Tag: Miscarriage

Let’s Talk Gender S2E8: Nonbinary Pregnancy and Parenting

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Hi everyone. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Gender.

This episode is about pregnancy and parenting as a nonbinary person including navigating the incredibly gendered world of fertility and pregnancy, the physical experience of being pregnant, and my thoughts as I look ahead to parenting.

FERTILITY AND TRYING TO CONCEIVE

Over the course of four years, my husband and I tried as many methods of getting pregnant as we could access. This included home insemination, known donor, IUI, and eventually IVF. I have heard many stories from folks who have gotten pregnant after only a couple tries of these earlier methods but, for no discernible medical reason, this was not the case for us. 

The IUI (intrauterine insemination) trials were done at a fertility clinic. Their language was generally inclusive of gay couples (referring to the partner as ‘partner’ instead of husband) but all the references to patient were female. We also ran into a few situations where, once my partner was identified as a man, people were confused as to why we were using donor sperm. Most notably, the psychologist we had to see to get the go-ahead to use donor sperm (which seemed strange to begin with) wanted to talk about if there was any guilt or shame on my husband’s part about not being able to provide viable sperm and when he stated he was trans she became very interested and curious, wanting to ask a bunch of irrelevant questions about his transness, and nearly derailed the appointment multiple times. You can bet I provided feedback about that encounter. 

The fertility clinic itself also did not have a gender neutral bathroom option and I had to empty my bladder immediately before each procedure. So that was fun. I did end up finding a single use bathroom in one of the medical areas during the IVF but it required a staff member to use a swipe card to get there so not actually for public use. 

I never came out to the fertility clinic, doctor, or nurses as nonbinary. With all the emotional ups and downs of trying to conceive, I didn’t have enough energy to educate or correct any misgendering that would happen afterwards. It was easier to let them assume I was female and deal with the dysphoria as best I could. 

Honestly, I didn’t find the IUI attempts to be that difficult. The procedures were fast with just me and Jake and a nurse in the suite, no high tech stuff. And it was only one procedure every two months. We decided early on that we needed to take a month off between trials to reset and breathe emotionally. Otherwise we would be required to order the next round of donor sperm before finding out if the previous trial had worked which felt a bit like having bad karma by assuming it wouldn’t. 

The IVF process was much more invasive and dysphoria inducing at times. They had to do an internal ultrasound as a baseline, after one week, and then every other day or every day thereafter for about five more visits before the actual procedure was scheduled. The ultrasound wand is much bigger than an insemination catheter and they had to move it around and dig it in to get good images of both ovaries. If my gender happened to be more female aligned on that day, this was mostly just physically uncomfortable. But there were a couple times when my gender was particularly male aligned and let me tell you, the dysphoria during the procedures on those days was a hell of a lot more uncomfortable than the physical part. I think I death gripped my husband’s hand to keep from crying at one point. Oh, and did I mention that these all had to take place first thing in the morning before I went to work? Where I’m also not out to most people and have a decent amount of dysphoria? Those were not good days. But hey, at the time of this recording I am 37 weeks pregnant and by the time this airs we will hopefully have been parents for a couple months so as far as I’m concerned, it was all worth it. 

PREGNANCY, MISCARRIAGE, AND GENDER

Being pregnant comes with its own slew of gendery things. One of those IUI attempts actually did work though it turned out that the egg that was inseminated was empty. I didn’t know this was something that could happen but apparently it’s very common. Usually these types of pregnancies end in miscarriage before the person even knows they’re pregnant. But my body was so ready to be pregnant it did a really good job of implantation and building a gestational sac despite the fact that nothing was growing inside it. So I experienced all the symptoms of early pregnancy until 10 weeks. 

