A father has complained that nurses insisted on calling him ‘mom’ during his pregnancy despite being a man.
Bennet Kaspar-Williams, 37, from Los Angeles, first discovered he was trans about ten years ago, in 2011, but didn’t start his transition until three years ago.
Then six years later, in 2017 he found Malik, his future husband, who he married in 2019.
The couple decided that they wanted to have children, and weighed the options available to them because it meant Bennett stopping the testosterone hormone therapy he’d been on for several years to enable his ovaries to function.
Bennett, who’s had surgery on the top half of his body but not on his genitalia, eventually decided that he would be comfortable trying to conceive and carry a child.
He fell pregnant naturally shortly after they started trying, and the couple welcomed their son, Hudson, via cesarean section, in October 2020.
Two years after beginning hormone treatment, in the summer of 2015, Bennett had surgery to remove his breasts, paying $5,000 for the procedure.
Remembering how it took the operation to make him realise how unhappy he was about having female breasts, he said it was liberating, and that he had this feeling that it was something that he needed to do, but that he never had a self-hatred of his breasts, like some trans people, and he said that he had no dysphoria about specific parts and still doesn’t, but that he could’ve never have predicted what a relief it would be to find them gone, it was a massive weight off his shoulders.
He said that’s the end of the surgical road when it comes to his transitioning though, and that bottom half surgery is off the table because he has no dysphoria with that part of his body. However, carrying and giving birth to his own child wasn’t a straightforward decision for Bennett.
He said he always knew there was a chance that his body might be able to achieve pregnancy, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted to do until he learned how to separate the function of his body from any notions of gender.
He said that once he learned to think of his body as a tool and not a collection of gendered stereotypes, he discovered that he could both be the person he wanted to be and bring a child into the world.
Many people reading this might be appalled by the idea of a man giving birth, although years ago we watched ‘Twins’ with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito and thought it was a great film, but the idea of a man giving birth never really entered people’s minds, it was just a comedy.
But that was then and this is now and lots of things are transforming and our world is developing into something we couldn’t possibly understand or even want to, it’s almost as if the world has gone mad, or saying that, it might even be too late for that.
At the end of the day, it’s freedom of choice. To choose what you want to do concerning your body, after all, it is your body, and the thing that people seem to overlook is that it’s not their life and they should just walk on by.
A man having a baby will be the ‘in’ thing now. Not that it should concern other people because they’re plenty of children being happily and lovingly raised by two mums or two dads and there has been for years, and guess what? The world hasn’t ended.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 