Being pregnant is a huge undertaking for your body. It makes permanent changes to lots of areas, includes lots of discomfort and unpleasant experiences, and involves a decent amount of risk. It changes how you are viewed by society and how strangers interact with you. And it is (or can be) the first step in one of the biggest changes anyone can make in life – becoming a parent.
So of course I have all the typical fears:
- How will my body change?
- Risk of miscarriage (Ha! That already happened once)
- Huge life change
- Adverse symptoms for nine months such as nausea, fatigue, and joint pain
- Birth trauma
- Postpartum depression and isolation
Pregnancy is also one of the most feminizing experiences a person can have. So, as a nonbinary person, I also have gender related fears:
- Will my sense of where my gender is on the spectrum shift in unpredictable ways due to hormones?
- Will my social dysphoria increase to unbearable levels due to the quintessential feminization of my body?
- Will my physical dysphoria increase due to my chest getting bigger and my pregnant belly?
- Will I struggle to find clothes that fit me that are not hyper-feminine like typical maternity clothes are?
But on the other side of my fears is what I hope for:
- My gender identity will shift to the more feminine side of my range like it does during my period and result in minimal dysphoria with pregnancy changes
- I will have fewer physical discomfort symptoms than I am expecting
- Many of my current clothes will fit throughout pregnancy since I prefer looser clothes to begin with (though they will end up being more fitted as I get bigger)
Now that I have actually been pregnant once, for a short time, and only in the first trimester phase before the hyperfeminization of my body happened, some of these fears and hopes have shifted. I now know, or am more confident that my gender will shift to the female side for some or all of my pregnancy. Hopefully this will help with the social and physical dysphoria.
But this caused another area of discomfort: feeling like I was missing half of who I was. And after I had a miscarriage, my gender swung back to the male side with a resurgence of dysphoria that I was now unaccustomed to. You can read more about that in Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Gender. So I can now add ‘postpartum dysphoria’ to my list of fears.
Here are some strategies I’ve come up with to help me through this process:
- Look for alternative maternity clothing stores or just buy larger sized clothing from cheaper places
- Come out to as many people as I am comfortable with so that I have lots of options of people to hang out with in a gender affirming environment to combat social dysphoria and invisibility/inauthenticity
- Focus on the personal, wondrous, internal feeling of growing a life inside me
- Be kind to myself post partum while I’m learning how to deal with dysphoria again and review my personal journals and previous blog posts about how I deal with it
If you have a similar identity to mine, I hope that sharing my thoughts and experiences with pregnancy will help you feel more comfortable in your skin or at least not so alone during this experience. If you have someone in your life who is pregnant, maybe this will help you understand that not everyone who looks pregnant identifies as female and what that might feel like.
Do you have any stories of your own or strategies that got you through pregnancy with dysphoria?
Do you have any questions or specific aspects of this experience that you are looking forward to hearing more about?
Leave a comment below! I’d love to hear from you.