Open Prologue

What If My Life Isn't a Journey?

(Prologue)

I’ve been thinking about that word, “journey.” Journey gets thrown around a lot with regard to fertility and transition. A fertility journey. A gender journey. What is a journey? We’re trying to get from one place to another, possibly through a lengthy trip fraught with peril. But I’ve learned it’s important to watch our metaphors. There are hidden ideas within “journey.” Are we always travelers? Always on a quest from one place to another? Where does this metaphor serve us, and where does it break down?

To begin, a journey contains the idea of arrival—a successful journey has an endpoint in which one safely reaches a destination, or, in some cases, achieves the goal of the journey and returns safely home. There’s a sense of the possibility of success, which suggests also the possibility of failure.

When I was first trying to conceive, more than five years ago now, there was the sense of a journey. There were steps—I stopped T, found a donor, tracked

Open There Are No Rules for a Pregnant Trans Body

There Are No Rules for a Pregnant Trans Body

There are no specific rules for a pregnant trans body, at least none that I’ve been able to discern.

There do appear to be rules for pregnant cis bodies— my targeted ads on social media have slowly filled with thin white women cradling smooth, stretch mark-free bumps, generally wearing loungewear or high-end maternity clothes that accentuate the swell of their bellies and breasts, the thinness of the rest of their bodies.

I always assumed I’d hide my pregnant belly, and I gave a lot of thought to this in the time, nearly five years ago now, that I was actively trying to conceive, that time when every month felt like it would be—but ultimately wasn’t—a plunge into an unknown world.

This pregnancy, years later and somewhat unexpected, felt more like when someone yells, “Think fast!” and lobs a ball at your face. Who am I now? I am not the same person who carefully planned and anticipated a pregnancy. I’m less prepared, but also less afraid.

So, I don’t

Open Against the Linear Narrative of Pregnancy

Against the Linear Narrative of Pregnancy

Last week, my baby was the size of a large onion or a Coke can, depending on which app I asked. Not long ago, it was the size of a deck of cards. One week early on, different websites told me that it was the size of a bee, or the size of a raspberry. Soon, presumably, my baby will grow to be the size of larger fruits—a grapefruit, perhaps, or a cantaloupe.

The standard narrative is that my pregnancy will grow larger and larger, my belly more and more tumescent, until one day I—metaphorically, one hopes—pop, followed by what the narrative tells me will be a refractory period of sorts, soft-focused and full of sleeplessness and love.

But as a writer, I can tell you that plot structures matter. The shape of a story matters. And I am not willing to live or narrate my pregnancy from inside the shape of what appears to be a conventional cis male orgasm.

In the novel,_ We Were Witches_, Ariel Gore’s protagonist, also named Ariel, sits in a graduate writing worksh

Open Empowerment and Self-Preservation

Empowerment and Self-Preservation

“We are concerned that you are learning empowerment without self-preservation.” — from We Were Witches, by Ariel Gore

I was waiting for my 20-week ultrasound when my phone rang.

It was my storage facility. They told me that they were planning to demolish the part of the building that currently had my storage unit, and wanted to know when I could come in, as soon as possible, to move my stuff to a different unit.

“Will there be anyone to help me?” I asked.

No, the woman said.

“Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do then, because I am pregnant and I literally can’t move any of these boxes. Either you need to find someone to help me or I’ll need to see if I can find someone.”

The woman became extremely apologetic then. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry! Let me see if we can find someone to help you. I’ll call you back.” “Thanks so much,” I said.

It was only after I hung up the phone that I realized that I’d put myself in a position where I’d be showing up

Open Have You Felt the Baby Move Yet?

Have You Felt the Baby Move Yet?

“Have you felt the baby move yet?”

This question has followed me for the last two months. I knew it was coming, once I hit sixteen weeks, then eighteen. I kept scrutinizing my abdominal sensations—could that be it? Or could it maybe just be a touch of indigestion?

The idea that I could be wrong felt unbearable, the possibility that I might tell my partner that I’d felt the baby move and then it might have only been gas all along.

No, I would say. I don’t think I’ve felt it. Even when another answer might have been Maybe. Or, I think so.

It’s just that there were so many times I’d tried to conceive and it hadn’t worked, and many of those times I’d been so sure. So completely sure I was pregnant— sure because my nipples were tender, or my sense of smell was heightened, and I just knew I was pregnant because I’d never felt this way before. So sure I felt myself glowing. So sure I sang songs to what turned out to be an empty womb.

