Visit theallusionist.org/parents to listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, hand-knit language a matching set of chunky scarf, hat and mittens, and now language looks like a catalogue model in the 1970s.
This episode is about the language around pregnancy and parenthood when you’re trans.
Two guests talk about their experiences, and bear in mind they’re not representing all trans people, just themselves.
I do think what they have to say is relevant to all genders - a lot of the language in this area doesn’t work great for a lot of people, including cis parents.
Also, ugh I hate to acknowledge it but, the Current Discourse, “you can’t say mother any more!” The word mother is about to appear in this episode a lot of times, so not wanting to face a whole lot of legal trouble, I checked it with the language police - yeah I’m pretty well connected - and they said, “No, of course you can say mother, also don’t bother us with spurious inquiries, also we don’t exist.”
The move is towards language that is additive, so it’s referring to cis women and other people. The point is to make language more inclusive. Say it with me: inclusive.
Who always benefits from transphobia? <chorus> The patriarchy. And what was it that hurt us all in the first place? <chorus> The patriarchy.
Glad we’re all clear about this. On with the show.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Seahorses are this incredible species, as well as just being beautiful and generally like a good mascot animal, because they're so cute and stunning, they are a species where the male is pregnant and gives birth. But it's often a fact that's euphemized, I've noticed, when people talk about seahorses in science contexts or marine biology contexts: they will say that the seahorse "carries the eggs", or sometimes they'll say "gives birth"; but they'll rarely say "pregnant", and they won't go into detail because it's actually, a full-blown pregnancy, the young are fertilized in the male's body. It's also sometimes referred to as a pouch as well, which I think is a way of people, again, removing it from the idea of pregnancy. But it's in the body and then the male is pregnant and gives birth.
HZ: If you have never seen a seahorse give birth before, get yourself to Youtube and watch.
FREDDY McCONNELL: The giving birth is extraordinary. It's very powerful. They squirt out hundreds, I think, of young, all in one go, like live young. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot to watch. But you still have the couple, and you still have the female carrying the egg and the male seahorse carrying the sperm, but it's just that the fertilization happens in the male and the male is pregnant and gives birth.
HZ: That's interesting. Now it makes me think of the sort of broad biological applications of male and female, because so often it would just be the one who is pregnant with the young, and then they would reclassify the egg as the sperm or something, rather than reclassify the sex of the seahorse.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Yeah. The determination of human beings to maintain this binary and to have it match on to human experience: that's where the euphemism comes from, I think, of not wanting to talk about the fact that this thing that we've designated as the male is pregnant. And then I think people would say, "But the female still has the eggs." Well, humans aren't seahorses, it's not a perfect analogy.
HZ: There's a 2019 documentary called Seahorse that is about Freddy becoming pregnancy and giving birth to his first child, who is now nearly four years old.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Hi, I'm Freddy and I'm a journalist and a writer, and I'm also a dad and I'm trans.
HZ: Freddy is currently pregnant with his second child.
FREDDY McCONNELL: I'm probably still a little bit uncomfortable myself with the term ‘pregnant’. Back then I used to prefer to talk about ‘carrying’; I remember jokingly talking with another trans man about being an incubator. And even in the years since that to now, even just me seeing other visible pregnant trans men has made me so much more comfortable with it. And I think people would assume I'm like the most comfortable with it, but I'm not; it's been a journey for me as well, and I'm still on that journey. And it's always wonderful and incredibly heartening to see other people and it's inspiring and it's taught me to learn to feel pride in it and confidence, in a way that I didn't even when I was doing it the first time around.
HZ: ‘Seahorse dad’ is definitely a more beautiful term than ‘incubator’.
FREDDY McCONNELL: It is.
CJ: Actually, I think I've kind of surprised myself. Like when I was trying to get pregnant, I never had an issue saying the word 'pregnant'. And yet, up until a couple of weeks ago, I could not say the word 'pregnant' in relation to myself. I don't know why; I don't know what feelings were there, but I would use every other word under the sun for 'pregnant'.
HZ: And at the time of recording, how pregnant are you?
