A biological female who identifies as a transgender man felt outraged after being referred to as a mother by nurses in a Los Angeles hospital after giving birth to a baby. The transgender man wanted medical workers to know that not everyone who gives birth is comfortable being called a “mother”, a report published in NY Post said.
Bennett Kaspar-Williams, 37, who lives in Los Angeles and sports a beard, gave birth to a healthy baby boy in October 2020 with his husband Malik. While delivery did not trouble Williams as much as the constant misgendering of him by the hospital staff who insisted on calling him a “mom”, the Daily Mail reported.
Despite mothering the child, Williams wanted to be identified as the child’s father. “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,” Williams, who realised he was transgender in 2011 and began transitioning in 2014 said. “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.”
Williams started his transitioning in 2014, three years after identifying his trans identity. He underwent a $5,000 surgery on the top half of his body but not on his genitalia.
“It was really liberating. I never could have anticipated what a relief it would be to find them gone. It was a huge weight off my shoulders,” he said of the surgery to remove his breasts.
Then in 2017, he found Malik, his future husband – who he married in 2019. After marriage, the couple decided to have children and contemplated the options they had in front of them. Bennett stopped having testosterone hormone therapy he had been on for several years to enable his ovaries to function. Having done surgery only on the top half of his body on not on his lower body, Williams eventually decided he would be comfortable trying to conceive a child.
Williams became pregnant soon after the couple started trying, and had. healthy pregnancy, giving birth to their son hudson through cesarean section. He said the only challenge he had to face during his entire pregnancy was the constant misgendering he had to face while he was seeking medical care.
“The only thing that made me dysphoric about my pregnancy was the misgendering that happened to me when I was getting medical care for my pregnancy. The business of pregnancy — and yes, I say business, because the entire institution of pregnancy care in America is centred around selling this concept of ‘motherhood’ — is so intertwined with the gender that it was hard to escape being misgendered,” he said to NY Post.
