The Most Feminine Thing? Gender and Pregnancy
As a trans man who talks publicly about my pregnancies, I am often questioned about why I would want to do “the most feminine thing” by being pregnant. Saying pregnancy has to be not only feminine, but The Most Feminine Thing isn’t accurate. It not only attempts to exclude trans people from using their bodies to grow their families, but can also leave women feeling like they are failing at womanhood if they can’t or dont want to be pregnant.
Through my two pregnancies, I know how beautiful and magical pregnancy can be. My body did a miracle and made life from the smallest ingredients and then, working with my baby, I brought them into the world.
We usually associate this beauty and magic with femininity, because it’s mainly feminine people who are doing it. But even when we put trans experiences to one side and focus on women who have been pregnant, not all of them are feminine. And even those that are usually feminine may find that pregnancy isn’t a feminine experience at all.
I posted a video on tiktok recently about feminity and pregnancy the comments were filled with many women (and others) sharing how pregnancy felt distinctly unfeminine while other women shared how they felt very feminine despite never experiencing pregnancy.
Pregnancy is hard work. It’s hard on the body and it’s hard on the mind. You are trapped for up for 40+ weeks while a parasite, hopefully a very wanted and very loved parasite but a parasite none the less, changes your body forever. How it impacts you physically can vary, but for everyone who goes through it, but there’s one constant – nobody else can tag in. This is between you and your baby (or babies!) and you have to fortify through it.
And how much harder is it to fortify when the language around you is telling you you’re experiencing this wrong? Anyone who is pregnant is already at risk of experiencing mental health problems, but imagine the extra toll of this pressure and expectation. And again I’m not talking about trans people here, I’m talking about the women who experience pregnancy and wondering why they aren’t glowing and feeling feminine in the way they’ve been told they should.
It isn’t just pregnant women that are harmed by this narrative, but women (both cis and trans) who can’t experience pregnancy can then feel a deep sense of loss or a disconnect with their gender.
The inability to be pregnant can be deeply painful for people to experience regardless of their gender identity. Pregnancy in and of itself is something that so many of us want to experience, both to be able to make biological children, but also because it is a life changing experience and it is a shared experience with others who have gone through this mundane miracle.
But the grief and loss of not being able to experience pregnancy is hard enough on it’s own without adding in another layer. By making pregnancy the most feminine thing (and that’s always the phrasing by the way – why would I, a trans man, want to do “the most womanly thing”, “the most feminine thing”.) then we’re assuming that huge swathes of women can never access the peak of femininity – which is clearly not the case.
But what feels feminine is ultimately incredibly personal. Just like all of gender, it’s experienced by the individual based on their experiences of being part of a wider group
I can see why we have taken this experience and surrounded it in sisterhood and community. We need that to get through it!
From trying to conceive, the anxiety physical exertion of the first trimester to the full body experience of childbirth (however and whenever you experience it), pregnancy can be one of the hardest experiences that someone goes through. And then at the end of it you have the life changing responsibility of a tiny human, or in some cases, the life changing grief that there isn’t one.
We need the sisterhood, but what I want to celebrate is that the sisterhood includes siblings and not just sisters. We are here and we need that community too.
We can joyfully celebrate the people who find pregnancy to be the most feminine thing possible and still hold space for those of us who just felt like nauseous slugs
By expanding our language and understanding of pregnancy and birth, we can include the women and others who find the narrative of femininity excludes them from community and support at one of the most vulnerable times in their lives.
Article by Jacob Stokoe
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