How does the gender binary show up around pregnancy and birth? How do trans and gender-nonconforming people navigate all that? How does race intersect with these experiences? And are things starting to change at all? Are our ideas about birth and gender becoming more expansive and more inclusive? And if they’re not, how can we make it better?

Visit us at: beyondthebinarypodcast.com 

Online resources:

Doula4All (Nadine Ashby): https://www.doula4all.com/ 

Birth Revolution: https://thebirthrevolution.org/ 

Embodied Birth (Ash Dasuqi): https://www.embodiedbirthclass.com/ 

“A Mother, But Not a Woman”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2019/08/16/non-binary-pregnant-navigating-most-gendered-role-all-motherhood/ 

“Black birthing persons matter – all of them” (Harvard Medical School Primary Care Review): https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/black-birthing-persons-matter 

“For many pregnant trans people, competent medical care is hard to find”: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/for-many-pregnant-trans-people-competent-medical-care-is-hard-to-find 

Rainbow Families Trans and Gender Diverse Parents Guide: https://www.transhealthsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Rainbow_Families_TGD_Parents-Guide.pdf 

Other podcasts:

Masculine Birth Ritual: https://www.masculinebirthritual.com/home 

Evidence Based Birth (Episode 182: Black-led Queer and Trans Birth Work): https://evidencebasedbirth.com/black-led-queer-and-trans-birth-work-with-mystique-hargrove-kortney-lapeyrolerie-and-nadine-ashby/ 

Books:

The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (by Krys Malcolm Belc)

For the kids:

What Makes a Baby (author)

Episode transcript:

SUMNER MCRAE:  Christmas 2013. My partner and I announced that she’s pregnant. One of her cousins asks if we know what our sperm donor does for a living. My partner says she’s not sure. He’s a student, we think. Why? We ask. We assume her cousin is just curious. He grins at us. Because if the guy is a construction worker, he says, I think the baby will be a boy. We look blankly at him. Uh, my partner starts to say. The cousin continues, And if he’s an interior designer, it’ll be a girl.

Welcome to Beyond the Binary, a podcast about nonbinary folks, navigating a binary world. Our first 5 episodes center on parenting in the gender binary. We’ll be talking to nonbinary parents about the unique challenges we face, the unique joys we experience, and the ways we all come up against the gender binary at nearly every turn once we become parents.  I’m Sumner McRae, your host on this journey. I’m queer, nonbinary, and a parent. This is Episode Two: Birth. 

[Baby crying] So that’s how it starts. You’re pregnant. Or maybe your partner is pregnant. You’re overjoyed and nervous in equal measure. You start planning and looking forward to this new season of your life. You share the news with family and friends. Everyone gets caught up in the excitement.

Then, you start to get asked about the baby’s gender. You’re not sure if or how you want to answer that question. Maybe folks start referring to you as mom, which causes you some dysphoria. After that, there are prenatal appointments, ultrasound appointments, blood draws, stress tests. Maybe you’re pregnant after years of being on testosterone. You have a beard and a deep voice. The front desk staff don’t understand why you’re there. They ask you if you’re checking in for your wife. You have to insist that you’re the one who’s pregnant.

There’s waiting room after waiting room after waiting room. Nearly all of them are filled with cisgender pregnant women. At the end of every weight is a nurse or receptionist who might call out the wrong name if it’s still on your medical record. And this is all on top of the typical worries about the pregnant person’s health or carrying to term. When you go into labor, if you’re having a hospital birth, you might be admitted to the maternity floor. There will be new nurses and staff after every shift change.

The hospital might have a system that reflects your lived name and pronouns. Maybe the staff are all aware and consistent in affirming your gender and your family. But maybe they’re not. When the baby emerges, someone might gender your baby, whether you want them to or not. Then more new people arrive—the postpartum nurse, maybe a lactation consultant, or hospital staff bringing paperwork for the birth certificate, which may default to mother and father.

You bring your baby home and field the constant question from strangers and even from friends and family: girl or boy? 

The gender noise around pregnancy and birth can feel like a cacophony for anyone, but especially for nonbinary people. Every interaction with the healthcare system–and there will be many–carries the potential stress of being misnamed, misgendered, and misunderstood.

Over the course of history, I have no doubt that a multitude of trans and nonbinary folks have carried pregnancies, had babies, and become parents. But more and more, folks are sharing their stories publicly and building a community around their experiences. 