During this first pregnancy, my gender shifted early on to the far end of my female range (which is still only about halfway from neutral) and stayed there. At first I was grateful. I had so much less dysphoria, both social and physical, and without the gender shifts I didn’t have to pay attention to my gender as much or worry about dysphoria taking me by surprise. But after a few weeks I started to feel like a part of myself, that I had only recently gotten to know, was missing. The male half of me that I knew was still there felt like a ghost, something I couldn’t quite touch, feel, or embody. The times I was interacting with queer friends who knew me as Ray felt dysphoric in a way they hadn’t before. I didn’t feel like Ray at all. It was very strange and disconcerting. 

After the miscarriage I was worried that my gender would suddenly shift to the male side and I would be swamped with dysphoria. But the hormonal confusion that I went through either masked that or overrode it completely. By the time my hormones stabilized and I felt more like myself, my gender was back to normal, feeling mostly neutral with a gentle fluctuation to either side. Still, it took some conscious work to re-learn how to use my dysphoria management strategies that I had developed before this weird female pregnancy experience. 

PREGNANCY (AGAIN)

Then I got pregnant again, after the IVF procedure. I was expecting a similar experience and had tried to think of strategies I could use to help with that ghostly feeling of losing contact with my male side for nine months. But as it turned out, my gender has stayed pretty consistently neutral. If anything, the only change is that it fluctuates less, if at all. 

This means that I have experienced dysphoria with this pregnancy. In the first trimester, before many people knew I was pregnant, it was mostly chest dysphoria as my breasts increased by multiple cup sizes. My chest was too sore to be able to wear a binder right from the beginning. I did use tape a couple times but even that was uncomfortable.

In the second trimester, the breast growth slowed down but my binder no longer fit. Once we announced the pregnancy I was slammed with social dysphoria as everyone started using more female language for me and asking about the gender of the baby. I continued to struggle with chest dysphoria until my belly started to grow. As my belly got bigger, my chest looked and felt smaller and smaller in comparison. In the third trimester, my belly was big enough that most regular t-shirts created a tenting effect that nearly completely hid my chest. I’m sure it looks funny to other people but it feels great to me. 

Throughout the pregnancy process I have been trying to consume as much information as I can about pregnancy, birth, and baby care though apps, websites, books, podcasts, and medical care providers. The majority of this information is female centric. The pregnant person is always referred to as mom or mom-to-be, is always assumed to be a woman, and dysphoria is never mentioned as one of the potential symptoms of being pregnant. 

We were lucky enough to find a midwife team in our area that is LGBT inclusive who we were upfront with about both my husband being trans and me being nonbinary from the start. This was hugely helpful for me. I don’t have to brace myself to go to every pregnancy related appointment like I had to during the fertility/trying to conceive process. If you are trans or nonbinary and trying to get pregnant, I highly recommend finding a trans inclusive care provider if you can. If none exist in your area or you don’t have a choice of who you go to, I recommend finding a trans inclusive doula to add to your support team who will advocate on your behalf throughout the process. You will have enough to deal with without having to do all the advocacy and education related to your gender identity on your own. 

At some point mid-pregnancy, I had an aha moment based on something someone posted on one of the facebook groups I’m in. They explained how they had re–framed their pregnancy as a nonbinary experience in a nonbinary body because they identify as nonbinary. When it was put like that, it seemed so simple. Of course if I identify as nonbinary, my body is a nonbinary body, and anything it can do, including getting pregnant and growing a baby, is a nonbinary experience. This mantra has helped a lot on days when my social dysphoria is getting the better of me or when I am trying to consume information that is highly gendered. 

INCLUSIVE TERMINOLOGY MATTERS

I have been able to find some resources that are trans inclusive. The Birth Partner, 5th edition is the best one. I included links to trans doula practices that also provide inclusive resources in Related Posts and Resources at the end of the show notes. 

The prenatal classes we attended were advertised as being LGBT inclusive and did a good job of being LGB inclusive, referring to partners instead of husbands, but they didn’t have much awareness of the trans component. They didn’t introduce themselves with their pronouns, so naturally I didn’t either. They almost exclusively referred to the birthing person as a woman or mom using female language. And when they were talking about feeding the baby they only ever talked about breastfeeding and used that terminology.

