I Found Gender Euphoria In My Second Pregnancy

A few months after I learned how unlikely it was that I’d be able to conceive a second own-egg baby, I began seeing a therapist. I took the therapy video calls in my oldest son’s bedroom-slash-office-slash-workout room. Together, we talked about my months of fertility treatment: All those early mornings sitting alone in the waiting room of the clinic, a lone trans guy in a sea of women. The medications intended to make my ovaries cooperate with my desire; the side effects that made me feel out of control — hot flashes that lasted for weeks, a sudden, severe depressive episode.

My therapist asked if I liked homework. I do. She sent me articles about mindfulness and I read them in gasps and spurts, but the words and sentences in her friendly PDFs sent me spiraling. We talked through how difficult it was for me even to read about exercises in which I could practice being present in my body. Be present in this body, with all its recent failures?

I’d been mired in anguish and regret — was there anything I could have done to keep my ovarian function? Anna had wanted one more child for years; why had it taken me so long to want the same? With so much energy spent on remorse, I had not dared imagine what it would be like to be pregnant again, had not risked preparing for something that might never happen.

Unable at 25 to reconcile pregnancy with my gender, I had simply drifted through pregnancy to the end, distancing, dissociating.

Then, a few sessions later, my new chance had come: We now had embryos, made with my partner’s eggs, waiting for me.

The week before my first embryo transfer, clutching a PDF printout on how to do a body scan, to check in quickly with my body, I confessed to my therapist what I had so rarely disclosed to anyone: As much as I had thought about, talked about, written about having my first baby, I had almost no physical memories of my pregnancy. Unable at 25 to reconcile pregnancy with my gender, I had simply drifted through pregnancy to the end, distancing, dissociating. I rely almost entirely on pictures of myself from that time to piece together what it was like.

When I got down to it, what I was afraid of about being pregnant was more of this: feeling little, maybe even nothing. Nothing about how it felt to feel a baby move, how my breasts felt, how hot it was to carry a baby through a Philadelphia summer, had stuck with me clearly through the years. I wanted so badly to have it be different the second time around.

***

For years, Anna and I fought over the annual sperm storage bill. She kept paying, even though I said I thought it was a waste of money. Our youngest turned 1, 2, 3.

What I remember clearly, about this time, is the moment I sat Anna down to tell her I wanted to have a fourth baby. We crowded into a corner of the couch after dinner, kids in bed, and I turned off the television. A few weeks off testosterone, I felt mostly normal. Sitting her down like this, this wasn’t something I did lightly.

I often thought about the vials, 15 of them, submerged in tanks in a facility I had never seen. The number was astounding — a stockpile. We already had three children. Two of hers, one of mine. The promise of the sperm overwhelmed me. And alongside the promise, a threat; to use it, one of us would need to become pregnant again. “We’re done,” I would say, firmly, turning the cryobank bill over in my hands.

“Maybe you’re done,” she would say. She’d smile slyly, ruffling my hair or nudging me with a shoulder.

It was spring again, and through the pain and difficulty of working through the pandemic in our respective health care jobs, our family had grown close. The mostly-remote school and work lives the kids and I led came with their own nightmares, but we no longer spent all of our energy on figuring out beforecare, aftercare, who would get dinner on the table. Things felt calm. At 34, there was no reason for me to suspect I would have any difficulty.

I took her hands. “I want to have another baby,” I said. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m ready.”

Can any pregnancy be a redemptive act? Is it wrong to want a redemptive birth? Is any pregnancy, any birth, pure in its motivation?

And what of my hesitation about the publicness of being a bearded pregnant person? It felt silly; I never went anywhere anymore. It seemed like a fear from a past life, a past world. “What I really want this time,” I finally said, “is a pregnancy not much worth writing about.”

Can any pregnancy be a redemptive act? Is it wrong to want a redemptive birth? Is any pregnancy, any birth, pure in its motivation? The act of creating my children, because of Anna’s and my bodies, has required an unusual amount of patience and planning, and which, because of our queerness, creates children with few connections to similar family models, but it is as selfish as anyone’s. Our children are their own people and they are also our exercises in vanity, desire, longing, love.

One of the reasons Anna wanted to be pregnant a second time is that she wanted another baby. Another is that the first time, things felt off in a number of ways. Over the years as we’ve tried to make space to become the parents we want and need to be, we’ve talked about our pregnancies, births, postpartum periods, what was there, what was missing. For one, she feels she wasn’t ready for a baby in her 20s. Her birth was long, hard, hours of pushing, and the after was hard, too. For months, it was like there was an unbreakable film between her and our first son.

The second time, she got to be the new parent she wanted to be. Every time is dangerous, every time can go wrong, but this time, she had a peaceful birth, peaceful months when the other kids were in school and I was at work, and she held our third baby and recovered not only from that one but also the first. Could I have an experience like that, too?

***

A list of past moments of gender euphoria: wearing a binder, wearing a suit, wearing a single earring, wearing a baseball cap with DAD emblazoned across it, wearing sharp new shoes. A fresh tattoo, hard and colorful. Testosterone gel slathered on my shoulders and upper back, that small, daily gift to myself. It was always something I put on or in the body. The joy, it seemed, could not come from the body itself. I thought all that having a baby could give me was the relationship that followed with the person I had made: seeing myself reflected back, sometimes even the good parts. It’s true, I watch my gestational son kick a soccer ball, play pranks on his siblings, eat a bowl of ramen, and I feel something I don’t have with my other children. A glory, in a way, of having made that moment with my body. But it took years to get here, years in which I had to get to a place of admitting what had gone wrong the first time, of admitting to myself that, out of fear, I had not really allowed myself to be there.