How does the gender binary show up around pregnancy and birth? How do trans and gender nonconforming people navigate all that? How does race intersect with these experiences? And are things starting to change at all? Are our ideas about birth and gender becoming more expansive and more inclusive? And if they’re not, how can we make it better? 

NADINE ASHBY:  You know, it was really difficult to find a provider I could really be open with. So, I was really closeted during that time because I was afraid that if I was open about who I was fully, that I wouldn’t receive the care that I needed to receive.

SUMNER MCRAE:  This is Nadine Ashby.  Nadine is a queer, nonbinary doula and parent. They are the founder of Birth Revolution, a black and indigenous, trans led birth education organization. 

NADINE ASHBY:  A lot of that inability to find care and trying to figure out how to navigate the racism and homophobia and transphobia of our healthcare system informs a lot of the advocacy work that I do with clients today.

ASH DASUQI: When I was first doing my labor and delivery rotation in nursing school, I was like, oh gross, I can’t believe they’re going to make me watch a birth. How do I have to do this? And then when I was in there, I was crying immediately. So it was funny. I remember thinking like, wow, that’s one of the most innately human, raw things I’ve ever seen before. 

SUMNER MCRAE: I also spoke with Ash Dasuqi, a queer, nonbinary nurse midwife, and doula, who runs queer focused childbirth classes.

ASH DASUQI: I would say it really came from growing up Palestinian and queer and just like always asking really big questions about suffering and violence and pain in the world. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Ash and Nadine both had a lot to say about the idea of pregnancy and birth not being exclusive to women or femininity being a difficult thing for a lot of folks in healthcare and birth work to get their heads around. 

ASH DASUQI:  There’s a lot of pretty intense TERF energy in the birth community.

NADINE ASHBY:  That was a thing that really almost pushed me out when I first really got started as a birth worker. It was just so in your face. Everything was like woman, woman, woman, mama, woman, woman. Hey, ladies. And trying to interrupt that was so exhausting. 

ASH DASUQI:  So many midwives and doulas are just coming at it from this like, when you get pregnant, you get excited to wear a maternity dress, birthing is like innately your purpose as a woman, et cetera.

Whereas like I’ve had clients talk about how getting pregnant has been like some of the most affirming masculinizing gender experiences they’ve ever experienced, you know? 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  Interestingly, I feel like I have always wanted to birth a baby and that surprisingly hasn’t changed a lot. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  This is Kimmins Southard. Kimmins is a trans nonbinary person who gave birth to their first child last summer.

For Kimmins, the idea of getting pregnant and having a baby was never really at odds with their trans non binary identity. Though it’s clear that a lot of medical providers will assume that a person who is trans masculine or doing things like taking testosterone and pursuing top surgery by default wouldn’t want to be a gestational parent. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  And I’ve heard stories of folks who go on testosterone and are told or have to sign off saying they will be infertile or understand they won’t be able to have a baby. And I lived in Chicago at the time and where I went for hormones, that wasn’t part. We didn’t talk about it at all, which maybe it should be a conversation, but it also shouldn’t be a false conversation, like a lot of people I’ve talked to where they’ve been told they won’t be able to have a baby or they would be infertile, which isn’t the case. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  There’s a lot of misinformation out there that transgender and nonbinary folks on testosterone can’t have biological children after hormones, even if they keep their uterus and ovaries.

Fertility for folks on testosterone isn’t usually affected. People can go off of testosterone, get pregnant, and even nurse their babies. A study published in 2019 showed that trans men and cis women undergoing egg retrieval in preparation for in vitro fertilization or egg banking had eggs of similar quality and quantity. In the study, the trans men who used their egg retrievals for immediate in vitro procedures all had successful live births.

So getting pregnant, for trans and non binary folks who want to, isn’t necessarily an issue. What is an issue are the barriers trans and non binary people face when they seek medical care. 

NADINE ASHBY:  A lot of times they go into their visit and maybe their provider is a little bit cold. And maybe have some questions for them that are a little invasive, which is something that I find happens with queer and trans families when they go to get care from most hospital systems.

