Transgender men put surgery on hold to give birth
A BRITISH man announced that he was the first in the UK to give birth – only to have his title snatched away by another transgender man who revealed he had given birth weeks earlier.
Hayden Cross, 21, and Scott Parker, 23, were both born women and chose to put their gender transitions on hold to have children before full surgery made it impossible.
Both men are planning to return to gender reassignment surgery as quickly as possible.
Mr Cross announced on Saturday that he delivered his daughter, Trinity-leigh, by caesarean section last month, after he found a sperm donor on Facebook and inseminated himself.
However, Mr Parker then revealed that in April he gave birth to daughter Sara who was conceived following a drunken one-night stand with a friend in August last year.
Mr Cross was born Paige but has been living legally as a man for more than three years and taking male hormones.
He had asked the NHS to freeze his eggs before completing the transition in the hope that he might have children in later years, but the health service refused.
“I faced the prospect of not becoming the man I’m supposed to be, physically, or a dad,” he told the Sun newspaper on Saturday. I found the donor on the internet.
“I found I was pregnant two weeks after the sperm was inserted. I was happy, but I knew it would be backtracking on my transition. It’s a very female thing to carry a baby and it goes against everything I feel in my body.”
Mr Parker gave birth seven weeks
‘It is wonderful that attitudes are changing and people like me can celebrate being a parent’
before Mr Cross. He had been living as a man for two years but put his transition on hold to have Sara.
Since the birth, Mr Parker has resumed life as a man and is continuing with his transition. He is planning to have an operation to remove his breasts next year. The taxpayer-funded process costs an average of £29,000.
In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Mr Parker said: “It is wonderful that attitudes are changing and people like me can celebrate being a parent. I am overjoyed for Hayden Cross too.”
Mr Parker has a partner who was also born female and is transitioning to become a man, and is hoping to become a legal parent to Sara.
The first man to give birth was Thomas Beatie, from Arizona, in 2007. Also born female, he went on to have three children using donor sperm.