What I recall from the first time is horror, full-fledged body horror at every development, followed by a shut down. Darker nipples, then static. Crinkling paper at the birth center, then letting myself look overhead and float away. I remember feeling viscerally taken over once I could feel the baby move, feeling alienated by the wonder many mothers claim to feel.

This time, when the midwife, holding a doppler over my uterus, told me I might feel the baby earlier because my body would remember the sensation, I realized I could not, did not. And with that realization came pain, but also possibility. This baby could give me something long before learning to read a book or tell a joke, something while on the inside: gender euphoria while pregnant.

The last time I had a baby, I was just as trans as I am now. I had a trans childhood, a trans adolescence, and a trans pregnancy and birth.

In her essay “The Grand Shattering,” Sarah Manguso writes, “The point of having a child is to be rent asunder, torn in two. … It is a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone. Still, it is a breakage that we are, as a species if not as individuals, meant to survive.” After having my first gestational child, I faced a crisis: It had never been clearer to me that to lead a happy and productive life, I’d be better served transitioning medically: taking hormones, having surgery, maybe. Giving birth, in its way, shattered me, albeit in a different way than Manguso may be gesturing toward.

Starting testosterone, going by different pronouns, changing my name and gender on my driver’s license, these things did not change who I was. The last time I had a baby, I was just as trans as I am now. I had a trans childhood, a trans adolescence, and a trans pregnancy and birth. Trans people having babies is nothing new. We’ve always been doing everything cis people have been doing. And to me, transition isn’t something with a clean before and after. I’ve always been the same Krys, hurtling through time and space trying to find where I fit. But none of that can touch the persistent feeling that when I got pregnant at 25, I was not yet myself. Could anything be truer of my 20s? My last pregnancy has haunted me since the moment it ended.

In her memoir of poetic translation and motherhood, A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes, facing a fourth pregnancy, “In choosing to carry a pregnancy, a woman gives of her body with a selflessness so ordinary that it goes unnoticed, even by herself. Her body becomes bound to altruism as instinctively as to hunger. If she cannot consume sufficient calcium, for example, that mineral will rise up from deep within her bones and donate itself to her infant on her behalf, leaving her own system in deficiency. Sometimes a female body serves another by effecting a theft upon itself.”

When Anna drove me to the surgical center early on a Thursday morning to transfer the first of our embryos, after months of submitting to endless testing and medications and ultrasounds, I finally felt a chance to take myself back.

Ní Ghríofa’s writing is some of the little I’ve found about carrying a fourth baby, but when I got to this passage, it struck me as something from my past. The first time I was pregnant, I felt I was setting myself aside for the baby. It did feel like he was stealing from me, like I was giving away parts of myself. As my oldest closes in on 10, the people in our lives who started having kids when Anna and I had ours are done, usually with one or two. This fourth baby will be born into a community of middle schoolers and elementary school kids. Most of the adults in our lives sleep again. When Anna drove me to the surgical center early on a Thursday morning to transfer the first of our embryos, after months of submitting to testing and medications and ultrasounds, I finally felt a chance to take myself back.

***

I was lying in bed after masturbating the first time I felt this baby move. It was a weekend, and my family was out of the house running errands. In the stillness, I felt what I can only compare to soap bubbles popping deep inside me. My biggest fear had been that emotionally, I’d feel nothing when it happened. My secondary fear was that I’d feel what caused me to switch to blank nothingness the first time: anger, revulsion, terror. How it weirded me out, nine years ago, feeling taken over. Feeling myself give in, then check out.

Instead, in the peace of a blissfully quiet house, I felt my hands instinctively moving toward them, toward this baby that did not ask to be made but that is coming quickly anyway, into a chaotic, jam-packed rowhome full of people and pets, into a queer family whose members have been talking now for months about how to open ourselves up to them. The first time, I can remember lying back in moments like this and willing myself to disappear, to be anywhere else but in my body. This time, despite the pain of infertility, the loss of the experience I thought I was going to have, I feel myself here.

This transitioned body inexplicably has allowed me to feel this love, this openness.

It’s a few days before Mother’s Day and we are driving home from eating pizza at a playground near my work. “So,” Anna begins like we’re about to talk about something bad: scheduling child care for a day off from school, our dog’s dermatological issues, how bald our car’s tires have grown.

“What are we doing this year about, you know, Father’s Day, or whatever?” In my nine years as a parent, our family hasn’t quite found a solution fit for it, for a day that forces me to call into question who and what I am in this family. Some years we do nothing, some years we pick a day between Mother’s and Father’s Day and call it Krys Day, and the last few years, I’ve given in, accepted Father’s Day as the best-fit day for me, and enjoyed the kids’ cards and treats and maybe sneaking upstairs to make out while the kids watch a movie. It always charms me how many of my friends still text me, “Happy Krys Day!” on Father’s Day.

This year, I am 21 weeks pregnant when it comes. I’m big enough not to fit into my clothes anymore. I’m feeling the baby all the time. I’m uncomfortable and winded in a way that feels inexplicably beautiful, beyond my hopes for how healing this could be. This transitioned body inexplicably has allowed me to feel this love, this openness. I’m in community with other families who may not get it but who come to me on the playground to tell me how wild four kids is going to be, to tell me what they remember from the last time they did this thing I wanted so badly to do again.

It’s a quiet Father’s Day. My kids and I eat hoagies and peanut butter cups in the woods, and I realize I’m not thinking about the people we pass on the hiking trail, whether they can tell I’m pregnant, whether they care, whether they think people like me should have families at all. The first time I was pregnant, I felt others’ hot gaze on me for months, and worried endlessly about what others thought about a masculine pregnancy, and then what it said about me that I cared. This intrusive measurement of others’ judgment was one of the things that clouded my ability to be present in pregnancy. This Father’s Day, though, I just get to be a dad — present in these woods, during this chapter of this parenting, waiting for the next one to start.