SUMNER MCRAE:  Access to medical care that is affirming and welcoming for trans and nonbinary people is a huge issue in our communities. This is a problem even when pregnancy and birth are not in the mix. One third of trans and gender non conforming folks who access healthcare report having negative experiences related to being transgender. Nearly a quarter avoid seeking medical care altogether for fear of discrimination for being trans. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  So I hadn’t done a legal name change. I decided it was time. And so I did a legal name change. I did not realize how drastically that would change my experience of healthcare. 

I got misgendered so much less. I was always called the correct name. And so, just the constant dread I would have in healthcare settings about like, are they going to call out my legal name in the waiting room? Is every single nurse I’m going to interact with going to call me the wrong name and misgender me? But not being called the wrong name also just helped me be more present while I was getting medical care rather than continually feeling like dysphoric and uncomfortable. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  But even with a legal name change, pregnancy complicates things. Trying to access prenatal care for trans folks who might be very masculine appearing, or anyone whose gender identity is fluid or nonbinary and just doesn’t want to be “mom”-ed constantly, is an uphill battle. 

ASH DASUQI: When you’re walking into the women’s unit, the women’s health center to give birth, it is a lot deeper than just being misgendered. It’s also being seen as somebody you’re not. People often are denied care from various providers and sometimes lactation consultants will refuse to help with lactation physicians or midwives or various providers will not want to work with people who are trans just for lack of education, but also more overt active discrimination and things like that.

SUMNER MCRAE:  Nadine and Ash both noted that the stress trans and nonbinary people experience both while accessing healthcare and in their day to today lives can negatively affect birth outcomes. 

ASH DASUQI:  Not feeling safe and not feeling seen can have pretty significant ramifications on the safety of somebody’s birth process, even when people like try really hard and just correct themselves or something in the way that they refer to you. You sort of know they don’t see that there is this nonbinary person birthing right now or there’s a dude who’s giving birth to a baby right now.

So that experience of like being in such a vulnerable space, very vulnerable moment in your life, maybe being like largely unseen by the people around you–can have a pretty big impact on just the safety of birth. 

NADINE ASHBY:  The constant misgendering, the constant like, oh, is this person your sister? Did you bring your sister with you today? Things like that. Those kind of microaggressions really increase our cortisol levels and cortisol, it regulates our body’s stress response. And people who are stressed, people who are in stressful situations, especially over long periods of time, don’t have as good birth outcomes. It really wears and tears at our bodies. That discrimination really has an impact. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Race also informs how trans and nonbinary folks experience the healthcare system. There are plenty of reports showing mortality rates for black people giving birth in the U.S.. Both that they are unconscionably high and that they’re much higher than mortality rates for white folks giving birth.

NADINE ASHBY:  Black women are three to 5 times more likely to die from childbirth related complications, which really is just dying from racism. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  But this data refers to maternal mortality. And either is focused largely on cis women or assumes that anyone giving birth is a cis woman. 

NADINE ASHBY:  They don’t realize that a lot of black queer folks, a lot of black trans folks are pushed into that statistic as well. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  There is some limited research on transgender parents who give birth which looks at the discrimination trans and gender nonconforming people experience in medical settings during prenatal care and birth. But the research looks primarily at discrimination due to gender identity with very little attention to how gender identity intersects with race. 

NADINE ASHBY:  In my experience, talking with queer and trans families, a lot of times, especially families of color, there is so much fear about the hospital system.

ASH DASUQI: Queer and trans folks of color, they’re facing more various barriers within the medical institution around, for example, pain and outcomes and everything than white people who are going through the same thing that are queer and trans. There are studies that show that many physicians actually do believe that their black patients experience less pain than their other patients.

NADINE ASHBY:  There was a study that came out, I can’t remember what year it was, but one of the things that they looked at was a huge percentage of medical students were still believing that black people had thicker skin than white people. And that may seem like a small thing, but when you think about here is someone who’s coming in to do an IV, and you’re just stabbing the IV into someone, rupturing people’s veins, and just causing pain where there doesn’t need to be any. Things like that.

ASH DASUQI:  A lot of black and brown birthing people tell stories from being in the hospital birthing where they’re asking for pain medication or they’re asking for epidurals and you know it’s sort of getting prolonged, procrastinated, not responded to right away. Whereas on the flip side, you hear a lot of white people talking about how I didn’t want to get an epidural and they wouldn’t stop asking me every single time they came into the room. Are you ready for your epidural? Are you ready for your epidural? Which is also problematic, but like, damn, the discrepancy there.

