A lot more common than you might think
Is it possible?
The healthline item is from 2018. I think I’ve seen it before, and probably written about it here, but I haven’t been able to find anything here. Apologies if I repeat myself.
The trick turns out to be easy.
Yes, it’s possible for men to become pregnant and give birth to children of their own. In fact, it’s probably a lot more common than you might think. In order to explain, we’ll need to break down some common misconceptions about how we understand the term “man.”
Oh, that. They mean women who call themselves men can get pregnant. Yes no kidding, we know that already.
Many AFAB folks who identify as men or who don’t identify as women have the reproductive organs necessary to carry a child.
Duh. All of them do unless they have a serious abnormality. This isn’t some crapshoot that nobody can really predict, it’s what everybody already knows.
Yes, pigs can fly, if you define eagles as pigs. Yes, frogs can teach physics, if you define frogs as humans who have learned physics. Yes, jumbo jets can be submarines if you define submarines as jumbo jets.
Reject redefinition.
There’s a fundamental category error in play. The truth of some propositions supervenes only on their meanings, while others’ additionally supervenes on facts about the world. The former we call analytic; the latter synthetic. There is no knowledge about the world that we could learn, even in principle, that could require us to revise our evaluation of, “no circle is a triangle.” On the other hand, it is possible to learn something that leads us to revise an evaluation of, “No circles are in Australia.”
Pregnant men is a phenomenon of the first sort, obviously.
I call foul. I was going for a weird biological anomaly and it turned out to be smoke and mirrors.
Everything is possible if every word means anything you want it to mean. Great news for anyone taking exams – just write down whatever, and the meaning of the words will morph into the correct answer somehow. There, that fixes most of the world’s problems I reckon.
I notice they never illustrate the point with an anecdote. Most trans-mythology is underpinned by stories, stories of oppressed non-white trans teenagers living on the streets, endless claims of suicides etc. etc.
So where is our children’s book about a trans man having a baby? Just how many instances have there actually been?
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
Regarding “AFAB folks who identify as men” and their reproductive organs: 99+% percent of them were born with all the usual female anatomy, but they’re much more likely than other women to undergo hysterectomy and/or oophorectomy, whether it’s to quell “dysphoria” or to address the issues caused by long-term testosterone usage causes (uterine atrophy and prolapse, ovarian cysts). So, technically speaking, a decent number of them actually don’t have the reproductive organs necessary for pregnancy.
The preachy tone of a first year undergrad philosophy student is vital in these articles. The author knows they’re telling us things we already know. What’s happening here is that the author is giving us arguments to blurt out if we sense the slightest challenge to our earnest, deeply held beliefs that we only found out about last year.
And to signal virtue like a baboon flaunts it’s arse, of course.