On The Fetishization of Fertility

From the comments in an earlier post: 

Honestly, how does a child who has never experienced orgasm give informed consent to the risk of never having one, let alone the guaranteed infertility resulting from the removal of genitals? Especially when faced with affirming parents and doctors.

I’m really not sure where the myth of “trans people don’t have orgasms” comes from.  While it is possible for any number of reasons that a post-operative transgender woman might not have sufficient clitoral sensitivity to achieve orgasm, by far the majority certainly do.  I’m not aware of any specific studies in this regard for those who begin their transition before puberty, but there’s little reason to suspect it’s different. 

However, it’s the last part of that same sentence that I want to explore further.  This arises from a number of social and cultural phenomena that ironically have been very much central to the fight that feminists have been having with society and governments in general.  

Central to the feminist cause from the beginning is the idea that women are more than their ability to bear children.  Women have historically been sidelined when they are deemed “infertile” {although we now know that infertility in couples has just as much to do with the man as the woman}; they were forced to leave their careers the moment they became pregnant; even today, women face barriers in the workplace where management is often reluctant to hire or promote women because they “worry” that the woman will become pregnant.  All of this stems from old religious hang-ups, where women are both fetishizes for their ability to bear children and demonized for being sexual creatures at the same time. 

Now, let me turn to the topic of transgender people and fertility.  Yes, transgender women are generally infertile.  After a couple of years on hormone therapy, that’s the case even without surgery, and yes, without question, current surgical approaches finalize that entirely.  But, we also have to recognize that plenty of natal females live with the reality that for one reason or another they cannot become pregnant. 

While I know full well that plenty of transgender women would absolutely want the ability to become pregnant and bear a child, current medical technology simply cannot achieve that.  (I’ll leave aside the considerable discussion around uterus transplants from a couple of years ago - I do not believe that approach is widely available at the time of writing, and its status for transgender women is even more unclear)

However, it is also enormously unreasonable to point to the consequence of infertility as an issue here.  It is among the many conundrums that transgender people face in the complex matter of their relationship with their bodies.  

It is not uncommon for therapists to hear statements like “I want to claw myself out of my skin every day” as part of the description of their pre-transition experiences.  This is not a universal experience, but for the purposes of this essay, I wish to use it as a starting point because it illustrates the sense of discomfort that so many transgender people express about their pre-transition bodies. 

Now, someone experiencing that level of distress about their body is likely to experience a whole host of other issues.  Do you really think that person is going to be able to be emotionally available to their partners, or to any children they might have to be a “good parent”?  A lot of transgender people I know have said in absolutely blunt terms that they were utterly unable to be effective in the birth-assigned role because their relationship with their body was so discordant.  

Does that sound like a recipe for a functional parent?  Not to me.  It sounds like a recipe for a positively miserable experience for the individual, their partner, and any children that might be brought into the world in that context.  It’s well understood in psychology that an essential aspect of being a good parent is that the person is fully secure in themselves as a person.  

What’s more interesting is that transgender people are often profoundly aware of this.  Even as children, they were painfully aware of the need to feel integrated as a person taking precedence over having children of their own at some point.  

To sit there and say “well, you’ll never have children, and that’s a terrible thing” is to speak from a position of privilege.  In relative terms you have the luxury of being fairly comfortable in your own body, and the question of whether you can be available to others emotionally may have never crossed your mind.  Meet the transgender person where they are at for a moment, and try to understand where they are coming from.  They already know the consequences - often well before most “adults” understand the consequences of getting pregnant.  

I’d much rather see someone be comfortable in their own skin than trying to be a parent while suffering with the discomfort of not being congruent. As for the argument that transgender youth can’t possibly appreciate the implications of those decisions, I suggest to you that you are not giving them credit for their understanding and ability to understand. 

Fertility isn’t all that there is in life, and idolizing it does nobody any favours in the long run.