mootz III, 157-182. New York: Springer, 2011.

WPATH, Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People. 7th version. <http://www.wpath.org>

K.J. Surkan has been teaching in the Women’s and GenderStudies Program at MIT since 2005, and has research interests in queer and transgender theory, gender and

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Notes

technology, and new media topics. 24

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