CJ: 17 weeks. 17 weeks pregnant.
HZ: This is a friend of mine, CJ.
CJ: I usually describe my gender as non-binary or gender queer. That's the easiest way for me to describe what my gender feels like. What that means for me - because it means different things to different people, but I feel like I am not male or female, but I do have a gender, just, I don't have a name for it. It's just something in between. Honestly, the only thing that bothers me particularly is being called a mother, or like, you know, an ‘expectant mama’ or something like that.
HZ: ‘Mama’.
CJ: ‘Mama’! Because I'm very obviously not one. I've been lucky enough that my experience has been fine, but even like getting the report from my last scan the sonographer, or whoever writes it up, wrote it up in a typical way they write it up, and just randomly changed my title to Miss, and then the rest of the report even gendered. I kind of thought that because my experience was so good that it wouldn't bother me that much, but I haven't been able to even read through the full report because it doesn't feel like they're talking about me.
CJ: The NHS systems aren't really set up to deal with stuff, but really easy fixes - like sometimes they just don't have my appointments on file, because they have to manually go in and change my gender to female to access a lot of the services. They're like, "I would like to book you in for an appointment, but the system's literally not letting me do it. Can I temporarily change your gender to female so I can book you into this appointment and then change it back?" And I'm like, if that's what you gotta do, sure. It's weird though.
HZ: You made a glitch! Or rather, they made a glitch by making a binary system. Computers don't care.
CJ: Computers don't care, no. Well, that's the thing, it seems like extra effort to program it that way. Aside from pregnancy stuff, it also means that stuff like a lot of trans men across the UK don't get called for cervical screenings or things that you should be reminded of on a regular basis. But because the system set up that only people with this gender marker get called for these things, that means that a lot of those people are missed. It’s the same when it comes to pregnant stuff. I have to call beforehand every time to like double check that they have my appointment on file and it hasn't like been lost to the weird gender computer.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Within pregnancy care in general, the NHS, it tends to be very ad hoc changes that are happening to include trans and non binary people. In my area, they had actually changed the IT system at the local hospital so that I didn't have to have F on my wristband. And that had happened because another guy had given birth like two years before me. So that was amazing, but that's just that one hospital.
HZ: But it can be done.
FREDDY McCONNELL: It can be done. It just takes that individual spark of initiative and desire to care for as many people as possible. Which so many people have! So yeah, that does give you hope, definitely.
HZ: Did you find in the years since you had your first pregnancy and your recent treatments, that the ways that the medical staff would talk about it and the vocabulary they'd use has shifted at all?
FREDDY McCONNELL: I don't think so, to be honest, because you'd be amazed, by the time you're at a fertility clinic or pregnant and under the care of the NHS or whatever, there's not a lot of talk about the basics. There's very little language that needs to be used in order for everyone to understand what's happening and what their jobs are in that moment, so I think that in a way decreases the chances of being mis-gendered or people using the word ‘mum’ or ‘woman’. I started my family after I started my medical transition, so often just being in someone's physical presence will preclude any of that because of how I look and sound, which is very helpful, obviously, for me. And also sometimes I feel like it actually gives me a weird little bit of male privilege where people actually take me more seriously, paradoxically, even though I'm pregnant. So no, I've always had positive experiences at more than one fertility clinic that I've attended. I think there's definitely an element of people being nervous, and so they are conscious of what they're saying; but it doesn't make it feel awkward, it's never made it feel awkward. Again, I actually also feel that doctors, especially doctors who are maybe gynaecologists or fertility doctors, are so used to this just being their day in, day out, breakfast, lunch, and dinner type stuff, that they do see it quite clinically, understandably.
HZ: You're just a lump of meat with various holes.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Exactly. Which is exactly how I think of myself! Just a big meat bag, with feelings. And also I'm paying, you know. In the fertility world you're often paying, which means you get treated like a paying customer, and that involves more respect than often sometimes you get in the slightly paternalistic NHS.
CJ: Honestly, I think when it comes to pregnancy specifically, I think there's some stuff to do with the actual act of childbirth that in a roundabout way benefits me as a trans person because of the discomfort about talking about typically female genitalia in general.