NADINE ASHBY: So I live in the neighborhood where George Floyd was murdered. Right after the uprising, there was still—my neighborhood was really smoky.

I was sitting on the porch with my friend B, who was another queer trans doula in the community. And we were just talking about how much white saviorism was going on in our—in the greater community and also in the birth community. And that also led us into a conversation about our doula training and how there was always, you get one thing, and it was kind of a trade off.

I took a training that was really heavily focused on black birth and black birthing people, but there wasn’t very much about supporting queer folks or trans folks or fat clients.  Like there wasn’t much about any of the other things that are affecting people in our healthcare system. And B experienced that as well where maybe you go to a training that is about queerness and transness, but it’s very white. And there isn’t a lot of talk about racism. 

And so we decided to just create something to try to improve the outcomes for our communities. So, that’s kind of where Birth Revolution was born. You know, we’ve done some panel discussions with some of the nursing staff at these healthcare systems in Minnesota, but there needs to be so much more. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Doing this work well hinges on a clear and honest understanding of the history of race and white supremacy in the United States.  And how this informs everything, from patients’ anxiety around accessing medical care, providers’ biases about their patients, the way medical and nursing school is taught, pain management, and on and on. 

NADINE ASHBY:  The foundation of my training is built on history. You can’t understand what’s going on right now without an understanding of what has happened to lead us to this place. People don’t have—people in this country don’t have an understanding of history. And I mean, I can get off on a tangent about critical race theory and just the suppression of this information, which is just so clearly rooted in white supremacy culture. 

Why are outcomes the way that they are? If people can understand the why, and the why is history, I think we can get to a better place. I feel like the first step is trying to understand how we got here in the first place.

There’s a lack of historical—accurate historical understanding of healthcare: where we got our understanding of gynecology from, where we got the use of the speculum from, which is from the torture of black birthing people who were enslaved in this country. But a lot of people don’t know that. And so you go into a room, you are taking care of someone who is black, and you pull out that speculum, and the provider’s not necessarily thinking about, is this person thinking about where this device came from or any of that? But the history is in us. We feel it. We carry that ancestral information in our DNA.

Another thing that could improve outcomes, not just in birth, but in healthcare in general, is just completely dismantling the healthcare education system. It is so deeply rooted in white supremacy culture. It feels impossible to get out of it without tearing the thing apart and building it back up from the bottom.

ASH DASUQI: I remember in nursing school, just like always learning like, okay, here’s the average rate of this or that issue for white people, and then for African Americans, it’s a higher percentage of people suffering from XYZ thing. And it’s just like reported as fact without any analysis without any thought. And I just remember being like, am I the only person here who is not just like, oh, this must be because of some kind of genetic difference or something? Like, why isn’t anybody talking about this? This is so strange.

It’s kind of problematic because we’re dealing with a lot of people on both fronts in terms of racism and transphobia, homophobia issues. We’re dealing with the fact that plenty of people don’t want to adjust where they are. They’re not interested in being educated, but yeah, those things should be required. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  For nonbinary birthing people, finding trans competent birth care can be a challenge. Gender identity isn’t always on the radar of cisgender providers, and even when it is, there can still be issues. 

ASH DASUQI:  Sometimes providers who are trying their best can be just like tokenizing or weird people that are like actually pretty well meaning, that are weirdly excited to have a trans patient right now. They’re like, oh my God, I’ve learned about this. You’re on the slides and stuff from my PowerPoint training or whatever. All of it can just be so strange.

SUMNER MCRAE:  Kimmins definitely worried about this. They had a lot to say about finding trans competent prenatal care, birth care, and a doula in Michigan, where they live. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  So you know we live in the middle of Michigan. So it’s not like a big city. It’s not like a rural area either. So I asked trans folks for recommendations of doctors. It’s not like when I lived in Chicago, and there were tons of options, though. But you know I told those doctors, like, I was recommended to you as a trans competent provider. And I think maybe that helps them make sure you do a good job. 

My partner and I still had issues though. Like so, it happened multiple times that they were like, your partner does he have…—because they knew my partner is coming in too. And just making assumptions about who my partner was and what my gender was and what their gender was. So, that was very frustrating that still happened, but at the OB/GYN we went to, all of the doctors we interacted with seemed to kind of do a good job. They must have had something in my chart. Sometimes nurses were messing things up a little more. 