Particularly during the class on feeding, I had so much dysphoria that I became claustrophobic and had to pace in order to be able to stay in the room to get the information I needed. One of the perks of being in a pandemic was that these classes were all run over Zoom so I was able to be off screen and still listen in. Otherwise I probably would have had to speak up or leave the class entirely. I also provided the instructors of this class feedback (a couple weeks later once my dysphoria had calmed down) which was well received. 

When I’m trying to absorb information that will likely be helpful in navigating pregnancy, birth, or postpartum and caring for the baby and the information is presented in a gendered way that triggers my dysphoria, it’s very hard to tell if I am dysphoric because I just happen to be feeling more male and have more dysphoria that day, if the language used in the resource is triggering dysphoria that otherwise wouldn’t be there, or if the situation I am learning about will be dysphoria inducing when I’m experiencing it and I should prepare for that. This is why inclusive language is so important. 

If I feel dysphoric when picturing myself in a situation as I read an inclusive resource, it seems much more likely that I might struggle with that experience when the time comes. Since that very uncomfortable prenatal class, I have re-read the section on chestfeeding in The Birth Partner and watched videos by trans doulas on chest and body feeding and the dysphoria I feel when picturing myself doing this has decreased significantly. After this episode airs I will write an update on my blog and let you know how it’s going in real life. 

After the experience with the prenatal class and comparing it to reading The Birth Partner, I wrote a blog post with a list of inclusive pregnancy, birthing, and feeding terminology. This includes using gestating or pregnant person instead of mom, birthing person instead of woman, and chest or body feeding in addition to breastfeeding.

NONBINARY PARENTING

Of course the pregnancy journey doesn’t just stop relating to gender after the baby is born. It turns into a parenting journey. As I am not quite yet a parent, I can only speak to what I have been wondering about and talking to others about in preparation for this next step. 

First of all, there’s what the baby will call me. There are lots of nonbinary parental terms that people use and lots of nonbinary parents that are comfortable with either mom or dad. I honestly don’t know where I will go with this yet. I feel ok with mom but less ok with mommy or momma. I’m considering the name Mur based on my initials M.R. Or there’s something different like Ren or Renny from paRENt, or Mapa which seems highly accurate to my experience but doesn’t have any particular emotional connection for me. I guess we’ll see what sticks once we test them out. 

Then there’s deciding whether to gender your child based on their assumed sex or whether to raise them as gender neutral until or unless they specify otherwise. We have decided to gender our child but raise them in a gender inclusive, gender expansive way. For me, fighting for our child to be recognized as nonbinary when it is likely that they will identify as cis is not worth the effort and would be extremely dysphoria inducing for myself. We will of course be open about our own identities with our child and ask them often about their identity and adjust our use of language as often as they wish. 

This brings up another point. If we are open about our identities with our child, that necessitates being open with anyone the child interacts with – family, medical systems, school systems, playgroups. My husband is fairly open about being trans so this won’t be a huge shift for him. But I have only just started coming out to co-workers and family so this will likely be a steep coming out curve for me. I guess that is a pretty solid way of shifting the ‘need’ factor up in the coming out equation I talked about in Episode 5. 

And lastly, I have heard from many nonbinary parents that the world of parenting is, if possible, even more forcibly gendered than the world of fertility and pregnancy. I’m sure that is something you learn to deal with as it happens. But it’s probably good to have low expectations in order to be prepared and maybe occasionally pleasantly surprised instead of constantly irritated and defensive. 

REACH OUT!

If you are struggling through the process of trying to conceive, currently pregnant, or a nonbinary parent and want to reach out, please email me at letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com. You are not alone. 

That’s it for Season 2 of Let’s Talk Gender.

The music for this podcast is by Jamie Price. You can find them at Must Be Tuesday or on iTunes. 

As this season is airing, I will hopefully be at home with my husband and newborn baby, learning what it means to be a parent. If you subscribe to my blog, you will continue to get regular updates on our parenting journey and how it relates to gender as well as any other gender related thoughts and experiences such as updates on coming out as nonbinary or any medical or legal transition steps I take in the future. 