HZ: Also, is it that a lot of the words used in a medical context for body parts feel so scientific and detached that do you have a different response to them than some other things that might be dysphoric?
FREDDY McCONNELL: Yeah, definitely. I guess this was part of the long personal process I went through when I discovered years ago that trans men could have babies, having been told that testosterone would make me infertile by an NHS consultant, which is not true.
HZ: Evidently.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Indeed, and yet they still tell people this.
HZ: Did they keep a record of terms to use with you? Do they do that?
FREDDY McCONNELL: There were notes that you get when you're pregnant and in my area they are very gendered, so I corrected them by hand. One thing that was really important for me approaching birth was writing a birth plan and it was only through community groups online that I realized how important a birth time would be for someone in my position. And I used the first third of my birth plan just to explain language that I wanted for myself, but also do that in a way that I hoped would put people at ease - because I knew that when I came to give birth, I would probably encounter people I'd never met before. I'm not saying you have to do that; that's my Englishness, I suppose, I wanted people to feel at ease so that I could be at ease, because those things are kind of mutually reliant. But it felt very empowering and it did totally put me at ease. So yeah, my birth plan was kind of the only place where that sort of language stuff came up explicitly.
CJ: Luckily when it comes to childbirth, there's a lot of different ways of talking about the different, like, you know, you can say a vaginal birth, which, for the most part, I would prefer to say, because I don't like 'natural birth', but there's loads of other ways to describe that that are common.
HZ: It's also just so striking how easy a lot of the substitutions are, like saying 'human milk' instead of ‘breast milk’ seems a lot less reductive, you know, it's sort of emphasizing the person, providing it rather than the often objectified body part.
CJ: Yeah. And it's not like a weird thing to say, because when we talk about milk from other animals, we don't say 'udder milk', we say 'cows' milk', because it's milk that from cows.
HZ: ‘Dog nipple milk.'
CJ: Eww! Why would you say 'dog nipple milk'?
HZ: Sorry. I was trying to think of an animal, but I didn't know the name for its udders.
CJ: I love it. It's great. Yeah. So it doesn't feel super weird to me. Even if we weren't talking about gender in any way, if I'd said 'human milk', you'd be able to figure out what that was, maybe? Or stuff like chestfeeding: I have had top surgery, so I don't have breasts anymore. And a lot of people who have had the same surgery as me are still able to chestfeed. Bodies are really weird and interesting, and sometimes your milk ducts will just reconnect. They'll just be like, “Oh, we know where we've got to go,” and they'll just find their way back and you can chestfeed. I don't have breasts anymore, I barely have breast tissue, but I'm still able to feed the baby with my chest. And it's one of those things where nobody's saying that if you have breasts, you need to use the same words as me; it's just giving me access to language that describes my experience in a way that's authentic, but also medically correct.
FREDDY McCONNELL: At the fertility clinic, the HFEA, which is the authority that looks after fertility provision and clinics in the UK: they actually have a gender neutral set of forms that anyone can use regardless of their role in the process, which is great, that's so great: I think that's the best solution, right? Not to, again, change all the forms to be neutral necessarily; keep the forms that work for the people they work for, and then have a folder of forms that are gender neutral for people that want them as well. A relatively inexpensive solution that obviously the HFEA has deemed appropriate.
A lot of the time when you hear about trans and non binary inclusion in pregnancy care, the idea is that all of this inclusive stuff is additive. It's not meant to replace language that works for the vast majority of people who are pregnant, which are cis women; it's just this is the language you use if and when you do encounter someone who's trans.
CJ: When us as trans people or people who are allies of trans people fight for language that's more inclusive, or language that's additional, people think that we have invented these words for trans people only, and now we are taking these trans words and putting them on to everyone else, so now everyone has to be trans or something. Even if you are someone who has breasts, but feels uncomfortable with that terminology for some reason - because of trauma, because of the way you see your own body - you can use the term ‘chest feeding’ because it's still medically correct and your doctors will know what you're talking about, or people will know what you're talking about. So the pushback on it is really weird because it's not just language for trans people; it's additional language to give people the words that they need to talk about what they're going through.
