Mr. Mom

By Edward Keenan April 2, 2008 7 Comments

I once saw a short documentary at a festival of film students’ projects—the name of the movie and its makers is lost in the fog of memory, unfortunately—that was about a teenage genderqueer. She was biologically female but dressed like a male all the time. She and her boi friends dressed like greasers and walked and talked like slim-built James Deans.

This particular young person had a father who was a pre-operation male-to-female transsexual—Dad had been born a male, lived as a man and fathered a child, and was by the time of filming living as a woman and hoping to have surgery to make the body match the mind.

(To complete the freakshow, both Female Dad and male-ish daughter were at the screening, and had a screaming match outside afterwards—and fell into the behaviours commonly identified with their biological genders, Dad booming her voice in exasperation while daughter cried and stormed off, signifying what, I don’t know).

Anyway, onscreen in the film there was a moment when the female-identified Dad said something along the lines of, “There’s a difference between you and your friends and me. You girls are interested in fucking with gender roles. I’m completely invested in them.”

That moment stuck with me, and the concept has long fascinated me. Unlike others in the ever-expanding alphabet soup of LGBTTTQQI-dom[1], some transsexuals are heavily committed to the legitimacy of gender roles. So much so that they believe that they need to alter their bodies to match the role they feel they are supposed to—meant to, need to—play.

One of the books sitting on my desk awaiting a spare moment is The First Man-Made Man by Pagan Kennedy, about Michael Dillon, the first person to undergo a female-to-male sex change operation. According to the book’s overleaf, he had a failed love affair with Roberta Cowell, a pre-op male-to-female transsexual. I’m interested in what it, and what female-to-male transsexuals in general, have to say about manliness.

Because obviously they’ve thought a lot about the concept. These are people who have felt so strongly that they are men that they didn’t let their bodies get in the way of their manly identities. They were not, clearly, interested in radically altering our impressions of how someone in a woman’s body should act, they instead went about radically altering their bodies so that the flesh would match their own conception of how they felt compelled to behave.

All by way of introducing this crazy-sounding item from the Advocate. A pregnant man. The first since Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this one actually real.

Of course, the guy in question was born a female, and even as he had his sex legally changed, he left the female plumbing intact. How does this fit into the scale of being a man? I don’t know.

But I do know that I’m kind of jealous. There are two reasons I’ve ever thought it would be cool to be a female—or “wished I could be,” as I’d say in a parlour game. The first, that I’d like to stare at my naked body in the mirror all day and see how it all looks and feels, is typically adolescent and faded soon after puberty.

But the second is enduring: I have always wished it could be possible for me to carry a child. There’s something magical about growing a life inside of you, and there seems to me also to be something magical about the connection between mother and child that stems from the very fact that they were once physically attached, that the child literally came into being and grew from a cluster of cells into a person inside the belly of his or her mother.

That’s powerful stuff, and my experience of fatherhood has only made my suspicion that the apparently stronger bonds that exist between mothers and children than between fathers and children begin right there in the womb. (Not in every case, obviously, and the other usual provisos—my wife Rebecca tells me that the lack of an immediate connection and ensuing alienation is a major cause of postpartum depression… let the debate rage in the comments!) A father and his baby, whether they share genetic material or not, need to get to know each other and figure out how their relationship will work. Mothers don’t. The baby came right out of them and in most cases (historically all cases), the baby continues to feed directly from Mom’s body for months after the birth. Their connection is organic.

I’m sure you’ve seen as many psychological theories as I have speculating that the male drive to create art and build monuments is a compensation for being unable to give life (and as many other theories the male urge to destroy stems from the same place). Whatever.

Not this guy. He gets to have his own baby. And whatever that says about him as a man or about his commitment to male-ness, I’m happy for him.

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[1] That’d be Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Two-Spirited, Queer, Questioning and Intersexed, for those of you no longer keeping track. If we add an “S”, we could significantly ease pronunciation of that awkward initialism to “everyone”, but don’t hold your breath waiting for that.[back]

Posted in Act Like A Man

stellewriter

Is it not a loving act? Each of us does what we can to show our devotion to our mate.