I hope you have found this podcast helpful. Please reach out by commenting below or emailing me at letstalkgenderpodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your reactions, thoughts, experiences, and suggestions for future seasons.

Bye for now. 

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Pregnancy Fears, Hopes, and Strategies

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.

Pregnancy, Miscarriage, and Gender

IT WORKED!

We were pregnant! If you missed the story of how we got here, check out Getting Pregnant is Hard to do Without Sperm.

The first thing we felt was excitement. The second was anxiety. Not because suddenly such a big thing was happening, but because we had spent so long stopping ourselves from being excited in order to avoid the pain of disappointment that any excitement we felt triggered anxiety. This reaction slowly wore off and we allowed ourselves to be happy and excited but the more excited we got the more we wanted to share the news. Suddenly, we had a secret again.

I knew I was pregnant before we got the results. I know that’s a cliche but it’s true. My breasts were so sore that I couldn’t touch them, days in advance of when I normally have PMS symptoms. I was fatigued to the point of being in a daze. These symptoms continued and were joined by mild to moderate intermittent nausea. All the typical symptoms but nothing extreme. If you know me at all, you know I can’t keep anything to myself. Especially if it involves distress. I much prefer to complain – I mean, commiserate – about it with others. Luckily, a couple people at work were in their second trimester and gave me a small community for support with this new adventure.

GENDER WHILE PREGNANT

If you’ve read other posts on this blog, you may already know that I am gender fluid, shifting between moderately female and mildly male with the majority of time spent in the neutral space between. But, as I talk about in Menstruation and Gender, I consistently shift towards the female side during my period. The same thing happened when I was pregnant. Except that I wasn’t just pregnant for a few days, like when I’m on my period. So I shifted to female and stayed female for two and a half months.

After about three weeks of being consistently female I started to feel like the male part of myself, Ray, was imagined, a dream, a ghost. I was missing half of myself, unable to experience my full range of gender that I had only just recently struggled to understand and accept. This was a symptom of being pregnant that I couldn’t so easily explain to or commiserate about with others.

EARLY ULTRASOUNDS

Because we were followed by the fertility clinic, we were scheduled for early trans-vaginal ultrasounds. The first one was when I was 7 weeks pregnant. The image on the screen showed a slightly small gestational sack in my uterus but no yolk sack or fetal pole. This was mildly concerning but not conclusive since it was still early and the gestational sack was small. We went back the next week for another one. It showed the same result which was significantly more conclusive of a blighted ovum. With some googling, I learned that this happens when the egg that was fertilized happened to grow without any genetic material inside it. An ’empty egg’.

So, I had to come to terms with the fact that at some point in the next few weeks, when my body figured out something was wrong, I was going to have a miscarriage. I was waiting, and dreading, but not yet able to grief or process because if I did, I would be grieving until it happened, which could be days or weeks or a month. But I had to go to work as usual, travel to visit my family, and stand with my friend in her wedding. So instead, I became emotionally constipated, numb, and burnt out.

While visiting family, I had some spotting and cramping but then it stopped again. When we returned home, we had a final ultrasound that showed the same result and gave an official diagnosis of a non-viable pregnancy. This triggered a referral to the early pregnancy loss clinic. They called me four hours later and reviewed my options. I could let the miscarriage happen naturally (which my body didn’t seem to want to do), take a medication that would induce severe enough cramping to force my body to miscarry (sounds terrifying), or have a procedure (Dilation and Curettage or D&C) where they put me to sleep, dilate my cervix, go in, and scoop everything out. If the first two options didn’t expel everything I may end up needing the D&C anyway. Since I had known this was coming for what felt like an eternity already, I work in a hospital so medical stuff doesn’t bother me, and I had had a polyp removal six months prior via the same procedure, I opted for the D&C. It was scheduled for three days later.

