PREGNANT MEN—NOT THE REVOLUTION WE IMAGINED, BUT REVOLUTIONARY NONETHELESS

Reproductive technologies are creating new opportunities and new challenges – not only for people who want to be parents, but for the broader communities in which we live as we strive to understand what parenthood means in the twenty-first century. A current flashpoint of these contemporary anxieties is captured in the story of Thomas Beatie and his first person account of being a pregnant man in a recent issue of The Advocate.

Beatie, who lives with his wife in the Pacific northwest, is pregnant with their child, a healthy baby girl, due to be delivered this summer. Beatie writes compellingly about his pregnancy and his desire to be a parent, calling this desire, not a male or female desire, but a human desire. I’m happy for Beatie and his wife and the upcoming addition to their family. What I’ve found interesting, and surprising, is the reactions of friends and the popular media around me.

I hadn’t really read the story in The Advocate, though I had seen some blog mentions of it, when I heard a full discussion of the story on the local hip hop radio station at the gym. I admit, that I braced myself as I sat in the weight room between abdominal repetitions. I was expecting some sort of homophobic and transphobic screed. What I heard instead was a fascinating conversation about the reactions of the two radio hosts. Let me be plain, they did not embrace Thomas’ pregnancy. They expressed confusion and astonishment, but they did so in a way that seemed to me concordant with the uniqueness of the situation. It isn’t everyday that a man is pregnant. They discussed the operational aspects of the pregnancy including the details of Thomas’ transition. They expressed concern about the baby’s health, but read the portion of the article in which Thomas said that the baby was healthy and seemed reassured by that. Overall, the discussion was honest, informative, and interested in the situation. By it’s conclusion, the two hosts, while affirming that their were things that they didn’t understand about the arrangement, wished Thomas and his wife the best with their child. This wasn’t what I expected from a mainstream radio station.

The other discussions that I have been involved with have been with lesbians and bisexual women. The reactions, particularly from lesbians, have been surprising more negative than the reactions from the radio hosts. How can a man be pregnant? Is this the right thing to do to the child? Why don’t they adopt? While I feel that there is legitimacy to all of those questions and that asking them is just fine, I’m surprised by the tone and intention behind the questions. Rather than a general curiosity about the conditions and circumstances of the “pregnant man,” I’ve felt that the impulse is more to ensure that men are excluded from child-bearing and that transgender men, in particular are excluded.

As I’ve read the news and thought about it, I continue to be excited for Thomas and his wife about their pregnancy. Questions about the child’s health and well-being are uniformly met with responses from people in the medical profession that the child should be perfectly normal regardless of the fact that her birth parent took testosterone. Any effects of the testosterone will be in the normal range of human sexual organs. (A normal range, which for me includes a variety of sexual orientations and gender identities). Adoptions for this couple—and other transgender couples as well as in many locations gay, bisexual, and lesbian couples and polyamorous couples or others who organize their erotic and sexual lives outside of the binary heterosexual partnership—as a result of the homophobia and transphobia in the adoption system would not be an option. Pregnancy was their option for having children, and I support reproductive rights—that is the possibilities of controlling one’s own reproductive organs and the decision-making concomitant with them—for everyone, regardless of other aspects of their lives and identities.

Increasingly over this century I think that reproductive questions and questions of queer rights and equality will continue to intersect. I hope that we think about them in ways that are careful and respectful and congruent with our larger quest for equality.

Thomas Beatie’s article in The Advocate
http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail.asp?id=52947&page=1

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #18 dated March 29, 2008 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

ONE OF MY SISTERS DOESN’T LOOK LIKE ME

For me, one of the things that defines family is comfort. Certainly love is a part of the definition of family, but, for me, comfort is more foundational. Comfort comes from spending time with people over extended periods. Not necessarily large amounts of time, but repeated, focused amounts of time over a number of years. From comfort comes caring and compassion and the ability to freely express oneself without pretense. It is then that the ties that I call familial begin to emerge.

My wife has a sister who is now seventeen. For the past handful of years, we’ve spent a week with her at spring break and we regularly talk on the phone and on IM. After our years together, I consider her my sister, not just my wife’s sister.