We created a birth plan, and we put our gendered language in our birth plan. We put please don’t gender our baby when they’re born in the first plan. And they uploaded that to our medical record, and then we also brought it to the hospital. So when we are at the hospital, I don’t know what their system looks like, but I was surprised because it seemed like most of the nurses and providers we worked with had kind of had some kind of heads up about our pronouns.

I think my partner actually did a lot of proactive work in talking to providers for me like, don’t call us moms, and you know, these are the pronouns we use. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Kimmins, Ash, and Nadine all noted how critical doulas are in improving birth outcomes and supporting birthing parents. 

NADINE ASHBY:  Doulas, especially doulas who are queer and doulas who are trans, really have their ear out there and so can help people to navigate—here are the safer places to go. Here are the safer providers to see so that you don’t have to do kind of like trial and error and go through all of the microaggressions that come along with providers trying to have you teach them how to take care of you.

ASH DASUQI:  I think having a doula for folks that are birthing at least in the hospital context, but really in any setting, I highly recommend in terms of just having somebody to advocate for your well-being as much as I know that doula access is very limited for many people. I wish that it wasn’t. I wish that people—I wish that everyone could have a doula just be given a doula, is paid in some other way because they’re so important.

SUMNER MCRAE:  As Ash said, it’s not always easy or possible for people to have a doula. Sometimes the cost is prohibitive. For trans and nonbinary birthing parents, especially if they live in a smaller town or a more conservative part of the country, sometimes it’s just very hard to find a trans competent doula in their community. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  We did have a doula. We looked for a doula early on and we put a lot of thought in our initial emails out to doulas about explaining who we are and what we’re looking for.  And we figured, you know, in the middle of Michigan here, we might not find a doula who’s worked with a trans birthing person before. But we’d like to find somebody who’s like met a trans person before, or used gender neutral pronouns for people before. 

So we interviewed a couple doulas, and yeah, there was one who sent us her paperwork, and it just said like, mom, mom, mom, everywhere in the paperwork. And so we were like, we told you in our email, who we were. Why did you send this to us? And she’s like, oh, I didn’t even realize. So we didn’t go with her. 

So yeah, we ended up finding a doula that worked with us and had met trans people before, so that was good. 

NADINE ASHBY:  The thing that really impacts birth outcomes is having a doula that is a cultural match. So if the family is a black family who is queer, who is trans, having a doula who has personal experience there is so key.

But there aren’t that many of us. And there aren’t that many of us because of all of the gatekeeping in birth work. You know, having to pay for the certifications and the training and stuff like that, there just not being funding for it.  Funding is so important funding so that people can take, can afford the doula trainings, and so that people like me who are black and brown and queer and trans can actually be paid a living wage to teach people about this work. More funding for families, having access to home birth, having access to birth center birth, you know, just other options is huge, and doulas as well.

SUMNER MCRAE:  One thing I hadn’t really thought about much until I spoke with Kimmins about it was birthing classes. I’d been thinking in terms of medical care, like what is it like to be a trans or nonbinary person seeking prenatal care?

And also, the actual birth itself. Finding a trans competent doula and dealing with the challenges of being misgendered or feeling like a spectacle in a hospital birth setting. But I’d kind of forgotten about the birth classes. My partner and I took a birth class when she was pregnant with our first kid. And while we weren’t the only queer couple in the class, it definitely felt like a very hetero and cis normative gendered space, which was somewhat uncomfortable. But I hadn’t thought about what that space might be like to experience if my partner had been trans or nonbinary and pregnant, or if I had been the one to carry our baby. 

ASH DASUQI: I currently teach a childbirth class for queer and trans people. 

SUMNER MCRAE: Ash runs prenatal birth classes, developed for queer, trans, and nonbinary parents via their organization embodied birth. 

ASH DASUQI:  I mean, initially, I was teaching all kinds of folks, this birth class, and then I slowly started shifting it and altering the curriculum to include more of the things that I wanted to see in a trans, nonbinary inclusive curriculum.

We also get into chest feeding, alternatives to chest feeding for folks that don’t want to do it, but maybe still want the benefits of human milk, for example, or still want close contact while feeding. We’ll talk about difficulties with chest feeding for folks that have had top surgery but want to do it or the kinds of assumptions that people might experience from the public as a pregnant trans person or as somebody that’s ambiguous in their gender, but nursing or things like that.