Before this pregnancy, I

Open What Does It Mean to Be Believed?

What Does It Mean to Be Believed?

Ever since I became a pregnant man, I have ceased to be believed about certain basic facts.

In New York State, pregnant people are permitted to change their insurance plan through a special enrollment period. When I called the New York State of Health marketplace in order to do this, I was informed that there was no mechanism for someone listed as male to report a pregnancy, and that I had been in error in listing my sex as male.

“There’s a difference between sex and gender,” the man at the call center explained to me, as though I hadn’t been leading trainings to this effect for the past fifteen years. “Your sex is assigned at birth and does not change. There is a different space for gender, and you can put whatever you want there.” I explained that legal sex was different from sex assigned at birth, and that I no longer had any legally valid documentation reflecting a female sex because this documentation had been updated. He entirely failed to understand this, insi

Open When the Missing Part Came Back

When the Missing Part Came Back

On Thanksgiving Day, 28 weeks pregnant, I was choosing an outfit to wear to my parents’ house when I pulled down my pants and saw blood. My partner saw it too. “That’s blood,” I said, though it was obvious. “I’m bleeding.”

A part of me left then, although I didn’t notice at the time. The part of me that felt confident, that felt optimistic. The part that said things like, you’re doing it, you’re doing a good job. The part that said, you can do this, and you know what’s right for your body, and you can trust your judgment.

That part of me left, but I didn’t notice because I was too busy folding up paper towels and shoving them between my legs and then pulling them out seconds later to try to see how fast I was bleeding.

I also didn’t notice because a different part of me stepped in, maybe many different parts—the panicked part, the scared part, the part that felt guilty but couldn’t say for what—and together pretended to be the other part, the confident one,

Open I Do Not Wish to Become a Better Me

I Do Not Wish to Become a Better Me

I pretended not to be pregnant yesterday when I went for a haircut.

I didn’t try too hard at it, but I did pretend. I wore a busy plaid shirt, though I didn’t bother with a scarf to drape down in front and partially obscure my belly. I tried to avoid awkwardly clambering onto the barber’s chair, tried to remember and imitate the way I used to just easily take a step up and then sit down, before I was pregnant, back when my body’s balance came intuitively to me. I was relieved when the barber put on the shapeless black cape and got started.

He asked what I was looking forward to in the new year. I told him I was starting a new job. Inside me, my baby kicked, unseen.

I made small talk about my job, my hobbies. I relished the invisibility, the freedom from the need to perform any particular narrative around my pregnancy for a complete stranger, simply to receive a basic service while in possession of a very pregnant body.

Sometimes, I resent this invisibility—I

Open On Not Rocking It Like a Pro

On Not Rocking It Like a Pro

You want to postpartum like a pro.

That’s what the latest ad says.

Before I was pregnant, my ads often featured fancy notebooks, occasionally a new planner system or some sort of online course about how to attract more clients to my business. All of these told me what they would do for me, how their products would transform my life.

But none of these ads presumed to tell me what I wanted.

The pregnancy ads, and, increasingly the ads for nursing bras, lactation smoothies, and portable pumps, as the algorithm seems to know exactly how pregnant I am—are much more pushy.

I can’t avoid wondering if this is because of the culturally gendered nature of pregnancy, the way that in so many ways, anyone who has ever lived in the world in any way aligned with femaleness and/or femininity is presumed to be impractical, confused, unsure of what they want.

Is pregnancy assumed to be such a disempowering time for me that I can no longer be trusted to know what I want for my

Open Epilogue

Seeking New Archetypes

Epilogue

For me, my transness isn’t the most interesting thing about my pregnancy. It’s not uninteresting, and certainly not irrelevant. But it isn’t a mystery that keeps me up at night, it isn’t anything I need to sit quietly with and wonder about.

My transness is largely a practical consideration for me that illuminates some broader questions about storytelling, about gender, and about how we make a place for ourselves in the world.

But I am telling you it is not the most interesting thing to me about my pregnancy. The more interesting things I keep closer to my heart.

I will say, though, that I feel profoundly un-held right now, archetypally. In terms of mirrors to see my own experience represented by someone larger than myself, by a myth or deity. Or in terms of metaphoric containers—stories and allegories that feel strong and durable enough to hold me through this complex and deeply physical arc of time in my life.

In truth, this has been a challenge for many yea