A father has complained that nurses insisted on calling him ‘mom’ during his pregnancy despite being a man.
Bennett Kaspar-Williams, 37, from Los Angeles, first realised he was trans around ten years ago, in 2011, but didn’t begin his transition until three years later.
Then six years later, in 2017 he found Malik, his future husband – who he married in 2019.
The couple decided that they wanted to have children, and weighed the options available to them because it meant Bennett stopping the testosterone hormone therapy he’d been on for several years.
Bennett, who has had surgery on the top half of his body but not on his genitalia, eventually decided that he would be comfortable trying to conceive and carrying a child.
Two years after beginning hormone treatment, in the summer of 2015, Bennett had surgery to remove his breasts – paying $5,000 for the procedure.
Recalling how it took the operation to make him realise how unhappy he was about having female breasts, he said: ‘It was really liberating. I had this feeling that it was something that I needed to do, but I never had a self-hatred of my breasts, like some trans people.
‘I had no dysphoria about certain body parts and still don’t.
‘But I never could have anticipated what a relief it would be to find them gone. It was a huge weight off my shoulders.
‘That’s the end of the surgical road when it comes to my transitioning though – bottom half surgery is off the table. I have no dysphoria with that part of my body.’
However, carrying and giving birth to his own child was not a straightforward decision for Bennett.
‘I always knew it was a possibility that my body might achieve pregnancy, but it wasn’t something I ever wanted to do until I learned how to separate the function of my body from any notions of gender,’ said Bennett.
‘Once I learned to think of my body as a tool and not a collection of gendered stereotypes, I realized that I could both be the person I wanted to and bring a child into the world.
‘No one can ever really know whether having children is possible until you try – being born with a uterus doesn’t make conceiving or carrying a certainty.
‘That’s why it’s so important that we stop defining “womanhood” in terms of “motherhood”, because it’s a false equivalency that all women can become mothers, that all mothers carry their children, or that all people who carry children are mothers. – Daily Mai