Not the first pregnant man: Uncovering histories of trans family

The politicised erasure of trans history is a central feature of our contemporary anti-trans climate - but nowhere more so than in the realm of the family. Every year sees a new 'first pregnant man'; every form of trans family is too often approached with awe and stupefaction rather than care and recognition. Claiming that something is unprecedented is a cast-iron excuse for dealing with it badly, or not at all: how can medical staff and journalists really be asked to treat trans people with respect when this is all just so new? And feeling as if they're the first to do something can prevent trans families from building networks of solidarity: can the unprecedented family ever truly thrive?

Building on my work in Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, which argued that narrow contemporary ideas of what makes someone 'really trans' frequently obstruct our capacity to recognise trans history, I unpick the factors that construct trans family as uniquely unthinkable in contemporary Western thought, discussing the association between trans identity and individualism, and the perception that trans people are incompatible with normative biology. Focusing on ideas of pregnancy - as well as reflecting on my own recent experience - I show that while ‘pregnancy’ and ‘womanhood’ feel synonymous in Western culture today, they haven’t always been so. Tracing debates as far back as ancient Greece, I uncover the way scientists and philosophers have always thought critically and creatively about the relationship between pregnancy and gender – until the twentieth century, when social anxieties about destabilising the gender binary caused scientists to reassert it in the face of mounting evidence that it didn’t really work. The idea of a ‘pregnant man’ might be presented as a logical impossibility today, but that way of thinking is far more recent than we might expect.

This event has been organised by qUCL, part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. Please register to attend: https://qucl-trans-family.eventbrite.co.uk

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