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The Precarious Future of Trans Men Giving Birth in Trump’s America

Trystan Angel Reese worries that the Trump administration will prevent trans gestational parents from becoming success stories.

Pictured above: Trystan Angel Reese (R) with husband Biff Chaplow (L).

Trystan Angel Reese is used to advocating for his family. In August 2011, Reese’s husband, Biff Chaplow, received a call from a social worker that his sister’s children were going to be placed into foster care unless they were relocated to a loving home by the weekend. They certainly fit the bill. When he first met Chaplow at a trans community brunch in Los Angeles, Reese was immediately smitten. Although Reese had food stuck in his teeth and Chaplow—who is cisgender—was seeing someone else at the time, fate intervened. A year after their first date, they moved in together.

Although the couple had only been living together for three months when they got the call, there was no question what they would do. “You show up for kids when they need help,” Reese tells NewNowNext. “That’s how I was raised.”

Sunny Lee

That phone call triggered a four-year fight to adopt Hailey and Riley, who were just 3 and 1 years old at the time. While Reese remembers it as a “very chaotic and stressful way to become a parent,” the couple would experience a new kind of stress after deciding to expand their family in 2016. After discussing the effects of testosterone on uterine health with medical providers—and doing some of his own research—Reese found the impact was negligible. After ceasing hormone replacement therapy (HRT), the longtime trans activist was able to become pregnant within months.

Reese’s son, Leo Murray Chaplow, was born on July 14, 2017, weighing in at a healthy 9.5 pounds. He describes Leo as a “delight,” but also very much a typical toddler. Set to embark on his “terrible twos” in just a few months, Leo “wants to climb on everything, put everything in his mouth, and touch everything,” Reese claims. He adds, “If you're cooking, he wants to stir the pot, and if you're doing the dishes, he also wants to help put away the spoons.”

Since Leo was brought into their lives, Reese says he has become “an expert on trans pregnancy” almost out of necessity. Now the director of family formation with Family Equality Council, he has shared his experiences with CNN, BuzzFeed, and People magazine. In an essay he read at the live storytelling series The Moth last October, Reese claimed his seemingly nontraditional family is no exception but the rule. “[My husband and I have] known dozens of other transgender men who have given birth to happy, beautiful children,” Reese said. “We knew it was possible.”

Kevin Truong

However, Reese worries that new regulations from the Trump administration may prevent other trans gestational parents from becoming success stories. In a 440-page document released on May 2, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that any service providers who take action against healthcare workers for denying treatment on the basis of their moral or religious beliefs could face the loss of federal funding as a result.

The guidelines don’t specifically state that medical professionals are free to refuse healthcare on the basis of a patient’s “gender dysphoria.” Instead, it claims that such complaints will be dealt with on a “case‐by‐case basis.”

If the LGBTQ advocacy group Lambda Legal claims that 70% of transgender and gender nonconforming people have experienced discrimination in healthcare settings, trans gestational parents experience that vulnerability in a profound way. In a 2014 study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology, researchers found that interactions with medical providers varied widely across the 41 transgender men surveyed. Many enjoyed affirming treatment, but others were misgendered or turned away from healthcare centers. In a particularly extreme case, one respondent claimed “child protection services was alerted to the fact a ‘tranny’ had a baby.”

Sommessa Photography

While these experiences are sadly common, even the fear of mistreatment can deter transgender people—pregnant or not—from seeking medical care. According to Reese, studies have shown that around 22% (or nearly one in four) trans gestational parents “give birth outside of a hospital setting, compared to less than 2% of the broader population.”

Wyley Simpson, who gave birth to son Rowan through an emergency cesarean in September 2018, tells NewNowNext he has experienced “nothing but acceptance” and has “not really [had] many issues regarding negative questions directed toward [his] gender identity and being a pregnant man.” But in an episode of the We TV reality series Extreme Love, he claimed the potential for discrimination initially made him afraid of how medical staff would interact with him. “How would I be treated as a transgender individual in the hospital?” he wondered at the time.

As a middle-class white man with considerable privilege, Reese was able to have the conversations necessary to ensure he received affirming care. While patients’ charts at Kaiser hospitals don’t typically state whether the patient is trans, he wanted his chart to say, “This is a transgender man.” Any doctor with an issue about his gender identity needed to “have their own internal struggle and then get through it so they could provide [him] with competent care,” he says.

The day that he gave birth, Reese called the hospital to ensure his family would be treated with dignity and respect. “I am a man and I want every person who comes into my room to have been educated on that before they get there,” he told them at the time.

“I really took my own care into my own hands and put myself in the driver's seat,” Reese adds.

Shanna Sturgell

While medical providers were largely receptive to these discussions, Reese claims that being a pregnant man often meant going so far as to educating doctors and other staff about trans bodies. An endocrinologist, for example, asked him why his beard hadn’t fallen out since he stopped taking hormone therapy. Many of the effects of taking testosterone are “irreversible,” he explains, and facial hair is among them.

“It betrayed a profound lack of knowledge about my transition, and then quite frankly led to a lack of trust,” Reese says. “I did not trust her ability to adequately provide [medical care].”

Even for transgender people who are forced to become their own best advocates because they simply have no other choice, these experiences are often inescapable. Reese says an attendant at the emergency room once told him an allergic reaction he was having “was probably from [his] hormones.” “It wasn’t,” Reese maintains. Another time when he went to urgent care with a bladder infection, his medical provider was “shocked” to see a man with a UTI. “That's very rare,” the employee claimed at the time.

“I was too scared to tell him that I was transgender,” Reese recalls of the interaction.

While Reese can’t say if the “conscience protections” enacted by the Trump administration would have deterred the couple from making the decision to conceive a child, he predicts it would have placed even more of a burden on the family. When Reese’s story began going viral three years ago, he faced negative comments, harassment, and even death threats from strangers on the internet “hundreds of times a day.” The worst included comments like “You’re a cancerous piece of shit” and “I hope your baby dies,” as he previously told BuzzFeed.

Sarah Karlan

“I would've had to do double the work to make sure that I wasn't going to be encountering someone with bias,” Reese predicts. “That was already a lot of hard work at a time when I should have just been focused on growing a person, birthing them, and bringing them into this world.”

But as the White House continues to place more obstacles in the paths of transgender parents, the one thing that Trump can’t take away the overwhelming support Reese’s family has received. While he worried that other trans men might accuse him of “confusing people” or making it harder for the public to see transmasculine individuals as “real men,” Reese says many thanked him for showing there’s more than one way to have a family.

Meanwhile, Reese found a community of “kind, loving, and generous” families—both cis and trans—to offer support and guidance. Other parents at Hailey and Riley’s school in Portland “would send their kids to school with baby warming gifts, cards, and Target gift cards.”

“Our whole community really rallied around us to show their support, especially when I started sharing the backlash that I was receiving [online],” Reese says, taking note of the liberal bubble in Northwest Oregon he’s grateful to call home. “The joke that I say is that if someone sees a pregnant man at Starbucks, maybe that’s not even the weirdest thing they've seen that day. That's Portland for you.”

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