One trans man’s pioneering quest
The Guardian is excited about a new movie.
Watch the trailer for Seahorse, a new feature-length documentary produced in association with the Guardian, about one trans man’s pioneering quest to start his own family. This is the story of the dad who gave birth.
Freddy is 30 and yearns to start a family but for him this ordinary desire comes with unique challenges. He is a gay transgender man. Deciding to carry his own baby took years of soul searching, but nothing could prepare him for the reality of pregnancy, as both a physical experience and one that challenges society’s fundamental understanding of gender, parenthood and family.
In other words, a woman had a baby. Stop the presses!
It’s a thing that happens every day all over the planet without making the news…but when it’s a woman who claims to be a man doing it, then it challenges society’s fundamental understanding of gender, parenthood and family.
Except it doesn’t, you know. It’s still a woman having a baby. The fact that Freddy claims to be a man doesn’t change that. Words don’t change physical realities that easily. Words can change emotional realities, legal realities, social realities, but they can’t change material reality.
Made with unprecedented access and collaboration over three years, the film follows Freddy from preparing to conceive right through to birth. The film, directed by Jeanie Finlay, premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival at the end of April, and will play in the UK later this year.
And what about the baby? What about the hormones Freddy is taking and their effect on the baby? No doubt that’s too boring and routine to bother talking about.
Wow, imagine that. Having a baby when you have a uterus and ovaries. Such a quest. I can’t imagine. (Oh, wait, I can. I have done just that…)
And a heterosexual woman at that. Yawn.
*Grumble*: male seahorses don’t get pregnant, they just have a pouch to incubate eggs. This is manifestly not the same thing as mammalian pregnancy but everyone seems to pretend that it is. It’s no different to male (or, for that matter, female) birds sitting on eggs to keep them warm.
It’s interesting for sure, but not for the reasons a lot of people seem to think. There are a lot of other really cool things about seahorses that seem to be routinely ignored.
Oh, and yeah: snowflake had baby, somehow redefining the entire notion of motherhood and fatherhood. Seahorses are much more interesting.
Too bad Freddy didn’t give birth to a seahorse. Now that would have been stunning and brave.
latsot, and male water bugs carrying eggs on their back. And male catfish sitting on eggs. None of these beings laid the eggs, they only tended the young. Yeah, so much wrong. My ex sometimes carried our son in one of those carriers you strap around your chest and stomach. That’s a better analogy, but still not perfect because the baby was already born.
To be clear, a better analogy for seahorses, not for this female-identifying-as-male getting pregnant and giving birth with the structures that make one a female.
To be sure, there are species (eg clownfish?) where males will become female under certain circumstances and bear young. But those aren’t males giving birth, those are females giving birth. That this woman gave birth is clear proof that she is female, not the male she claims to be.
Maybe the Guardian can call back when they’ve got a documentary about a transwoman giving birth.
I’ll wait.
erm…