The decision falls in line with horrific sterilization histories entwined with rising fascism<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rampant transphobia in the U.K. has gotten so bad it\u2019s now being described as a \u201cpublic health crisis\u201d<\/a> by public health researchers. The last year in particular has been brutal. At the time of writing, there\u2019s a wide-reaching ban on puberty blockers<\/a> for trans youth, a push to bar trans people from sports<\/a>, as well a recent Supreme Court ruling<\/a> that excludes trans people from single-sex spaces. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, U.K. non-profit Good Law Project<\/a> (GLP), which fights discriminatory court rulings, is representing a trans man<\/a> who was denied legal gender recognition on the basis that he was trying to get pregnant. Exact details are scant due to anonymity requirements, but the Gender Recognition Panel deciding his case argued that \u201cbecause he was trying to conceive, he had not been living as a man.\u201d Effectively, these gatekeepers are arguing that you\u2019re only a \u201cman\u201d in the eyes of the law if you sacrifice reproductive autonomy. A lawyer has been appointed, and the GLP promises more updates as they come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The decision falls in line with long, horrific histories of trans people either being forcibly sterilized or coerced into sterilization in exchange for legal recognition of their gender. The infertility requirement has been named a clear human rights violation in dozens of countries worldwide. In one of the most well-known cases, Gen Suzuki successfully fought<\/a> a years-long court battle in Japan to change his legal gender without sterilization. In 2018, Sweden agreed to pay compensation of around $22,000 each<\/a> to trans people who were forcibly sterilized, leading the Netherlands<\/a> to follow suit. As of July this year, sterilization will no longer be a legal obligation for gender recognition in the Czech Republic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kit Heyam<\/a>, U.K.-based author of the wide-reaching, deeply researched book Before We Were Trans<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>has spent years of their professional career researching trans histories<\/a>. They\u2019re intimately familiar with the persecution of gender nonconformity, but even they were \u201chorrified\u201d by news of this case. \u201cThis is maybe the closest we\u2019ve come to trans eugenics in this contemporary moral panic,\u201d they tell me. \u201cWe\u2019re really telling people that being trans is incompatible with reproduction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Already, there\u2019s a draining, years-long ordeal required to get a GRC\u2014a Gender Recognition Certificate\u2014in the U.K. NGO TransActual, a trans-led advocacy and empowerment organization, breaks down this convoluted process<\/a>, which involves proving that you have \u201clived in your acquired gender\u201d for two years, as well as two medical reports stating a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Heyam explains that this effectively leads to \u201crandom cis people who have never met you deciding your gender on the basis of their own preconceptions.\u201d Strangers have the power to deem you trans or not trans, a decision they\u2019ll inevitably make based on their own stereotypes and biases\u2014in this case, that transmasculine people trying to get pregnant means they\u2019re not \u201cliving as men.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Heyam, like many trans people in the U.K., feared this was coming. \u201cI deliberately got my GRC before giving birth,\u201d he explains. \u201cI did that really consciously and on purpose, because I fully expected this.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, trans people giving birth is nothing new. Heyam notes that, increasingly, stories of transmasculine people giving birth are moving past clich\u00e9s to offer rich, fleshed-out insights guided by their lived experiences\u2014pointing to books like Oy\u00e8r\u00f3nk\u1eb9\u0301 Oy\u011bw\u00f9m\u00ed\u2019s What Gender Is Motherhood?<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>Jen Manion\u2019s Female Husbands: A Trans History<\/em><\/a> and Krys Malcolm Belc\u2019s The Natural Mother of the Child<\/em><\/a>. Heyam sees these stories as vital in this moment: \u201cIf we just leave this idea of \u2018biological family\u2019 as something that\u2019s unchallenged and very cishet, we\u2019re never really going to understand transness as compatible with the family,\u201d they say. <\/p>\n\n\n\n These decades of erasure have led to outdated scientific understandings of trans bodies. Even a few years ago, many doctors believed that taking testosterone rendered trans men permanently infertile<\/a>. Testosterone was viewed as de facto birth control, a myth that almost definitely led to some unexpected pregnancies. This misinformation ruins lives, especially as governments worldwide continue to criminalize abortion. Some trans men went through the expensive and extremely painful process of freezing their eggs, only for research to later show<\/a> that people can become pregnant after stopping testosterone. Heyam points to the work of researcher Dr. Michael Toze, whose 2018 journal article \u201c<\/em>The risky womb and the unthinkability of the pregnant man\u201d<\/a> <\/em>argued, as Heyam summarizes, that \u201call of the research starts with the assumption that a trans man wouldn\u2019t want to be pregnant.\u201d Toze pointed out that U.K. trans healthcare strongly encourages hysterectomies, and that transmasculine fertility is seen as \u201crisky, undesirable and unrecognized.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n As for Heyam, his experiences of reproductive healthcare were generally positive\u2014\u201cI\u2019m a middle-class, white trans person who can do lots of self-advocacy,\u201d he clarifies\u2014but this changed during the early stages of labour. Heyam went to the hospital to be induced, but was made to wait for five hours <\/em>because his medical records were listed as male, which glitched the system. By the time this technical difficulty had been resolved, there were no beds left at the hospital. Heyam was sent home to wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Good Law Project\u2019s team know that they aren\u2019t just fighting a British legal battle; the case\u2019s outcome will have implications for trans people around the world. \u201cWe\u2019ve already seen how decisions about trans rights in the U.K. have been weaponized against trans people globally,\u201d says Jess O\u2019Thomson, Good Law Project\u2019s community outreach lead, in a statement to Xtra.<\/em> \u201cFor example, the Cass Review<\/em> has been used to oppose access to trans healthcare in other countries.\u201d The contentious, widely critiqued report<\/a>, which led to the effective banning of puberty blockers in the U.K., has been parroted by U.S. government officials in a copycat 400-page report<\/a>; it also sparked a similar crackdown<\/a> on trans youth healthcare in Argentina. \u201cIf action isn\u2019t taken against these attacks on trans rights, they become normalized internationally,\u201d continues O\u2019Thomson, \u201cand much harder to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Similar wars are being waged on abortion rights. These parallels aren\u2019t accidental. Trans and reproductive rights have always been linked<\/a>; fundamentally, they\u2019re both about bodily autonomy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n