Having Children

Hi y'all,

So I'm about 38 hours away from waking up from surgery. I've had lots of finals and theatrical performances and things over the past few weeks, which means I haven't been writing. I'm hoping that tonight is a very productive night. Which gets us into our topic for the evening: reproduction.

So I'm never going to be able to have biological children. There's never been a successful uterine transplant for a trans* woman, and even for cis women they are EXTREMELY hazardous, experimental, and just not done. They've been doing some research, but it isn't especially promising. They certainly aren't going to figure it out in the timeframe that I would be of childbearing age. Besides, even if they could, it would be EXTREMELY expensive, and I know that I could never justfiy spending many many tens of thousands of dollars on an experimental surgery to carry a child when there are so many displaced and adoptable children.

I have a pretty massive attraction to the idea of being pregnant--it's one of those things that didn't matter to me at all until I realized it could never happen, granted, but that doesn't make the want any less real. It's gotten to the point where every time I look in a mirror I see a teensy baby bump, even though that obviously isn't reality. I try to stop it, I really do, but there it is. I find myself unconciously imitating the stances that I've seen pregnant people hold. It's really really unhealthy, but I haven't found any resources that help me cope with this reality yet. I asked some friends, and they recommmended some books about pregnancy from the perspective of trans* men, but I didn't find *anything* written by a trans* women. Maybe someday.

(Some trans* women freeze their sperm before they begin hormone replacement therapy, but that's prohibitively expensive for me. I don't even know if I would have wanted to go this route even if it had been covered by insurance.)

Adoption also isn't likely for me, at least not through a conventional agency. They do pretty extensive background checks, and since I'm still classified as mentally disordered for being trans* (and that's not going to change any time soon, with a special shout-"fuck you"-out to the cissexist assholes revising the DSM-V) I'm not going to be eligible. It also doesn't help that I'm anticipating ending up with a female-identified partner (or multiple partners) and all of these things means no adoption agency would seriously work with me.

So in terms of becoming a mother, I'm pretty much stuck, and that sucks pretty hard. Nothing to be done about it, at least right now. Maybe someday adoption rules will be different, or somehow I will end up being a mother in some other way--maybe I'll have a partner with a child(ren) from a previous partner, or maybe my partner(s) will get pregnant some other way, who knows? But there's no easy path to having a child.

Several months ago, one of my partners and I had a pregnancy scare. It wasn't an extremely serious thing, just a few days late, and we both knew that given my hormonal status, the likelihood that I could get hir pregnant was extremely extremely low, but the risk wasn't zero. And when I got the text that we had nothing to worry about, I was definitely relieved--I mean, having a child while you're in college is one of the more difficult life paths. But damn if there wasn't a tiny little part of me that was desperately hoping that we would have a child, since I'll never have the chance to get someone pregnant again.

In conclusion: bodies are hard, and surgery won't give me everything I ever wanted.