Trans Masculine Fertility

This video will help you think through specific resiliency strategies that can help you get through the fertility process and navigate the medical system, as a trans man.

There are three primary facets of psychological wellness that must be juggled in this process: support around gender identity, support around the fertility process, and bolstering a sense of personal safety.

Some individuals choose to keep their pregnancies under the radar, not telling anyone they’re pregnant, and living life as cisgender men. This may be called "going stealth."

This approach can help someone feel supported around your gender identity as a man or non-binary person, and it can also create increased safety.

But it can be hard to not have support around a pregnancy. Going stealth and choosing to not tell people you're pregnant may mean that you have nobody to vent to or ask advice from, that you might not get to sit at the front of the bus if you feel nauseous and you might not be able to take advantage of things like prenatal yoga or childbirth workshops.

Another alternative is to move thorugh the world pretending to be a cisgender pregnant woman, making the choice to not tell people that you identify as trans or non-binary. This is more possible for non-binary people or trans men who didn’t take hormones prior to pregnancy. This strategy is helpful in terms of a feeling of safety, and allowing access to pregnancy support systems. But it won’t allow you to be seen as who you really are, which can be deeply triggering. Not having support around your identity — being read or perceived as a woman without having the opportunity to correct the assumption — is a difficult experience for a man.

Finally, there is the option (which Trystan speaks to from personal experience in this video), to make the choice to be open and out as a trangender pregnant person. This addresses the needs around gender identity and pregnancy support, but can decrease the sense of personal safety, as it can make someone a target of transphobic attacks.

Much of this decision might hinge on the community you’re a part of. As Trystan explains, he lives in Portland which is a progressive area, where he assumed he wouldn’t face very much day-to-day bigotry. He also had the benefit of supportive people in his life. This allowed him to take advantage of support around his pregnancy, from prenatal yoga, to childbirth classes. While living in a progressive area might have shielded him from daily face-to-face negativity, the decision to share his pregnancy publicly was a different story — online was a much harsher world, and one that required significant resilience to navigate.

Often, questions come up like “am I really a man or a non-binary person if I’m pregnant?” Many struggle with this, and finding support systems either in person or online to connect with other men who are pregnant or who have been pregnant can be incredibly helpful in disentangling gender from pregnancy, and in reinforcing the concept that men are still men (and non-binary people are still non-binary), even when they’re pregnant.

People often wonder what they’ll tell their children about how they came to be. Luckily, there are now several great books you can read to their kids, at every stage of development, that can help them understand their origin story.

For example, one book called “What Makes A Baby” explains, in gender neutral terms, that there are three things required to make a baby — sperm, eggs, and a uterus — and that some bodies have some of those, and some don’t. It’s a simple way to explain to your child the different people who helped to bring them into the world.

In speaking with psychologists, they make clear that the best approach is to be honest and up front with your child from the time they are born. Historically, there was a desire to shelter children from their origin stories, but we now believe that does much more harm than good. Particularly in today’s world of consumer genetic testing, if a child is the result of third party reproduction like donor sperm or donor egg, it’s very likely that they will eventually find out.