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Season 2: Episode 3 - How did you get pregnant?

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: And how has your experience of pregnancy, you know, did it live up to all of these ideas you had in your head and maybe your worst fears about it?

FREDDY MCCONNELL: Yeah, I thought it would be scary from a social perspective, but like, maybe I would kind of boss it from a physical perspective.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Pregnancy boss.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: Yeah. Like actually the reality was externally and socially, I did pretty much fly under the radar. But internally and privately, I found it extremely difficult. And what was hard was the dysphoria and the not being on testosterone.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: Which for me had been like a totally life-changing, life-saving hormonal treatment.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right. Did pregnancy itself feel like a gendered experience? Were you conscious of that as a pregnant man?

FREDDY MCCONNELL: Like the experience of growing this baby, and feeling it kick and move like, you know, I think we think about it, is this a, well lot of people would describe it as like an essentially female experience and women talk about feeling very empowered by it. But I think any human that goes through that and sees it in that positive light would feel that same sense of empowerment and strength and like you're nurturing and growing this thing. The extraordinariness of it and the amazingness of it doesn't need to be gendered, I would say. Just, you know.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: It can be positive no matter who is experiencing it.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So because we're talking about the question, “How did you get pregnant?” Theoretically, if someone wanted to ask that to a pregnant trans person, do you think that's a conversation that shouldn't be had? Is that an inappropriate question?

FREDDY MCCONNELL: I mean, just even separate from trans people, that's an inappropriate question, isn't it? I mean, I can see how you might be more likely to ask if you know the person is trans because your curiosity is going to just be, it's going to be triggered. But especially in an age of where a lot of people are using assisted reproduction technologies and creating families in all sorts of ways, queer or not, like, hopefully you'd realise how inappropriate the question was in general and then sort of apply that to the situation regardless of who the person is.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: On the flipside of that is my experience is I have probably experienced more trans men who've had babies who haven't needed to like any kind of fertility interventions because they are either married or partnered with cis men.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: So, yeah, I mean, I know people who take a lot of pride in the fact that, or love to kind of blow cis people's minds by clarifying that they conceived "the old fashioned way."

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: You can't apply any kind of generalizations.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right. Asking this question is basically asking someone to share their personal story about being pregnant, often with, you know, the asker being a stranger. I was interested in your take on that because in a way, you did share your story with strangers by putting it in this film, Seahorse. Why did you want to share your story in such an intimate way?

FREDDY MCCONNELL: I always talk about like empathy. That's what's missing in that gap between people who fear and hate us and those that love and are allied with us. Like on one level, there just aren't enough trans people to be around for everyone to like know and love us.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: So if you could spend an hour and a half in a dark cinema like it might, it might come a little bit some way close. So empathy was one aim, but then the other was just much more pragmatic, which was the majority of trans men, trans masculine people and the people who could start their families in the way I did, still don't know that that's an option for them. Either they are actively told that it isn't, like I was. Like they are told that they're going to be infertile if they go on testosterone or they're just like socially, it's so unacceptable that they shouldn't consider it or think about it. You know, so like just letting, like it seems like a sort of extreme way to go about doing that, but I thought if people like me can see this film, then they'd understand that they may have been misinformed.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: So your documentary is out in the world, but now you're diving even further into the topic of queer and trans parenthood. You're making a whole podcast about it. What do you want to get into on the show?

FREDDY MCCONNELL: Like I found sharing my experience to be very empowering and it led to me feeling like I had a community. So the aim of the podcast is to try to provide other people with a sense of community and try to give other people an opportunity to share the stories of how they created their families and to honour their uniquely queer experience of having to really plan and work and think and get creative about how to become a parent and bring people together and then celebrate it.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. Well that's a lot to think about. And I love that you're out here trying to give community, like a thing you didn't have during your own pregnancy and journey to fatherhood, to other people. That's really great.

FREDDY MCCONNELL: That's a much quicker way of saying it, yeah.

[Music]

SARAH LEVINSOLD: My name is Sara Lebensold. I am queer, pregnant and a single parent by choice. I don't tend to get asked this because I actually answer it before anyone has a chance to ask. I usually go, “I'm pregnant via insemination,” and then people might ask me how I chose the donor or the other parts of the process. That kind of thing. I love the question, “How did you get pregnant?” because I think it implies that there's more than one way to do this. And as a queer person who got inseminated intentionally and is choosing single parenthood, it includes me in the conversation as opposed to assuming that I have a partner, I'm straight, and that's the way that you get pregnant.

HARVINDER WADHWA: So, Elena, when you told me about the topic...

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I was like, really, is that a topic? Because I have never thought about it.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I didn't think it was an issue.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Right.

HARVINDER WADHWA: People have babies. People don't have babies. Who cares? It was amazing how much I learned and how things can be so challenging.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah. What was interesting to me was that when I was going into this topic, I was just like “Cisgender, heterosexual people do the birds and the bees. Other people do not. The end.” But straight people can have problems with fertility too and use some of the same methods that a lot of LGBTQ people use as well.

HARVINDER WADHWA: And if I have to use it in one word, which is actually two words...

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: OK.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Eye opener.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Yeah?

HARVINDER WADHWA: It was an eye opener.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: I feel like that's your word for a lot of these episodes, which makes me very happy.

HARVINDER WADHWA: I'm Harvinder Wadhwa.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: And I'm Elena Hudgins Lyle.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Thanks for getting inappropriate with us.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Big thanks to our guests, Farrah Khan and Freddy McConnell. You also heard voice notes from Bianca Lopez and Sara Lebensold. Every episode has an accompanying webcomic and this week it was drawn by Louise Reimer. You can find it on Instagram @IQ_podcast. Also, make sure to check out our website at cbc.ca/iqpodcast for a full transcript and more resources. The passionate podcasters behind this show are Sabrina Bertsch, Cindy Long and myself.

HARVINDER WADHWA: Our digital producer is Judy Ziyi Gu.

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: This show is mixed by Andrew Norton. The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer and the executive producer is Arif Noorani.

[Music]

ELENA HUDGINS LYLE: Before you go, we wanted to tell you more about Freddy McConnell's new podcast. It's called Pride and Joy from BBC Sounds. It's a podcast about how queer people make families, whether that's through IVF, surrogacy or lots of other creative ways. It's warm, it's hilarious, sometimes sad, but we've really loved listening to these stories, like the one about a 61-year-old surrogate. So if you want to hear more about queer families, check out Pride and Joy from BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

HARVINDER WADHWA: An inappropriate question is like your annoying aunty showing up at every family gathering.

TRANSCRIPT: Inappropriate Questions - Season 2, EP 3

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