This past year, in anticipation of her visit, I told people that my sister would be here. For those that asked, I gave them the more detailed explanation of her being my wife’s half-sister (they share only a father), but for most people, just the statement, my sister is coming, was enough. Besides, they could see the joy in my eyes as I anticipated her visit.

When they met her, however, it was clear that something was different. This sister, you see, is of African-American heritage. I don’t think much of it, but I’m aware that people look at us oddly for a moment when I introduce her as my sister.

When people had that reaction, I didn’t much care. I gave them a little bit of time to assimilate the information and unless they asked, I didn’t offer much more. Sisterhood seems like it should stand without explanation.

Nowadays, I think we’re far too invested in families looking alike. It may have been significant in the past when people moved less, had more children, and marriages lasted longer. Today, however, most people I know have family cobbled together not entirely by biology.

Half-sisters, step-siblings, in-laws, and out-laws all characterize modern families. Combine those relations with increasing adoptions across races, cultures, and nationalities and throw in more interracial relationships and interracial families through a variety of means, and suddenly how we look does not determine if we are a family.

In my envisioned future, family isn’t about who looks like whom, but rather where is your comfort. Still, I’m not the norm. I cannot tell you how many times I hear or read about women who want a child who looks like them or their partners. I’ve heard lesbians looking for sperm from a man who shares physical characteristics with the woman who is to carry the child or the woman who is to be the “non-bio” parent. Sometimes the degree of focus on physical and genetic characteristics seems to me to eclipse the nature of our humanity. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on reproductive medicine to produce children who share physical characteristics with parents. Is how our children look worth all of that money?

I think it’s time to discard all of these associations of physical appearance with familial relationships. It’s as dated as Wally and the Beaver. Continuing to believe that shared physical attributes mark family is like continuing to believe that Rock Hudson was off screen the heterosexual lothario that he was on.

One of my sisters doesn’t look like me. I love her no less, and I’m waiting for the day when I introduce her in public – to cashiers or friends or casually on the street – and no one raises an eyebrow. There is no pregnant pause because everyone realizes that family is not defined by biology or genes, but by the strength of our affection for, our commitment to and our comfort with one another.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #17 dated December 11, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

MARKING OUR BODIES Remaking Our Lives

When I was coming out, a tattoo and a doubly-pierced right ear was a sign of being a lesbian. This seems silly now, I admit, but at twenty and twenty-one these were important identity expressions to my peer group and me along with Birkenstocks, thick wool socks (I came out in Michigan), and large army fatigues held up with wide leather belts. To this day, when I wear that uniform, I feel like a real lesbian.

Each generation defines itself with physical and external markers of identity. All have profound meaning to the people who are marked and to the people who create the marks. I welcome new generational markers – even if I don’t always understand them. (I admit, tongue piercing and navel piercing were initially uncomfortable and foreign to me; though I remember the way some recoiled from my large, comfortable shoes.) I only become concerned when the markers of identity result in permanent and unchangeable actions to our bodies.

I’ve taken those actions. One tattoo and three holes between my two earlobes. Do I regret either? No. Would I do it again? Perhaps not.

Part of my discomfort comes from feminism. As a feminist, I want to embrace my body as it is – and I want other people to do that. As a feminist, I’m uncomfortable with breast augmentation. I don’t think that permanent body alterations are something to support or celebrate. I hold this philosophy to a pretty strict standard in my life. Sure, I’ve shaven my legs on occasion (and the wifey wishes I would do it more, truth be told), but I’ve not done much that permanently alters my body.

This brings me to my concern: increasing people – and particularly young people, which to me still means under thirty-five or forty – are chosing to transition from one sex to another. On one hand, I support people’s ability to have control over their bodies and to express gender in whatever way that they wish. On the other hand, I’m concerned about permanent body alterations.

I worry about the increasing medicalization of our bodies and of gender. Women and queers have never been served by the medical establishment and yet increasing it seems we turn to doctors to give us bodies to help navigate a world in which gender roles are narrow prescribed and offer little fluidity and flexibility for a moment or a lifetime.