FREDDY McCONNELL: The word ‘maternity’, and the fact that we describe pregnancy care as ‘maternity care’, obviously that's a problem for trans people. And there are great alternatives, like ‘pregnancy care’; ‘perinatal care’ is another one I've heard increasingly in like medical settings. But also, that word 'maternity' is really a problem for lots of other kinds of people, including if you have a cis lesbian couple where there's two mums, or if you have dads and a surrogate. And the surrogate generally, increasingly now we understand doesn't want to be known as the mother, isn't the mother. So yeah, usually where there's a situation that's kind of failing trans parents, it's often actually failing all LGBT+ parents.
CJ: But in terms of the other words: for myself, I'm pretty flexible, but there are some... I definitely don't like being called a mother, or like a potential mother. I've always wanted to be a dad. And so even though I don't fully identify as male, I do present myself to the world as quite a masculine person. I've never found a non-gendered parenting name that I connect with, so I've always just sort of thought of myself as a dad, or a dad to be. But in terms of what my kid will call me: I've been rolling with dad for the longest while, but I feel like if I hear one that I really take to, I might just use that. Maybe my kid will come up with some super awesome name, and I'll be like, let's roll with that, that'd be cool.
HZ: It's also weird, because we have the word 'parent', which is a gender non-specific word. It's been around a really long time. Everyone knows what it means. It's really easy to use. You could substitute it in all of the medical documents everywhere and people wouldn't feel excluded by it, because they would be like, "Yes, I'm a parent. That's me." So that's very accommodating of language for once?
CJ: Right. And if someone said, "Would the parents of [your kid's name] ---?", you wouldn't be like, "Well, that's rude, how dare they call me that?" Because that's the word for what you are.
FREDDY McCONNELL: It's so weird, isn't it? I'm often wondering why we undervalue this word 'parent' so much, and it doesn't have the same loving connotations and profound connotations as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ do. I love the word parent. It's really useful.
CJ: Like mother and baby yoga or like mother and baby swimming classes. Guys swim! Guys swim and guys have kids. I just want to swim, I just want to do yoga with the baby, please, every now and again. But there aren’t a lot of - I can't even think of any gender neutral or dad-centered like activities for kids. Or it's something really silly, like, “We're catering for the dads today with this dad and baby mini golf course” where the baby is obviously not going to golf.
HZ: Or, shooting range. Or I think this is more of an American thing, but ‘daddy-daughter dance’. There's no way my dad would have ever gone near one of those.
CJ: No. I'm really glad - I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago and I never heard of any of those either.
HZ: I've seen the term 'birthing parent' suggested; how do you feel about that?
CJ: I mean, yeah, that's literally what I'm doing, or gestational parent. I've been thinking about having kids since I was a kid; I've been ready for a long time to have this kid. I've looked into it a lot and thought about it a lot. And interestingly, a few years ago when I started looking into trying seriously, I felt a lot more comfortable and accepted, I guess. There wasn't so much a culture of transphobia as there is now. Which is interesting. I know that if I said to a random person, “I'm trans, but I'm going to be pregnant and I'll be a birthing parent as opposed to an expecting mother,” mostly the reaction I would've expected would have been, "Oh, wow. Okay. That's interesting." Whereas now it's very much like "You are erasing mothers from the face of the Earth." And I think, not because I think it's justified, but to an extent I would understand if the thing that people were pushing back on - if I had said, "I am not going to be a mother, and so I have invented this new gender neutral name for all gestational parents, and we must all be called this now," I could kind of understand the pushback on that. But literally just saying, okay, I'm just going to say it for what it is: I am a parent who is birthing a child, I am a birthing parent, it's weird to argue with that because mothers who have given birth are also birthing parents. So I'm not making anything up; I'm describing it in a different way than you describe it, but I'm only describing it for myself.
HZ: Also, there are a lot of mothers who have not given birth.
