All Roads Led Us Here

In May of 2021, amidst the raging pandemic, I finally graduated from my undergrad and was ready to promptly move on with my life. With no career aspirations, and a great deal of relief to be done with school, I swiftly moved on to family planning. My partner, my high school sweetheart, had always known he wanted to be a father, and while I knew I always wanted to be a parent, I had wrongly assumed starting testosterone years prior had destroyed my fertility and chances to be a gestational parent. A widespread myth (unfortunately perpetuated by many uninformed healthcare providers) is that taking testosterone for HRT (hormone replacement therapy, a transitional and gender affirming tool used by many individuals, trans and cis alike) will eventually lead to infertility. It was framed to me, during my informed consent appointment where I was prescribed T, as an inevitability, and I could opt to spend thousands of dollars to freeze and store my eggs if I was considering having kids down the line. This was not an option for me, really, as a poor college drop out at the time. Whose insurance covers that kind of thing? Not mine for sure.

So I grieved. I accepted that I would never have kids of my own, and that was the price I’d pay for transitioning into a happier version of myself. Imagine my shock years later when I attended a webinar for trans people who want to be parents, and they debunked the whole “infertility” theory. Boston IVF Announces Results of Landmark Transgender Male Fertility Research Study (prnewswire.com) In fact, a study showed that trans people utilizing T as HRT had egg yields comparable to cis women who had not been on T, after stopping T for an average of 4 months. Additionally, people taking T have become pregnant while on T because T is not an effective birth control method (though notably high levels of testosterone can be detrimental to a pregnancies viability and health). 

Back to May 2021, armed with the knowledge that I had not destroyed my eggs, I was ready to start a family. I made an appointment with an OB/GYN to discuss fertility planning as well as to undergo a preconception check up. At that appointment, I shared that we had been nonchalantly trying to conceive for 6 months but had not been successful thus far. She recommended Clomid to induce ovulation, and took an ultrasound of my ovaries to check on their health. In October of 2021, after only one round (although a frustrating round fraught with side effects) of Clomid, I got pregnant!

Pregnancy was tumultuous for me. I dealt with intense, chronic nausea throughout my first trimester, exacerbation of my chronic pain, several falls due to dislocations (each with their own OB triage visit), late nights wondering “is this labor? Was that my water breaking?”, and more on top of social changes, like the loss of a toxic job and shifting into a respite care position midway through my pregnancy. I loved the ability and capacity of my body to grow new life, and felt as at home in my gender as I ever have, but was met with medical transphobia and community distaste for the pregnant man in their public spaces. By the end of it, I was so exhausted physically and emotionally from navigating my safety online and in public, I chose to be induced. 

My induction was the stereotypical domino effect of interventions, and I am at peace with that. As someone who fears and distrusts medical professionals to be knowledgeable about my trans disabled bodymind, I was apprehensive of any interventions. I wanted to birth the way my body knew how. I spent a good deal of time in the tub, on the toilet, pacing, on the birthing ball, and several other positional changes with my team around me. I was surrounded by my partner, one of my dearest friends and family members, and my doula, whom I met through recommendations from the Madison Doula Collective. The three of them kept me grounded and held me as I trudged through 29 hours of labor, mostly with my eyes closed so I could feel my way through the most intense waves of my life. During labor, I found that time ceased to exist. I also stopped existing solely in my physical body, I lived somewhere between this plane and another, every second moving closer to meeting my baby.

The domino effect looked like this for me: we placed a Cook’s catheter to dilate my cervix, and that moved along pretty quickly. We started Pitocin just a few hours later to ramp up contractions. After about half a day of laboring through that, with a number of cervical checks between, I was growing tired but unable to rest because of the intensity of my contractions. I finally agreed to an epidural while sitting on the toilet, scream crying that “birth was f****** crazy!” They placed it not even half an hour later, and I got about an hour of rest before I started throwing up. I was moving closer still, but not quite ready to push. Turns out epidurals don’t always last, especially in people with certain conditions. I negotiated with a doctor, pleading no more interventions. Just let my body do the damn thing! At every step my experience had been medicalized. It’s inception with clomid, the cooks catheter, pitocin, epidural, rupture of amniotic sac, and the countless cervical checks. After discussing with my team, and letting a nurse explain to me more thoroughly what the doctor was trying to rush me through, I finally agreed to let them break my water. My blood pressure was rising, baby’s heart rate was rising, we were both ready to meet each other, she just needed one last push. That was all it took for things to rapidly escalate and before I knew it, we were breaking the bed and I was finally given the okay to push (which I have feelings on, maybe I’ll write on that later).

After 15 minutes of pushing, I held my baby in my arms, wrapped in a blanket from home. She was so beyond beautiful, and I felt whole just sitting there with her, completely oblivious to the team stitching up my slight tears and cleaning up the mess that comes with vaginal delivery. I felt so proud to have made it through those long months of pregnancy, and the intensity of labor, and also I felt EXHAUSTED. I hadn’t slept in two days, and it’s not like the sleep you get during late pregnancy is all that restful anyways. Regardless, I look back on my labor and delivery and feel such pride and joy. I wasn’t always at peace with what was happening around me and to me but I had my team, and we all got through it together, and at the end of it all, I held the most wonderful, extraordinary child.

Addendum: To be abundantly clear- I am not opposed to medical intervention and seeking health care from hospitals, doctors, and nursing staff. Not in the slightest. I just have considerations for navigating these systems that have been traumatic for me in the past, and that have a history of abusing and otherwise harming generations of BIPOC, queer & trans folks, disabled people, and otherwise marginalized people. The medicalization of my labor was difficult for me to process in real time because I have a traumatic medical history. I did not know the doctor who was attending my labor and delivery, so I had not had a chance to build a relationship with him before we were engaged in this intimate and vulnerable moment. I believe if the OB who provided me care throughout my pregnancy had been delivering my baby, I may have felt different about the presentation of interventions at various steps.