Despite the title, you’ll be pleased to know this piece is not going to be some kind of Rigger-Sutra, and definitely not a perfumed garden.
I came across1 this phrase whilst reading a learned paper, peer reviewed and all, and published in the journal SSM - Qualitative Research in Health.
Why on earth was I reading a paper from this journal? Good question.
The title of the paper is Medical uncertainty and reproduction of the “normal”: Decision-making around testosterone therapy in transgender pregnancy and it was mentioned in a recent piece by Andrew Doyle
Andrew Doyle, who I presume to be a person with sperm, is one of my favourite commentators and writers on modern issues. He’s a lot more sane and reasonable than I am, but our concerns about the direction we’re heading in our societies overlap considerably.
Doyle’s article addresses the primary problem in our society today. It isn’t Putin, or Tucker Carlson, or Gaza, or even Global Boiling™. No, it’s the highly important and critical question of how we can help people who have sperm, to breastfeed.
I remember that first time walking through the door of the house with baldy number one. The little darling was asleep in a Moses basket and we plonked it in the middle of the floor. Me and the womb carrier looked at one another and she said those immortal words “what the fuck do we do with it now?”
The damn thing didn’t come with an instruction manual. It all seemed so easy in hospital. All of these competent and confident nurse thingies were floating about and doing stuff, and they made it all look so easy. Thankfully, both the sperm producer and the womb carrier and, more importantly, baldy herself, survived the initial uncertainty.
And there, right there, is the rub. Those words you almost overlooked didn’t you?
“More importantly”
From the moment baldy first emerges, things change. You’re no longer the most important thing in your own life2. Not even close.
It’s a shame that some feminists have, over the years, attacked motherhood so much. It’s a magical and precious thing that only women can be. Unfortunately it has been a bit relegated to a kind of 2nd class option for women and seen as a technique for patriarchal slavery.
I get that. Sort of. Juggling the demands of parenthood with a career, particularly for women, is an almost impossible task that was made far more difficult than it should have been because of the various ‘patriarchal’ attitudes that existed.
But not so for modern women. Those women who have sperm might be able to escape all that, never having been subject to those various ‘patriarchal’ oppressions that exist in the first place. The biggest problem for the modern woman is how to breastfeed when nature hasn’t given you tits.
There is a flip side, and it concerns the modern man. These men actually do have tits, or did have, but when you need to be injected with high doses of testosterone in order to maintain your manly manliness, how does that impact your male pregnancy?
That’s what the paper in SSM - Qualitative Research in Health is all about.
You see, when you throw trans into the equation, everything changes. It’s no longer about doing what’s best for baldy, but about how to maintain the glorious self-image and gender wellbeing of the parents. The paper asks difficult questions about who gets priority here. Baldy or trans?
In our past ‘normative’ society asking this kind of question would have been met with
But that’s such an old-fashioned response.
The article says that the old-fashioned way of doing things, like not giving women (actual women) high doses of testosterone during pregnancy, do not consider the wellbeing of the trans person3.
Nature, apparently, made a bit of a mistake with women. Furthermore, we must ditch such out-dated and old-fashioned notions of what’s ‘normal’ and best for baldy. Here’s how the article phrases the issue :
These approaches reinscribe binarized notions of sex, resulting in social control in their attempts to safeguard against non-normative potential future outcomes for offspring.
Me : I’d kind of like my baby to be born with a head
New Fangled Doctor : Oh, how very normative of you
The issue is that there’s just too much focus on baldy, and nowhere near enough focus on what’s best for the trans person who’s having to try to maintain their trans identity in the face of the unrelenting pressure of pregnancy and societal norms.
These offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies and approaches are, we argue, part of the gendered precautionary labour of pregnancy and pregnancy care itself, and not without potentially-harmful consequences for trans people
Offspring-focused risk-avoidance strategies?
Yeah, I mean we spend far too much time what might be bad for the inconvenient baldy thing, and not enough on what might be bad for the trans person, don’t we? I mean, it’s just so unfair that the high doses of testosterone that maintain one’s state of trans manly manliness might have to be suspended during pregnancy for the sake of the baby.
Fucking transphobic, that is.
The paper argues that there’s insufficient evidence that high testosterone dosage is harmful for baldy and so we should just squirt the stuff in willy-nilly because it’s better for trans people if we do. Something like that, anyway.
Of course, the authors rail against the perception that trans people are selfish in prioritizing their own needs over that of baldy.
First, we find that health care providers reinscribe their status and authority, in the context of uncertainty, by prescribing caution as they advise their trans patients to pause testosterone therapy, center normative development of trans offspring, and cast trans patients’ pursuit of testosterone therapy during pregnancy as illicit or selfish
They quote from some of the interviews of trans people they have conducted.
As another participant told us: “A lot of my relationship with medical care was really around telling people what they needed to hear for me to get the medical care that I thought that I needed rather than go into medical professionals for opinions and advice.” Rather than being “selfish” or “blinkered,” trans participants described engaging in strategic and pragmatic efforts to negotiate gatekeeping practices of the state and health care systems in order to obtain the services that they needed to ensure their present and future wellbeing and life possibilities in the context of cisnormative and transphobic sociomedical practices.
So, yeah, not at all selfish to lie to your healthcare provider in order to get the healthcare for yourself that you think you need. That might be excusable on an individual level, although it’s clearly unwise4, but when there’s the health and safety of another life to consider?
In other words, you can give baldy your tit, but not your priority.
These insufferably narcissistic knuckleheads, who seem to care more for their fabulous “gender journey” than the actual health of their offspring, are definitely not selfish at all. No Sir. Not a bit of it.
The final lesson is that having sex with a sperm carrier may, under current cisnormative and transphobic sociomedical practices, result in an interruption to your gender journey - and that’s really bad. Baldy will understand if you choose not to interrupt things - even if it ends up with no head.
Behave yourselves
Or the 2nd most important thing if we’re of the romantic persuasion
I wonder why we didn’t do this in the past. I mean, c’mon sperm producer, it’s just such a natural thing to do, to dose up pregnant women with high doses of a hormone they usually don’t make in such high concentrations. What could possibly go wrong?
Having said that, given the collective self-wrought shame of the medical profession over covid, we might think it entirely wise, these days, to be less than forthcoming with our doctors
Utterly reprehensible.
The use of all that proprietary academic jargon to distance the paper’s author from the monstrousness reminds me of the “Wannsee Conference” film, and its depiction of how the participants used bureaucratic tropes to armor themselves against the reality of what they were perpetrating.
“Doyle’s article addresses the primary problem in our society today. It isn’t Putin, or Tucker Carlson, or Gaza, or even Global Boiling™. No, it’s the highly important and critical question of how we can help people who have sperm, to breastfeed.”
...........
My good Professor Rigger,
I am once again forced to respectfully disagree. I appreciate that you are transfixed but it’s not the primary problem. It’s a fad which will fade away. Conquest ideologies are the primary problem. And coincidentally when Muslims take over Britain (read the opinions of America’s Coptic Christian Raymond Ibrahim or your own Douglas Murray) this particular problem will be solved.