CJ: Exactly. Right. And so just saying that ‘mother’ is a catch-all term for a person who has given birth is incorrect. It's just correct to say a gestational parent. Most people who go through pregnancy and childbirth are women, and I think that there is benefit in talking about women when we mean women. And so for instance, when we talk about discrimination in childbirth, that is because it's mostly women who go through it. That's a thing that women are subjected to because it's women, not because it's childbirth. And so when we're talking about stuff like that, then yeah, it is useful to specify who we're talking about. But the process itself, it's just a bodily process. Most people who have breast cancer are women - I'm not comparing pregnancy to breast cancer, but the fact of having breast cancer isn't a female thing, even though most people who have it are women. That's kind of how I feel about this. It's not a gendered phenomenon, but a lot of the ways in which we've dealt with it, or not dealt with it, as a society are because of gender, misogyny, et cetera. When I hear people fighting to keep all the language around it very female, I can understand why you feel like it's important to make sure that we know that a lot of the problems around this are rooted in misogyny. And that's something that absolutely needs to be acknowledged. But it doesn't mean that you have to erase everybody else at the same time.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Women often who are anti-trans who talk about wanting to 'protect' the word 'mother' I think just don't realize a lot of the time that the definition of mother - in law, if not socially - excludes all sorts of other kinds of cis women, not just trans people.
Actually what you realize when you spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, is that the real problem is that the words 'mother' and 'father' are exclusively reserved for cis heterosexual couples who conceive via intercourse. Even though that's not really what the birth certificate reflects, because of the fact that the father can basically be anyone that the mother says it is - which obviously privileges cis men throughout history, surprise, surprise... But all sorts of parents: adoptive, parents through surrogacy, trans parents, lesbian mums who don't give birth; none of those people have access to the words mother and father. Once you realize it from that angle, rather than it being about "What can I not be called?" it's actually the only people that do have access to these labels are this nuclear family setup. That's really shocking. Because it's 2021.
HZ: Fetch your ball of string and spare batteries for your headlamp, because we're about to go deep into the labyrinth that is English law. And to remind you of what we’re dealing with: remember the episode a while back about divorce, where we learned that in England, same sex couples cannot get divorced on grounds of adultery with someone else of the same sex, because the law defines adultery as P in V sex, and to change the law the government would have to have discussions about what might constitute sex between two Ps or two Vs, but <lalala!> they didn’t. Those are the kinds of systems we’re talking about here. Those are the systems Freddy has been dealing with for years, ever since he went to register his first baby’s birth, and wanted to be listed as the father on the birth certificate.
FREDDY McCONNELL: When my kid was born, I contacted the local registrar to make an appointment, and I managed to do that by putting myself in the father box and then putting an X in the mother box. And initially the local registrar rang up to clarify what was happening, because that was a bit confusing, and then I explained the situation and said that I had a gender recognition certificate, which says that not just my gender but my sex is legally male for all purposes. And she actually was like, "Oh, okay, that makes sense. Just bring all your documents and it'll be fine." And then about half an hour later, she rang back and said, "I'm sorry. I've actually just spoken to the registrar general, and they've clarified that no, you have to register as mother, because mother equals the person who gave birth." And that isn't actually written down in law anywhere, no one ever made that decision about that definition; it simply comes from surrogacy, basically. It's about "protecting the surrogate".
So I think when surrogacy was - I don't know whether I can say ‘legalized’ cause there still isn't like a legal framework for surrogacy officially in this country, but basically, people who work with a surrogate have no parental rights up until after the birth, when they have to go to court and then have a social worker visit, and then they can get this thing called a parental order where they become the legal parents. So up until that point, it's all based on trust, and neither side has any legal protection. So the surrogate could get left with a baby that they don't want, and the parents could not get the baby that usually is genetically theirs because one of the intended parents, or both, they are genetically the parents; but they're not legally the parents until they go to court. So as part of all that - sorry, bit long-winded - there was basically this formalization of the idea that the person who gives birth has to be the mother. So the surrogate has to go down on the birth certificate. Not only that, but if she's married, her husband goes down as the father.