Let us not confuse by unfair association those who have medical issuesâ€¦
Every ten minutes a child is born, 1/2500, in which the doctor cannot determine the sex, or gender. This is not talking about homosexuality, but tragically a congenital condition of birth which can be caused by endocrine agents and chemicals. These children are Intersex; they are born into a life of not male or female. Likewise in similar fashion the Transsexual is identified with a Bioneurological congenital condition, and they too are locked into something not quite so clearly defined as male, or female. The best we can do is live as close to what we seem to believe we are. That may preclude the wants, and often ignorant and bigoted beliefs of others. In what case do we ignore this issue and abandon the children who now cannot hide? How can anyone continue in hate and prejudice so as to deny simple equality and justice? Not an easy thing to resolve, but one that is present and will not go away. I can appreciate social opinion, and the freedom to express same, but I would hope our culture and ethos would be with regard to the children, teens, and emerging adults, and all who are not so fortunate to have been born by someoneâ€™s idea of â€œnormal.â€?

Stellewriter â€“ Conservative Christian, Parent, and Transsexual.
just wondering

I am a little bit confused, stellewriter, as to what part of the article above you are responding to. Perhaps you could clarify?
Trilobyte

You may be interested in one FtM’s analysis of the trip from female to male, called “Feminist on Testosterone”:

http://www.cauldronfarm.com/writing/feminist.html
http://scarlet-pervygirl.blogspot.com The Scarlet Pervygirl

It’s possible, I suppose, that mothers and their biological offspring have a stronger bond than fathers and their biological offspring, but then again an “organic” connection is not necessarily an emotional one. In my time I’ve been physically intimate with a number of people without being emotionally intimate with them at all; and I’ve known a number of women, mothers, who did not feel a strong sense of connection with their biological children at any point in the pregnancy/childbirth/breastfeeding/childrearing process. I remain unconvinced.

It’s ironic that you are male and want to experience what it’s like to be pregnant; I am female and deeply resent the total devotion of my body to reproducing. I find the idea of pregnancy horrifying, and have a strong desire to avoid ever having to experience it. Life is weird.
DR

Historically, in Europe at least, many aristocratic and wealthy women sent their children out to be breast-fed by wetnurses. They might not even see them until they were weaned. Then, in the middle of the 18th century, it suddenly became fashionable to be “natural” and breast-feed your own children (part of the Rousseau/romanticism movement). So women’s connection to their children is subject to cultural changes, to some extent – it’s not purely biological.

I’m interested in women (biological) like the teenager you cite, who choose to dress and present themselves as men. I remember a few years ago a lesbian senior administrator at Victoria University in BC announced that, from now on, she would, as your blog says, “Act Like a Man”, would dress and act as a male and wanted to be treated as a male by everyone (without, I think, any actual changes to his body). I thought this was interesting – going from the gender with the most, for want of a better term, sexual-politics credibility (homosexual woman) to the one with the least (straight male). I wondered if we straight males should have had a welcoming party of some kind. Should we take him to a strip club and offer him cigars, welcoming him with stereotypically straight male gestures? Especially since his new gender was made up entirely of outward, and therefore to some extent stereotypical, signs – clothing, haircut, behaviour typical of a straight male – rather than biological changes.

I also wondered if it was disorienting for his female partner, to suddenly become in some sense part of a “heteronormative” couple.
karenm

Saying that people who’ve transitioned are necessarily ‘invested’ in traditional gender roles is off the mark.

There are plenty of people who transition, and become far, far from stereotypes.

Also, it’s unfair to take it upon oneself that another person’s expression just *must* mean that they’ve bought into the binary, or whatever.

Unless they confess to it, which is of course, what this trans woman seems to have done. To which all I can say is, more and more young people wave off all the labels but the generalized Queer, and that’s obviously where it’s all headed.
http://www.eyeweeekly.com Edward Keenan

Hi Karen, thanks for your thoughts. Just wanted to mention that your point is a worthwhile one to emphasize, and it’s the reason why I had phrased the statement you’re questioning as “*some* transsexuals are heavily committed…”

Thanks again.

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