Our experience of gender and gender roles is related not only to how we understand the world personally but also to how other around us understand and interpret the world. Lots of the butch women I came out with twenty years ago embraced their butchness because of a feminist analysis which said that gender roles weren’t working – for women or for men, but that it was fine to be gender non-conforming. Today these same women might be told by prevailing analyses that their identity is transgender. That’s fine—if it is an identity that works, I support people’s ability to self-identify. Today, however, more is at stake than self-identity. People are changing their bodies and their sex through medical intervention.

That concerns me. I’m worried about a construction of gender that requires permanent body alteration. My body isn’t perfect as it is and I do things to change it – I change my clothes, I work out, I use lotions and lots of little potions from small pots, but all of that can be undone in a short amount of time – none of it is permanent. Are we sure that surgery and hormone therapy to permanently alter the body is an essential expression of gender identity?

Many won’t be happy that I’ve asked the question, but I think it must be asked. We need dialogue about the costs and benefits of medical interventions and the constructions of sex and gender in our queer community.

Meanwhile, I’ve dispensed with the second earring in my ear. I loved it for the years that I wore it. Today it doesn’t serve me. I’m glad that I could just stop wearing it when I wanted. I want for all of the other young queers to have the same choices as their lives change and evolve.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #16 dated November 27, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 698

WILL CONGRESS EVER PASS PRO-LGBT LEGISLATION? Reflections on ENDA

The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) passed out of the House of Representatives on November 7, 2007 with a vote of 235-184. In order to become law, it must of course also pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Most anticipate that those two things will not happen this legislative cycle. The version of ENDA that was voted out of the House is one that many advocates object to because it excluded gender identity language, which would have provided workplace protections to transgender people.

There has been an entire brouhaha surrounding ENDA that’s been mostly documented in the blogosphere though The New York Times article provided a good summary of it as well. I’ve watched these events unfold with astonishment. First, I am incredibly proud of the GLBT movement for standing on principle. The actions of United ENDA and the nearly four hundred organizations that worked to preserve gender identity in the bill are awe inspiring to me. I have never in my twenty years of being a participant / observer seen the queer community speak with such a united and clear voice. I am inspired by the number of organizations who have taken a stand in support of a transgender inclusive ENDA and called on their members to do the same. This is the movement about which I dreamed; I am proud to be a part of it.

I was amazed and slightly baffled by Representative Barney Frank’s actions. It seems that he had the opportunity to demonstrate the perfect “object lesson” about the value of Democrats to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender community, but that it has now been botched. Generally, yes, queers vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Lately, however, people like me—and others—question that loyalty in light of the waffling of Democrats on marriage. The script that could have played out is this: ENDA passes in the Senate and the House and then is vetoed by the President. The House and Senate are run by Democrats; the President is a Republican. Who will you vote for in 2008? The answer would have been obvious.

Instead, we were embroiled in wrangling with politicians about pragmatism and principle. It seems to me that politics should be about both, and politicians should find ways to hold onto both pragmatism and principle at all times. Ironically, one of the politicians who first introduced the law to protect gays and lesbians from workplace discrimination, in 1974 on the fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, was Representative Bella Abzug, the gentlewoman from New York. She was a politician with vision able to be both pragmatic and rooted in principle.

Instead of a transcendent political moment, or even an instructive political moment, the passage of ENDA was a divisive political moment. Certainly, the opposition to excluding gender identity from the bill was inspiring, to me and others, but the outcome was disheartening.

An important “object lesson” could still emerge from ENDA in 2007. That lesson may be more enlightening and may, in the long run, catapult queer liberation forward. I don’t think that it is going to be one that strengthens or stabilizes queer support for a Democratic candidate for President. Rather the lesson may be about unity, loyalty, and commitment. I hope that we are able to see it and learn it.


Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet. She lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #15 dated November 13, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 552

ANTICIPATING THE BIG 4-0

I rarely say no to myself. I don’t deny my whims and desires. In fact, in the realm of things that I want to do, there is very little that I haven’t done. I don’t believe in living a life deferred – or a dream deferred as the original poem states. Despite this, as I approach the milestone age of forty, I’m thinking about what I haven’t done and would like to before I transition, by some measures, into my middle age.

It will happen in January of 2010 and, truth be told, I’m quite excited about it. I’ve never feared growing older and I don’t want to adopt that fear as the years progress. In fact, I want to be one of those people who embrace age and its corollary, experience. To achieve the experience part of the equation, I’m thinking about what I haven’t done that I want to do. I’m making a list of things to do before forty.