HZ: Whoa!
FREDDY McCONNELL: So, once you realize that that's where this all comes from, you start to maybe have some more sympathy for the idea that it's very confusing and contradictory, and no longer fit for purpose, or hasn't been for a long time. So like there's this distinction between who gives birth and who's genetically related, and the same with adoption: they're not “real parents”, even though I'm not saying that because I agree with it, I think that's absolute bollocks, but I think that's the kind of bad faith that the government is engaging in. But ‘mother’ and ‘father’ can be applied in nuclear family situations, and then must be applied if someone gives birth, because that's the only definition of mother that “we” feel is valuable.
HZ: So hold on: in surrogacy, the person who births the baby is the mother until a court case, therefore the womb is more important than genetics, or whoever will be responsible for raising the child.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Absolutely.
HZ: And yet so different to how the child's life is going to unfurl. It's like the first nine months versus everything.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Yeah, the whole refusal to acknowledge social reality, the kind of hierarchy of value, of biology versus lived experience... And it's just so gross and we don't need it any more.
HZ: Is it right that if you are parents via surrogacy, you're listed as parent one, parent two, not mother and father?
FREDDY McCONNELL: That is absolutely right. That's why I'm saying that whole thing about that's why only like cis het couples who have children through sexual intercourse have access to the labels ‘mother’ and ‘father’, because on adoption certificates, it's 'parent, parent'; parental orders, which is what you get with surrogacy, it's 'parent, parent'; and the second mum in a lesbian couple who hasn't given birth is 'parent two'. She does not have access to the label of mother. And we just accept this stuff, because we're like, "Thank you for this kind of legal recognition. Thank you for this little bit of equality and little bit of legal protection. Oh, we're meant to be so grateful and oh yes, yes, thank you, we'll go away now and be quiet." So this stuff doesn't really get talked about, I suppose, because actually also, I suppose, we are afraid of losing even that. It’s all just so outdated. And that’s the most charitable reading of it.
HZ: So if he had not gestated his child himself, Freddy could have been listed on the birth certificate as ‘parent one’ rather than ‘mother’. Evidently it is possible for birth certificates to have genderfree terms for parents, so why are those options not available except in certain circumstances? In 2019, Freddy took it to the High Court.
FREDDY McCONNELL: And all we thought we were doing - all I thought I was doing - was highlighting this contradiction, highlighting the fact that the GRA, the Gender Recognition Act, doesn't refer to parenthood post-transition, because when the law was written, no one thought that was a thing. No one thought that trans people who were fully transitioning would be able to have children, would want to have children, basically would have full, happy lives. Being trans was all about shame and secrecy and hiding and just disappearing, and getting a GRC is all about erasing the fact that you're trans; you get a new birth certificate that has your correct gender, and it's like, "Let us never speak of this again."
We just went to court to say, look - so it's a judicial review, which is like reviewing the law around this to say, is there a contradiction in the various bits of legislation, not just one? There was this extra thing of if there is a contradiction, does it infringe my human rights? After lots of arguing and complicated back and forth, and some really bold statements by the government, the court said, ultimately, no, this all looks fine, and we acknowledged that your human rights are engaged, but on balance, we don't think they were infringed.
HZ: Britain!!
FREDDY McCONNELL: It's a testament to how immovable our legal system or how our laws are kind of written and then they're very difficult to change. Even though the Births and Deaths Registration Act was written in 1952, and all these bolt-on bits for queer parents and other forms of parenthood, like adoption and surrogacy, they’re just bolted on like a sort of Frankenstein's monster of birth registration. And the government likes to think that it's a coherent administrative system, and anyone who actually looks at it can see that it's a total mess. And then one of the things that the government said in court was that, "No, this is fine, because we're not just discriminating against Freddy McConnell who's given birth - and he's probably one of about three people that's done this," that was the kind of idea they wanted to create, even though there's many, many more people than that in this country and then hundreds, if not thousands, all around the world who are doing this - and it will become increasingly more doable and common as awareness grows. But they said, "Oh, no, it's not about giving birth. This is about being trans. This is about the fact that the GRA says that you are your acquired gender" - so your correct gender, in normal language - "for all purposes, except:" and then there's this list. I believe they basically kind of added parenthood to that in court, on the hoof. The other exceptions are things like sport in certain circumstances, incarceration. and peerages.