We get into all the different places that gender dysphoria can and regularly does show up, being pregnant can be can be very euphoric, but can also be very dysphoric, of course, in a way that many people haven’t experienced before because your body is doing sort of new unique things, if it’s someone’s first pregnancy. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Kimmins took Ash’s class and was so relieved and glad to find a safe space like this to prepare for giving birth. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  It was so validating to be in an environment in which it was intentionally for queer and trans people. And in so many spaces, at best, we are an afterthought and not ever the primary audience. We felt like we learned a lot of information. And it was just easier to learn it in environment where we weren’t constantly having to change the genders in our head or you know. 

ASH DASUQI:  So exhausting to translate mama in every other sentence in your head through an entire birth class, while still inputting what’s useful and continuously having to, I don’t know, you just have to like have your guards up the entire time really because it’s not your space and you know it. But you still need the information.

We also talked about like queer parenting and queer divisions of labor and yeah all sorts of things that are very fun for me to talk about. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  The other thing that was a big problem for Kimmins and for many pregnant trans folks was what to wear while pregnant. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  Something I don’t have recommendations for, but it’s going to be rough, is figuring out what kinds of clothes to wear when you’re pregnant because maternity clothes are very feminine often, and just like, they suck.

Being out in the world being seen by coworkers, like wanting to still be myself and not like suddenly look different, wanting to still dress as professionally as I had, which you know again, it wasn’t the most professional, but still like wanting to look appropriate and things like it was a challenge and figuring that out was was tough. And then it’s like if you size up, then they are so big in, you know, the arms or the neck, and you look, yeah, in your dad’s clothes or something.

So I found a couple like trans pregnant and parenting folks who are on Instagram, but people post pictures and just like having the visual to like see other pregnant trans folks and be like, okay.  You know people exist. I can exist. I can try to find clothes. 

The last like two weeks of my pregnancy—and it was in the summer when it was really hot, so that was rough too—I was able to work from home, which was great because I think I had like one pair of work pants that still fit. And so I know I could just wear my t-shirts that don’t even cover my belly fully and sit on the couch.

At times it felt like am I doing something really weird or out there you know? And so trying to just like normalize and feel like I, my family, we have the right to have a family and to do it this way. A lot of folks feel like they have to go into the closet essentially, you know, when they’re birthing and not be out to providers.  And that’s a personal choice and everybody knows what is best for them and their circumstances. But I think, yeah, trying to build a community, having podcasts like this, and knowing other people are out and birthing and parenting is really helpful and that I hope our systems continue to get better because I think as nonbinary people we have the right to be out and birthing and parenting. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Which brings us, of course, to the moment of birth itself. Your baby makes their messy, painful, spectacular, sometimes chaotic, sometimes quiet and peaceful entrance into the world. Maybe it comes after many long, hard hours, or even days of labor. Maybe it comes so fast, you barely have time to get to the hospital or the birth center. No matter how it happens, now the baby is here, and in a lot of cases, one of the first things that happens is someone genders your child.

ASH DASUQI:  The way that babies are treated you know directly based on their genitals get like a pink hat or a blue hat. It can also be really dysphoric for parents to be like, okay, here it is. I’m like watching gender assignment happen right in front of me with my own child. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Maybe it’s a doctor or midwife who calls out: it’s a boy. Maybe it’s having to check a box on birth certificate paperwork. Maybe it’s a nurse, bringing you a pink hat. 

It’s summer, 2014. Our baby is born. We’re thrilled. When we move to the recovery room, the baby is wrapped in a hospital receiving blanket, and wears a blue and pink cotton hat. The hospital gives us diapers, and Disney Cars-themed baby wipes. While I’m asleep, the recovery nurse brings us a new hat and new wipes for the baby. She hands them to my partner. The wipes are princess themed. For the princess, the nurse says.

The hat is just like the hat the baby already has, except this one has a bow. So people know she’s a girl, the nurse smiles and tells my partner. She tells my partner she had to look hard for that hat, and she’s so glad she found it. Um, thanks, my spouse says and wishes I were awake so she could see the look on my face. 