A dear friend suggested adrenaline activities, which are, I fear, woefully absent from my bank of life experiences. Sky diving, bungee jumping, tight-rope walking. I’ve done none of these. Nor do I particularly want to, but the point is taken about adrenaline. So I’m mulling those and definitely will put one on my list. At this point, I’m leaning to parasailing, but who can tell what might strike my fancy in the next months leading up to the big day.

I also want to dye my hair. Not brown to cover the gray that is now coming in by the handfuls, but pink or purple. A color that will shock and disarm. Perhaps green? I want to have an arresting presence for a few weeks before I cut it all off. I’ve never dyed my hair before, and it seems like a life experience that I am missing, so that’s on my list.

I’d like to do a thorough hair removal. Generally I’m a hairy gal. I don’t shave much but for one day, except for the hair on my head (dyed bright red?), I’d like to be hairless. Everyone tells me that the one hairless day will be paid for with a few weeks of intense discomfort afterward as it all grows back. That’s doesn’t seem to dissuade me, however.

I’m careening into more hedonism as I approach forty, and I embrace that. More partying and revelry all around. I didn’t do as much of this as I could have in my twenties so I’m reversing that part of the life cycle and staying out late getting drunk and sleeping in the next morning.

I’m trying to figure out how to honor all of the people in my life who have died before reaching forty. A group of gay men with whom I came out who have passed away – primarily from AIDS but other medical conditions as well. My sister, who should have been right behind me in approaching forty, but isn’t here to share in it. I want all of them to be present as I celebrate this milestone. So I regularly invoke them, calling on them to celebrate with me.

Suddenly, I’m interested in people who are eighty. What were they doing at forty? How did they spend the last forty years? What lessons do their lives have for me? I’m trying to soak that knowledge up in the way that I studied the forty year olds when I was twenty.

I want to speak another language fluently. I want to read more books that matter and change my life. I’d like to be an expert in something. I want to travel to every continent—at least once, some many times. I want to create my own list of the wonders of the world. I won’t achieve all of those goals by the time I’m forty. It seems prudent to have a few ideas of what I will do with the gift of time I am granted beyond this milestone birthday.

Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #14 dated October 30, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 703

OUTSIDE OF THE NATION

Nowhere in the world are we – gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people – a majority. There is no gay homeland from which we came and to which we turn in times of danger, for support and validation. Wherever we live, we are a minority. Even in Provincetown, the East or West Village, the Castro, Halstead, or West Hollywood, we are a minority, unless we draw the lines very narrowly and resist coloring outside them. The fact is we queer people will always be in the minority, living across cultures and communicating with others like us and yet not.

Living as a minority sometimes has advantages. Alienation from the dominant culture can be a creative; it can be an inspiring experience that energizes us to build our own culture – outside of the dominant, majority culture. Living outside also gives us greater freedom to think critically and critique our culture. We have the freedom and flexibility to create our own communities and families based not on biological or geographical conditions, but on our own intellectual, social, political, and affectional affinities.

Living as a minority also has disadvantages. Sometimes, we don’t have the support and compassion of our family of origin. Our families of origin may want us to be heterosexual or they want for us their vision of a normal life. Even when the do support us, sometimes they feel sad by their own sense of loss of their vision of us as heterosexual. Sometimes, our parents don’t teach us how to live as queer people and sometimes isolated from other queers, we struggle to find acceptance and validation. Sometimes living as a minority is isolating and alienating. Sometimes the chafe of living between the majority culture and our queer – and minority – subculture is difficult and painful.

Rather than living automatically with people who understand our lives and our cultures, we must seek out others like us. Instead of following the norms of our society, we must build our own lives, sometimes in the absence of effective role models. Then, when we do build families and communities that flourish, we cannot simply rest. We have a responsibility to translate and educate others – the dominant majority – about our lives and our culture, and we have a responsibility to help other queers like us. This can be tiresome and burdensome as well as annoying and vexing. Yet, we do it because we must. We live as a minority within our nation.