HZ: Oh, peerages! Big concern.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Big concern. It does refer to parenthood, but it refers to children born prior to the issuance of a GRC, of a gender recognition certificate. It makes no mention of becoming a parent after you have a GRC. But what they said was that, "Oh, no, this was what was intended. If you have a GRC and you become a parent, your legal gender recognition doesn't count for parenthood. So if you're a trans man whose wife gives birth, you also cannot register as father." And that's not just at registration, but that's the rest of your life, the rest of your child's life. For parenthood, you are one gender, your sex assigned at birth; and then for all other purposes, you are the other gender. And they were like, “That's fine. That's what we intended,” which is just wrong! I don't think that's an honest interpretation by the government, and if it is, it's completely irrational.
HZ: Fancy that.
FREDDY McCONNELL: If you go back to the Hansard records, which is like conversations or debates in parliament from when the GRA was being drafted, they do talk about this, but then they don't; someone brings it up and then there's this kind of awkward non-reply. And then they just move on. And then we're left with this problem, this situation.
HZ: Yeah. Well, when you have a lot of cis MPs, then I don't expect this to discussion to go very well.
FREDDY McCONNELL: During all this stuff, one of the things I discovered from talking to one of the politicians - who's now a peer in the House of Lords - about the whole process of getting the GRA enacted in the first place back in 2004, after the European Court of Human Rights said it was something that the UK had to do and that all member states had to do, to give trans people legal recognition. This peer said, "Funnily enough, the reason we all started lobbying on this and, and realized it was an issue that needed a solution was that a trans man came to me and said, I need to be able to register on my child's birth certificate." And that just floored me, made me quite emotional, really, just to think that this isn't an issue that was never considered: this was the whole reason this came up in the first place. And that back then, they didn't succeed on that point; they knew they didn't succeed on that point; and there was this really weird system where he eventually had to adopt his own children, and so did his wife, even though she gave birth to them. That's where this came from. And we'll keep fighting, obviously, until it changes.
HZ: So you are officially recognized as a man and also as a mother?
FREDDY McCONNELL: Well, my kid doesn't have a birth certificate.
HZ: None?
FREDDY McCONNELL: No, not yet. Because of the ongoing legal action. So we're going to the European Court of Human Rights. And then while that is all still going on, the government isn't making me register him.
HZ: I was wondering whether it was forcing them to redefine what 'mother' means.
FREDDY McCONNELL: They did say that in the court judgment. The president of the family division, this very learned, experienced judge, who had a big hand in writing things like the Children Act: he wrote in his judgment that 'mother' is no longer a genderbound term. So that brings up this other paradox, which is: either only women give birth, in which case, if you give birth, you're a mother; or, mother is no longer a genderbound term, in which case, mothers can be men. Often you get that discourse around pregnancy and the acknowledgement of trans birthing people, lots of people will say, "Only women give birth!" And that was the debate that was happening around this small piece of legislation that was recently passed, where the wording was changed from 'pregnant people', which was just the default gender neutral language, to ‘expectant mothers’. That change was made because a peer raised an objection on the basis that “the law does not respect the fact that only women give birth.” So the wording was changed to 'mother' because apparently only women give birth, but at the same time, it was changed to 'mother' not 'women' because of the judgment in my case, which said that 'mother' is no longer genderbound. Sorry, did you follow that?
HZ: I'm just drawing a diagram in my head. Not all mothers are women, that's how they managed to legal it, rather than not everyone who gives birth is a mother? How do you feel about that?
