I have also lived over 13 years of my life being perceived as a cisgender man.
I have seen what women go through firsthand.
I know what it is like to navigate this world as a little girl and as a woman. I lived a good amount of years being perceived as a woman. I was assigned female at birth my parents raised me as a girl. What’s strange about that last question is that when you see a woman with a child, how often do you ask them where their dad is? I’m guessing not very often, huh? Yeah, I figured.īut more importantly, there is also a great benefit to being a transgender dad to two daughters. I’m asked where their mother is when they’re being taken to the doctor or signed up for day care. Or they tell me that my children will grow up to be unhappy and confused. Adults constantly question why I transitioned to male just to do a “female” thing. My kids have the fewest questions, actually. The problem is that most of the questions are not coming from my kids. I love you, too.” And she never asked me that question again.īeing a transgender dad means answering a lot of questions. I told her that while she may not have a mommy, she has two dads who love her and would love her forever and that will never change. I told her that she doesn’t have a mommy because Daddy (me) wasn’t comfortable being a girl, so I changed some things about myself so that I could be happy. When Azaelia was 4 or 5, she asked me why she doesn’t have a mommy.
I am a man, but I am a transgender man, and in my case, that means I have the tools necessary to carry and birth children, and the autonomy over my own body to do so. I did not transition to try to be a cisgender man. My transition wasn’t me “giving up” my option to give birth. I have never hated my body it just felt foreign to me until I made the changes necessary for it to feel like home. As a person who is openly a “seahorse” dad (a term used when referring to transgender men who carry their own children in nature, it is the male seahorse who carries babies), I have quickly realized that the assumption for most of society (a lot of transgender people included), is that when transgender men transition, we are saying that we hate our bodies or what our bodies can do. When I think about what I want people to know about being a transgender dad, the very first thing that comes to mind is that we are human beings. I gave birth to my two amazing daughters after I began transitioning. I am a 35-year-old Black, gay, transgender dad.