Sometimes given the nation’s exclusion of queers, I want to reject my nationality. It is not only queerness. Recently, I’ve felt ashamed of my nations treatment of poor people, of children without health care, and of people in New Orleans during and after the hurricane. I want to rejected my nationality given the reality of the oppressive racism and sexism that dominates our history and our present. I’ve wondered, if my identity as a lesbian is not recognized, why should I adopt the identity that the nation wants for me? Why should I be nationalistic or patriotic?

I am outside of the nation and, yet, I am of the nation. I cannot disentangled the two. We queer people life outside this nation; we are not fully recognized by the nation with all of the rights and responsibility of citizens of the United States. The pain is felt most obviously when our governments – federal, state, and local – refuse to acknowledge our lives and treat us equally.

We are also inside the nation. Many of us were born here. We live here. We must engage with the country – to transform it to include our realities. Ultimately, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people effect everyone in our nation. We are a minority that is mutable – people join us and leave us over time. We can live without a nation; we cannot live outside of nationality. So we must struggle with both—our country and our identities. Through that struggle, we hope to transform us all with more justice and more integrity.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #13 dated October 16, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 664

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR GAY AND LESBIAN COUPLES IN MARYLAND – DELAYED OR DENIED?

On Tuesday, September 18, I woke up early, showered, and packed my bag for a day of travel. My partnered dropped me off at the New Carrollton train station, and I headed to New York for meetings for work. She drove back to Riverdale for her dentist appointment and then was off to work in Baltimore. It was a typical day.

I responded to all of my email on the train, took the subway to the office in New York, sat in meetings, ate the bagged lunch I had carried with me. Mid-morning an email arrived from Equality Maryland announcing the news that the Maryland Court of Appeals issued their decision in the Conaway v. Deane case—and it wasn’t in our favor.

The court ruled that gay and lesbian couples were not unfairly excluded from the marriage in Maryland or in their words, “the State’s legitimate interests in fostering procreation and encouraging the traditional family structure in which children are born” means that the State can excluded gay and lesbian couples from marriage. I didn’t have time that day to think about it.

My partner and I (and I confess, I often call her my wife and she reciprocates even though there is no legal basis for such an assertion) have been together for eleven years, yet with the exception of the mortgage that binds us both to payment and a stack of documents that are somewhere in our office (I’d be hard pressed to put my hands on them in under five minutes), we are strangers in the eyes of our government. We were hoping, perhaps foolishly that that would change. On Tuesday, we learned that it didn’t. At least for now.

At 7 p.m. Tuesday night, I was tuckered out from my day and still had to meet a friend on the Upper West Side. We had agreed to purchase her used car as she prepares to move to London (where gay and lesbian relationships are recognized), and I was driving it home. It was exciting to get the new-to-us car, but as I exited the Lincoln Tunnel, I knew I had to go south, but I fantasized about going north.

New Jersey recently ruled that gay and lesbian couples would be recognized through civil unions. I wondered, driving along the turnpike if perhaps we should move there. I knew if we headed farther north, a metaphoric and literal migration in the United States as people seek rights and equal treatment under the law, we would be recognized. The entirety of New England is now a safe haven for gay and lesbian couples. Marriage in Massachusetts; civil unions in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Only one mid-Atlantic government would recognize our relationship: the District of Columbia, and four western states: Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington. The south and the Midwest, from where we originally hale, are like Maryland all blind to our relationship.

I kept driving south and even felt sad leaving New Jersey, knowing that I was leaving one of the safe zones for gay and lesbian couples. Still, I was glad to get home just after midnight.

We love our life in Maryland. Our home, our community, our jobs. The reality is though, as we grow older when concerns about relationship recognition in light of health care, disability, and death become uppermost on our mind, we may have to move. If we had children, we would definitely want to be in a state that recognized our relationship. And as more and more states recognize gay and lesbian relationships in a variety of ways, my wife and I will want to live in a state – and a country – where we are accorded equal rights under the law.

If Maryland isn’t a state that will do that, we’ll take the future calls about employment elsewhere seriously. The drive north on I-95 is pleasant and will be even more so if it leads to a state of equality for us as a lesbian couple.



Julie R. Enszer is a writer and poet who lives in University Park, MD. You can read more of her work, including her blog, at www.JulieREnszer.com.

This is column #12 dated October 2, 2007 in the series, CIVILesbianIZATION.

Word Count: 667