RECOVERING FROM MISCARRIAGE

Both the physical recovery and the emotional recovery took longer than I expected, despite warnings from everyone I talked to who had also had a miscarriage (it is surprisingly common given how little it’s talked about). Physically, I had a few days of mild cramping and fatigue. When these initial symptoms faded out I felt like I was better and returned to work only to find that more than half an hour of being on my feet (I have a fairly active job) caused waves of moderate to severe fatigue, shakiness, dizziness, and hot and cold flashes. My body was in hormonal shock.

The most frustrating part physically was that knowing why it was happening and trying to connect with my body to calm it down did absolutely nothing to help. It felt like my body’s operating system had crashed and was taking forever to reboot. So I started doing really slow, gentle, breathing pace exercises. Anything from dynamic stretching to Qi Gong. Almost instantly, my mind-body connection began to repair itself. It was such a dramatic improvement at a time that I needed it most that I have kept up with these exercises ever since.

Emotionally, I expected to be a wreck as soon as the procedure was done and maybe the day after. But because I had not allowed myself to feel the grief for three weeks I was in an emotional holding pattern. I thought that maybe I had been processing my emotions this whole time and I didn’t need to have a strong, overt reaction. But the exhaustion after the second day back at work meant that I didn’t even have enough energy to hold my emotions back and once I got home I broke down and had a couple hours of intense crying and grieving with my lovely husband for support.

Overall it took just over a month for me to feel like I was back to my normal self.

GENDER WITH MISCARRIAGE

Going through the procedure itself and being in a ‘Women’s Hospital’ didn’t feel dysphoric since I was still feeling very female at the time. A week or so after miscarriage, my gender started shifting slowly back to the middle, then to the male side. And there it stayed for almost three weeks. This felt both good and bad. Good, because I was finally able to experience the other half of myself that had been missing for the last two and a half months. Bad, because all of a sudden I had dysphoria again. And I was out of practice with how to deal with it. While still being very emotionally raw.

Initially, it was very distracting and a constant irritation that sucked up a lot of mental and emotional energy. But I slowly remembered the strategies I had been using before and became acclimatized to the discomfort of dysphoria and it faded to a background buzz.

TALKING ABOUT MISCARRIAGE

Over the last few years both myself and my husband have been through some pretty major experiences that all have different levels of taboo and layperson knowledge/understanding. When I talk about our fertility struggles, very few people have negative reactions to discussing that and it doesn’t feel threatening for me to open up about it and though most people don’t know the variety of options, they have a general understanding that there are medical options and often know someone who has used them. When I talk about gender identity or transitioning, I don’t always know what reaction the other person will have and often have to deal with a negative or ignorant response. Most people have little to no understanding of nonbinary gender identities or the transitioning process to the point that they can’t even relate to whatever it is I’m telling them about unless I explicitly state what emotions are tied to this experience.

When talking about miscarriage, everyone instantly understands that that would be a difficult thing to go through, understands what emotional response is appropriate, and provides support. And yet, it’s still something that isn’t often discussed openly. I’m guessing this is partly because historically, it was viewed as the fault of the woman that it happened and was shameful. But nowadays, I think we’re mostly past that (based on the reactions I get when I talk about it) so I’m guessing it’s not discussed simply because it’s an emotionally difficult thing to talk about and considered a very private experience. I’d like to change the culture of silence around miscarriage and normalize talking about it and then eventually, normalize the idea that people of any gender identity could have a miscarriage.

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES!

At this point, we are still trying to get pregnant. There are a few more options we are willing to try and since the last one worked, I feel like it is likely to work again. But we have also discussed what our limit is in terms of how long we want to try for and how much money we are willing to put towards it. We are not tied to the idea of the child being genetically related to us (seeing as how it won’t be genetically related to Jake anyway) and open to considering adoption if we reach our personal fertility limit.

Subscribe to the blog or keep checking back to get future updates and find out what happens next!

Have you had pregnancy struggled or miscarriage? For those of you who are trans/non-binary, how did pregnancy and/or miscarriage affect your gender? Please leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your experiences.