FREDDY McCONNELL: I feel like it's a really worrying sign of the stealthy, insidious attacks that being made on trans people from all angles by a very well organized, concerted effort, well-funded effort, of people who have access to peers and politicians and the media and all sorts of places, where they would go after that wording, just to erase trans people. And the wording was default gender neutral, but when like anti-trans people realized that just accidentally includes trans people, then we can't have that, we must make clear that only women give birth. And they succeeded. It wasn't even about trans rights. It's just gender neutral by default. But then, the public discourse about terms like 'pregnant people' is so heightened, and just has all the hallmarks of a moral panic. And then often you find that trans people and our allies end up having to defend those terms. At the same time, it sometimes can be conflicting, because as someone who's like really interested in language and understands why people feel emotional about certain words, I get it. I also don't particularly like the term 'pregnant people', or I think actually it's become so poisoned at this point because when it's lined up against a word like ‘mother’ or ‘father’, it really pales in comparison. So not only are we having to have an argument about our humanity and our rights and just our like basic lived realities, we're also having to argue things that we didn't necessarily ask for in the first place. We're not able to have more nuanced conversations about, like, “No, that language isn't going to work for everyone - actually it doesn't even work for me, I much prefer this.” Are we really arguing about language, or are we just arguing about whether I have the right to be safe, and to start a family like you did, because that's what I've always dreamed of? That's often a frustration I feel when people are screaming about the term ‘pregnant people’ or ‘menstruators’. Those words are straw men, straw people. God, it’s exhausting.
HZ: I also was thinking about people being upset about period products being called period products, which I think is a positive development, because when they're named like 'women's products', it’s not only excluding people who need them who aren’t women, it’s euphemistic which perpetuates the shame around periods; and to me it feels like the term ‘women’s products’ is reducing women to their bodily emissions. It's not edifying anyone. It’s not a term to cling onto, because there are lots of reasons why it’s not a good term.
FREDDY McCONNELL: Yeah. It's so complicated, right? That's such a good example of period products. And every term that comes up in these conversations needs to be judged in its own context and on its own merits. And it's not about gender neutral versus gendered, and one is good and one is bad. Period products: if you're talking about something that is just a bodily function, then let's give it an appropriately clinical name.
If we're talking about something that might be the most important relationship you've ever had, in your life with another human being, let's give it an appropriately emotional name; but that name doesn't have to be gendered. But because it has been over the centuries, it has left us with this lack of rich profound terms that are gender neutral, and that I feel kind of sad about that. I hope that changes. I think it will. I hope ‘parent’ becomes as meaningful and profound as words like mother and father.
HZ: In this episode, you heard from Freddy McConnell and CJ. Freddy is now pregnant with his second child: he’s hoping to give birth in Sweden so the new baby can have a birth certificate and Freddy will officially be the father on it. You can contribute - I’ll link to the gofundme at theallusionist.org/parents as well as to Freddy’s Vice pieces about his pregnancy and fatherhood experiences, and his podcast Pride & Joy about queer parenting. You should also watch Seahorse, the documentary about him becoming a parent to his first child, it’s really amazing, you can buy it on Vimeo, or go to seahorsefilm.com.
In the time since I recorded with them, CJ has given birth, and their gorgeous baby is now two months old.
CJ’S BABY: <gurgles>
CJ: Wow, you’ve got so much to say!
The Allusionist is an independent podcast recorded in a cupboard in suburban London. Picture the scene: there's some acoustic baffling provided by a very thick cardigan I knitted myself last year, and can't really wear because it's too hot and too heavy. And then there's an overcoat that belonged to my husband's great-grandfather, which is still going quite strong; and some towels. So very fancy.
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
comedo, noun: technical term for ‘blackhead’. Origin 19th century from Latin, literally ‘glutton’ (a former name for parasitic worms, the term now refers to the matter squeezed from a blackhead).
That is a visual.
Try using ‘comedo’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with editorial advice from Cass Adair from Sylveon Consulting. The music is by Martin Austwick. Thanks to the Gender Inclusion Midwives at the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals, who have made some really useful materials which are available online.
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Find the show on Twitter,Instagram andFacebook@allusionistshow. And to hear or read every episode, get more information about every topic, see the full dictionary of the randomly selected words, and browse a lexicon of every word ever covered in the podcast linked to the relevant episode, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