Of course, gender assumptions about what it means when someone wants to be pregnant and give birth aren’t just limited to medical providers, birth classes, and strangers. Our own families and friends sometimes need help understanding that a trans or nonbinary person having a baby doesn’t necessarily mean they want to be a mom or that they want to participate in all of the gender pomp and circumstance that often accompanies pregnancy and the birth of a new baby. 

Kimmins and their partner were super proactive about this. They created a hand-drawn birth announcement after their baby’s arrival that had these awesome, sort of comic book style illustrations. 

Watch our family grow, it says, announcing that the new parents Mada (Kimmins) and Zeze (their partner Jae) have welcomed their baby. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  Most people we know in our family and friends and coworkers know both my partner and I are nonbinary. My partner’s gender queer. We both go by gender neutral pronouns. But I think even well meaning people seem to get caught up about birthing stuff and default to mother or something.

And so we’re like, don’t call us moms. This is what we want to be called, and just framing that from the start. So it was really helpful. It went over really well, and we’ve spread it far and wide. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  They say, we won’t be participating in any cis het nonsense, and we won’t be enforcing oppressive gender roles and norms. We want our kid to be free to grow up to be whoever they want to be. And we don’t want to limit their activities, expression, or fun. 

KIMMINS SOUTHARD:  So we made that one that you saw when our baby was born. We also made another one when I announced to people that I was pregnant a while back. And actually that first one had very similar information. And we had thought like originally like, oh, this will be for my family and extended family. But then we ended up using it when we like announced that we were pregnant on Facebook. And then when I announced I was pregnant at work, I went back and forth. I’m like, should I share this comic? Should I not? If I don’t, I’ll probably get a lot of annoying questions. And so I ended up sharing it with work and like any time I told someone I was pregnant, I shared the comic.

SUMNER MCRAE:  Kimmins and their partner brought their family into the world in a way that made space for queer joy and gender joy. Both in terms of the birth and how they shared the news of their pregnancy and new baby with the world. It reminded me of something Nadine told me about celebrating queer joy with their birth clients. 

NADINE ASHBY: I like to talk with people about if you could have everything that you wanted in your birth time, what would it look like? What would it smell like? Who would be there? And just sitting in those moments of like, kind of bliss with families and giving people permission to dream about—to dream about their ideal situation. Oftentimes, we don’t do that. I find that with a lot of my clients, there’s like fear about doing that. There’s like fear of being disappointed. There’s that fear about the healthcare system that creeps up always.  I really try to give people permission to just like sit in that for a while. And let’s just feel it. Let’s feel good about this for a moment. And also, just celebrating with people. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Birth. Phew. What a ride. And now, the hard part begins. Next episode, we’re taking on the chaos and joy of everyday life with kids, with a side of gender.

SPEAKER 1: Already having a kid go through school, and just exactly what you were describing–it’s like being mom-ed, being dad-ed. It’s not just about like our kid being respected at school. It’s about like our whole family being respected. 

SPEAKER 2: It’s the robot. Dog, pig, loaf of bread–does not compute and they just don’t know how to function. 

SPEAKER 3: Not many young kids probably get the kind of warmth and acceptance and support that queer and trans parents are capable of giving to their children. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  Join us for Beyond the Binary, Episode Three: Kids.

NADINE ASHBY:  Please support the black home birth initiative. One of the ways to create more joy in the world is supporting queer, black and brown midwives and bringing up a more diverse doula world. If you find value in that, head on over to thebirthrevolution.org. 

SUMNER MCRAE:  You can find Nadine Ashby at their website doula4all.com or on Instagram @doula4all. Learn more about their work with Birth Revolution at www.thebirthrevolution.org. You can find out more about Ash Dasuqi and their queer and trans focused birth classes on Instagram @embodied.birth or at their website embodiedbirthclass.com. All of these links can also be found in the show notes. I invite you to also find and support queer, nonbinary, and trans doulas and birth workers in your community.

If you liked what you heard today and you want to help us make more content like this, you can support Beyond the Binary through our Patreon page, patreon.com/beyondthebinary.  You can also find links to our Patreon page and more info about the podcast at our website, beyondthebinarypodcast.com. 

Beyond the Binary is written, hosted, and produced by me, Sumner McRae. Co-produced by Barbara Schwabauer. Theme music by Sumner McRae. Special thanks this episode to Kimmins Southard, Ash Dasuqi, and Nadine Ashby.