Thoughts on Gender-Non-Conformity and Pregnancy

*** This blog entry discusses thoughts about the possibility of becoming pregnant. Please consider this a friendly content warning so you can make your own decision about whether to read further!***

So because Husband and I are of a certain age and have to consider what we want out of life, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Obviously, big questions like “do we want kids?” “where do we see ourselves in five years?” “how should we plan for our financial future?” are tough. But one specific thing I’m struggling with is how I feel about the possibility of being pregnant as a gender non-conforming (GNC) woman.

I know that the problems I might encounter aren’t unique to me or my situation: they’re the products of sexism and ableism built into the design of public spaces and cultural norms. I’m not saying that the following potential challenges are “worse” or all that different from others’. We still have a long way to go when it comes to universal design that makes the world accessible for all bodies and supports parents of all genders.

Body

With pregnancy come a lot of physical changes, some of them temporary and some permanent. These are no doubt formidable for anyone who is considering becoming pregnant, especially those who already experience body negativity or struggle with body acceptance.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as “body negative,” but I do know that my gender presentation means that I spent what feels like forever learning to be comfortable in my body. When puberty hit with its accompanying physical changes, I felt not just thrown off-kilter but unsure about how to look and feel like me with these new gender-laden secondary sex features. Once I figured that out, it took me a lot longer to accept that being me wasn’t “being bad at being a real woman.”

Because I worked so long and so hard to get to a place where I’m mostly proud of my body and how I feel about it, the idea of undergoing another major, very gendered change scares me. What if I can’t look as (conventionally) masculine as I prefer when I’m pregnant? After I’m pregnant? What if I can no longer move the way I like to move or feel as confident as I’ve worked so hard to feel?

I know that bodies change over time, and I try to remind myself that I don’t get to feel this way forever no matter what. I’ll get older, and my body will change as I do. Heck, my body is changing now as my diet and exercise habits naturally change over time due to various external and internal causes.

But because the changes of pregnancy are so strongly culturally feminized, I still worry that being pregnant will rattle me in a way that changes like aging won’t.

Wardrobe

Just like I spent a long time learning to live comfortably in my body, I spent a very long time learning to be confident with my personal style. I prefer conventionally masculine clothing and grooming! It’s often difficult to find clothes that fit my body that also make me look the way I see myself!

Over the years, I’ve amassed a collection of everything from suits and dress shirts to more casual T-shirts and shorts, struggling to find clothing marketed for men that actually fits. Plenty of my formal clothes were made to measure, and I’ve altered a lot of my less-formal clothes myself.

This may not seem like such a big deal: oh no, for nine months or more I might not be able to wear clothing I prefer. Like any other pregnant person, Potential-Future-Me might have to buy a whole new wardrobe to reflect a changing body.

And you’re right — overall, I’m lucky to have clothes on my back that keep out the cold, and anything else is gravy. But my clothing is so strongly tied to my gender expression and self image that the thought of losing access to it, temporarily while being pregnant and/or for longer periods afterwards, shakes me up. It makes me ask myself questions like, is it possible to find conventionally masculine clothing for a pregnant body? Is it prohibitively expensive? And it makes me anticipate feeling the way I do when I have to wear a dress and make-up for a more rigidly gendered formal occasion*, but without a distinct and scheduled end in sight (and without the knowledge that I’m choosing to do this to celebrate people I care about in a way that’s meaningful to them).

Access

Obviously, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that there’s a big difference between anticipating being pregnant with a body that you can feel secure that most people will perceive as female and anticipating being pregnant with a body where you can’t take that for granted.

Like many other people who can become pregnant, I worry and wonder about how to navigate spaces not designed to facilitate pregnancy. It seems like a lot of the things that can make public life less challenging for pregnant people — access to some washrooms, priority for certain seats, use of certain parking spots — depend on the judgment of untrained, idiosyncratic gatekeepers.

I know that this is an issue for all pregnant people: can the retail employee being paid minimum wage open the employees-only bathroom for a pregnancy emergency? Will the seated person on this subway train stand in order to let a pregnant person sit? However, the idea that I may have to argue with strangers in public spaces about not just whether I am pregnant and why that should matter but about whether my body is capable of pregnancy is intimidating, to say the least.

If your appearance and behaviour don’t inspire strangers to hold referendums on your sex, I’m glad for you, because, honestly, it’s exhausting and dispiriting. Since I can remember — as a child and teenager as well as an adult — I’ve learned to avoid spaces and activities that may prompt such snap judgments, such as not using public bathrooms unless I absolutely have to and changing into more fitted clothing before, not after, entering a single-gender locker room. The idea that not only will I have to increase the frequency of these encounters but also rely much more heavily on them being successful isn’t thrilling, to say the least.

Post-pregnancy

Those of you who don’t “do” gender “right” — who don’t fit in the binary, who don’t identify with and/or present as the gender you were assigned at birth, who experience something other than socially condoned heterosexual/heteroromantic attraction leading to monogamous marriage, and/or who are in some way gender non-conforming — will know that no matter how supportive and loving your circle of family and/or friends, you will still be bombarded with messages from early childhood onward that you are wrong and should be ashamed. You probably also know, intellectually, that these messages are bullshit. But that doesn’t stop you from remembering how you once believed them and maybe even sometimes feeling like you still do.

If you never feel like you still do, well, please teach me how, because plenty of those messages have stuck with me, popping up when I least expect it. And they make me worry about my potential future as a parent, both because, despite progress over the past several decades, many parenting spaces and identities are still very gendered, and because I don’t want that feeling of shame and wrongness, even vicariously, for any kid I might parent.

Many of the social barriers I’d navigate wouldn’t go away after giving birth. If it’s tough for me to use public washrooms on my own, how will I navigate needing to use them with a small child in tow who needs a diaper change or a potty break? Would strangers treat any future kid of mine differently because they treat me differently?

Like I said, I know intellectually that these worries are not as big, practically speaking, as they loom for me emotionally. I know that it’d be way more harmful, ultimately, for any child to learn that you have to stifle yourself and don’t deserve to be who you are than for them to learn that other people are sometimes ignorant or intolerant. But knowing and believing are two different things.

Will I let these four worries prevent me from trying to become pregnant if that’s what my spouse and I decide is the right choice for us? No, of course not — both Husband and I have way more feelings to consider than just these ones, and just because something is difficult or scary doesn’t mean it’s impossible. But will these worries affect how I approach the whole question? I mean, of course. How could they not?

* To be absolutely clear, preferring to present myself as masculine-of-centre doesn’t mean that I never want to wear conventionally feminine clothes. Yes, most of the time, I’d rather wear a suit and tie than a dress. However, sometimes it’s fun to dress up formally and femme, in the same way (for me) that it’s also sometimes fun to wear a costume. And, just as with costumes, it’s sometimes especially fun if, as described above, I know I’m doing it with/for folks I care about.