Pregnancies and asymptotes
Something I didn’t touch on in my recent post, Pregnancy and PMS, was the idea of me ever having children. I haven’t talked about this much on the blog, other than the ton of fun I had while going off hormones to deposit sperm summer before last. And, to be honest, I haven’t thought about it a whole lot since.
At this party the other night, when I was talking with these other women about pregnancy and giving birth, it reminded me that I’ll never be pregnant. That I’ll never give birth.
Lots of women can’t get pregnant, for lots of different reasons. And, because I stored sperm, I will be able to parent children, something that most of those women can’t do. But hearing about the experience of giving birth, and in particular the experience of holding your newborn child right after giving birth, teetered between bittersweet and outright sad.
To listen to these women talk about the wonder of holding a child that had lived and grown inside their bodies. Of the impossibility of this living, breathing thing in their arms. To watch it as it sleeps.
It made me miss something, mourn the loss of something I’ll never have.
I’m approaching the standard definition of ‘woman’ in an asymptotic fashion. That is, I’ve gotten closer by leaps and bounds, but am nearing a final stretch which I will be unable to cross. As that happens, I’m feeling the pain of that distance more acutely than I was ten years ago, when my focus was on names and pronouns and wardrobe and presentation.
Now, I’m trying to allow myself to view myself as a woman. To rethink my own concept of my identity. I’m working on expanding my wardrobe, not starting it from scratch. I wish my breasts were bigger, but love that I have any in the first place. And yes, I’m thinking about The Surgery.
But sliding along an asymptotic curve doesn’t seem to be like a pleasant place to be. I want to be happy with my destination, not forever looking across an infinitesimal chasm to greener pastures.
There is a list of things – my regret at not transitioning earlier, my frustration with my past, my lack of confidence today, my unhappiness with the forever-limited amount of ‘womanhood’ I can achieve – that I would like to acknowledge, grieve and mourn, and move beyond.
How do I do that?
Themocracy
What a question! Would that I had a definitive answer.
The last paragraph brings to mind a ceremony I recently read about in which a person convenes a quorum of ten men to beg forgiveness from a dead person, and the ten men together absolve him. Or how when my father wanted to take care of myself as a stay at home dad, but his family’s traditions said that men couldn’t do various childcare tasks (or could do so only in bizarre ways), he convened a court (a beis bin) which released him from his familial ways.
In a parallel way, I imagine you could design a ceremony in which you symbolically throw away (or move away from) whatever things you want to get away from.
I think the idea of a ceremony is really attractive, and something I’ve toyed with before. Ultimately, though, I need to be able to overcome (or at least suppress) my own feelings of awkwardness and self-consciousness around the idea of a constructed ceremony. And, more importantly, the idea of being trans and being a woman.
But definitely something to think more about…
When I was in high school, I had horrible periods because I’m allergic to my own progesterone. When I complained to the school nurse (I got to use the nurse’s office bathroom because of my other health problems) she told me (not considering mine might actually be significantly worse than most) that yeah, it was no fun, but it was the price I paid for being able to have children and be a woman. I can’t have my own biological children. The same thing that make my periods so horrific mean that pregnancy would kill me. I knew this already, and I’ve known this since I was really little, so I was used to it, and I’m very lucky that my internal gender identity matches my biological sex, but it threw me, and hurt, to realize there were people who saw this thing that I would never be able to do as essential for real womanhood. If I asked any of them, none of them would say I wasn’t a woman, but all of them, unthinking, deny me a little bit of my gender authenticity. Tying femininity to biological aspects like cycles, pregnancy, and PMS is destructive, transphobic, ablest, and hurtful. I mean, I’m a pretty feminine cissexual girl and I cant fulfill this biological ideal of womanhood. I give up. It makes no sense.
Thank you for your comment, Attackfish.
Exactly! I completely agree, and yet I keep holding myself to that unreasonable and unfair standard. I’m trying to move past that, but it hasn’t been easy to let go of such closely held and hidden desires.
Do you have any thoughts or suggestions on how you were able to move past the idea that being a woman means you must be able to bear children? I’d love some pointers…
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