Becoming a transgender parent: three people’s stories
Transgender members of the LGBTQ community often find they have their own set of unexpected challenges to overcome, NATALIE STECHYSON reports.
Eby Heller and Jenna Jacobs walked hand-inhand on the path beside their red chicken barn, Heller’s beach-ball belly pushing tight against her winter coat as the couple grinned with anticipation of the upcoming birth of their first child.
They walked hand-in-hand, too, just over a year earlier, Heller bent over in pain, Jacobs’ face twisted with dismay, as they exited a Montreal fertility clinic after another failed attempt to impregnate Heller with Jacobs’ sperm.
Jacobs, a transgender woman, was born with a male body. She met Heller, who identifies as bisexual, at a yoga class in Montreal in 2010. They moved in together almost immediately and then became business partners, opening a co-operative vegetable farm in rural Quebec. Soon, they started trying for a baby using sperm Jacobs had stored before she started her transition.
It took nine rounds of intrauterine insemination for Heller to become pregnant. The first four experiences at a Montreal fertility clinic had been quick and impersonal. But their fifth try was worse than usual. The doctor rushed in, never said hello or gave his name, never looked at the women. He asked “insemination?” and they said “yes.” He was quick and rough, Heller recalled, and she bled afterward, something she’d never experienced. He left the lamp on between her legs as he rushed out of the room, they say.
“We left that day and I was just a wreck. I mean, I felt abused. And so frustrated, because it felt like I was so dependent on these people to have the life that I wanted to have,” Heller recalled. “It felt like, ‘It’s not my fault that I need to come here. I don’t want to come here. Why are you treating me like this?’”
With the advent of reproductive technologies, transgender people have options if they want to have children after transitioning, but there are a number of challenges. Not the least of which is what some allege is discrimination or a lack of understanding in the fertility clinics they rely upon.
While the gay liberation movement took off more than 40 years ago, the trans-liberation movement is still relatively young, says Dr. Kevin Alderson, a Calgary psychologist who specializes in LGBTQ issues.
“The trans community has really just gained in momentum since about the 1990s and the explosion of Internet, which means people can get information on this like never before,” Alderson says.
“We’re moving along about 15 years behind lesbian and gay and bi folks,” says Andy Inkster, a health promoter with the LGBTQ Parenting Network in Toronto.
“Trans people are the final frontier of acceptance.”
Jenna Jacobs was born in 1977 in Edmonton. For as long as she can remember, she wore women’s clothing when she was alone. It felt great, she said, but knew it was wrong.
“I had all the parts of a boy. But it just never felt right, all through my childhood. The earliest memories I have are ... of being unhappy with my gender. They never left,” Jacobs said.
She moved to Montreal when she was 31. She was midtransition when she met Heller, presenting as a woman in many social situations but as a man at university, where she was completing her PhD.
Heller, who was born in 1984 in Chicago, has dated both men and women, but never a transgender person before she met Jacobs.
“She was still presenting back and forth at that time.” But Heller said she saw a richness, a beauty, in what it meant to be trans.
And Jacobs’ worries that Heller would expect her to be more male were unfounded.
“Every time I took a step further in my transition I was almost expecting her to try to put on the brakes or put influence on me at some point, and she never did. And there is something really unique and really special in that,” Jacobs said.
Despite the painful experience at the fertility clinic, the couple tried three more times.
“I can really recognize that our situation is maybe unique and many clinics or many care providers haven’t ever encountered clients that fit kind of our, um, fit our model, so to speak,” Jacobs said, reaching out to touch Heller’s hand. After the eighth session, they switched clinics and got pregnant on the first try.
Baby Simone was born April 2.
Inkster isn’t just a professional expert. He was born with a female body, and started identifying as trans when he was a teenager in Kingston, Ont. He was 24 when he realized he wanted children “imminently,” and started looking at his options.
“Going into a pregnancy, whether someone’s queer, gay, lesbian, trans or straight, they know it may take some time and there’s some prep work involved. But for straight people that path is a little clearer,” Inkster says.
He eventually used assisted reproductive technologies at a clinic in the United States, he says, but for legal reasons he doesn’t want to go into further details about the process or location.
His daughter was born in the U.S., the first child in that particular state to be recognized on a birth certificate as having a “parent” instead of a mother or father, Inkster says.
“Legally, she has me. And she calls me Papa,” he says.