I’m fighting prejudice, says transgender man who’s four months PREGNANT
... but as PAUL BRACCHI reports, not everyone in Hayden’s family is happy
THE impossibly cute little girl in a pink fairy costume — with wand, tiara and long blonde hair — is Paige Cross, posing sweetly in the room she shared with her older sister.
Back then, the pupil at Tredworth Junior School in Gloucester would often wear her hair in a ponytail, had spectacles which reflected dazzling blues eyes and a smile which lit up the room.
Paige’s happy, early childhood was epitomised by an outing to Butlin’s when she took part in a competition to see who could put the most Maltesers in their mouth without chewing. She won, of course.
‘We have some lovely memories,’ says her grandmother Pam Edgeworth.
It is now almost impossible for Mrs Edgeworth to look at the pictures of Paige as a little girl without feeling tearful.
Paige will soon be 21. But she has changed her name by deed poll to Hayden Cross and has been living legally as a man for the past three years after starting gender reassignment on the NHS, a process which has left Hayden with a deeper voice and facial hair.
It has also bitterly divided his family and left him estranged from those who love him.
Mrs Edgeworth told the Mail poignantly: ‘She’s asked me to call her Hayden, and I say: “I can’t, love.” In my eyes she will always be Paige. She was born a girl. She wasn’t born a boy.’
As desperately sad as this is, it’s not the reason why Hayden’s case is in the news this week, or why a TV documentary team is making a film about him. After all, around 3,000 patients undergo gender reassignment every year.
Hayden Cross’s story is different, quite possibly unique in Britain.
He is believed to be the first transgender man in the country to publicly announce — on the front page of a red-top tabloid, no less — that he is pregnant after injecting himself with sperm from a donor he found on Facebook.
Hayden had originally hoped to freeze his eggs to be able to have children later.
But the NHS declined to pay for it and he could not afford the cost of having it done privately. So the former Asda worker, who lives on benefits in a council bedsit, suspended his hormone treatment and sought an anonymous ‘father’ online.
Hayden Cross’s pregnancy has raised profound ethical questions in an already controversial area and is fraught with medical risks.
He says he will resume his physical gender transition, from female to male, after giving birth in the summer, which means he will be both the biological mother of the child and the father.
HIS family are worried — for both Hayden and this child. His uncle, Sean Hodson, 41, who still cannot bring himself to call his nephew ‘he’, told us: ‘The one thing we’re scared of is that she has the child, and then she struggles to cope.
‘That baby is going to be born into an obscure and weird world. In my opinion, it’s just not the right way to bring a child into the world.’
There are other troubling concerns. Prior to his decision to have a baby, Hayden had been, as is standard procedure for women who are transitioning to men, receiving testosterone injections.
Doctors say anyone in this situation should wait up to six months before conceiving to allow the body to regain its hormonal balance.
The potential dangers of not doing so are stark; experts say a female foetus exposed to increased levels of testosterone may develop male genitals, and a male foetus may experience fertility and behavioural problems in the future.
Hayden fell pregnant in September. It’s not known when he stopped his testosterone injections.
What we do know about the latest chapter in his life is worrying.
Sperm donors at licensed fertility clinics are rigorously screened for HIV and other diseases and genetic conditions. Hayden, however, does not even know the name of his donor or anything about him.
He simply arrived at the door after being contacted on the internet and passed Hayden ‘the sperm in a pot and I did it via a syringe’.
Hayden blames the NHS, which is funding his transition (the treatment costs, on average, £29,000 per patient) for not finding a further £4,000 to freeze his eggs and forcing him to resort to such drastic measures.
Everyone who knows Hayden agrees his heart is in the right place. Nevertheless, his journey from angelic little girl to Britain’s first ‘pregnant man’ has bitterly divided his family — as well as wider society.
Today, he bears almost no physical resemblance to the person he once was. Few of the friends he went to school with would probably recognise him if they bumped into him in town in his trademark hoodie.
Depending on who you speak to, this is either deeply tragic or something we should be happy about on his behalf.
Hayden’s mother has demonstrated her support for him by flying a pink ribbon — a symbol of the LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay and Transgender) community — on the front door of her end- of-terrace home in Gloucester.
But others, including his maternal grandmother Mrs Edgeworth and his uncle, no longer have any contact with him.
They told of their fears for the welfare of the baby and their belief that the teenage Paige’s decision to become a man was heavily influenced by her friendship with an older member of the transgender community.
For his part, Hayden says he is determined to raise the infant as a single dad in a ‘ trans’ environment, and has applied for a new, bigger council flat to accommodate the baby. ‘I will be the greatest dad,’ he has said.
Hayden’s childhood was a troubled one. He was the second of four children (he has a sister Sky, 21, and brothers Jordan, 19, and robert, 16), and his father, Desmond Cross, was a drug taker when he first met their mother, Christine Edgeworth. By the time the children arrived, his father had come off drugs and was working as a lollipop man.
It is said that Mr Cross, who later took up a job with a building maintenance firm, was most handson with the kids. ‘He did everything with them,’ their uncle Sean Hodson, said. ‘He took them to school, parents’ evenings, picked them up when they were ill, took them to get their glasses and to doctor’s appointments.’
The family enjoyed numerous holidays to seaside resorts on the south coast such as Weymouth.
Hayden — or Paige as he was then, — shared a bedroom with older sibling Sky.
But the younger sister never shared Sky’s interest in dolls and would much rather play football with the boys and supported Manchester United.
‘Whatever the boys wanted to do, she wanted to do as well,’ Mr Hodson recalled. ‘She was always a bit of a tomboy. We thought nothing of it.’
Who, in all honesty, would have done? Many little girls behave in exactly the same way.
A ‘playful, vibrant, normal kid’, is how Mr Hodson remembers Paige, the name both he and Mrs Edgeworth — who agreed to be interviewed with Mr Hodson at his Gloucester home — continue to use. They pointed out that, like other girls her age, she had boyfriends. Aged 13, they said, she went out with a boy on her estate; the pair attended junior Army cadet courses together.
Happy as she was at home, Paige struggled academically and frequently got into fights with other pupils at secondary school, the all-girls Barnwood Park, behaviour which saw her excluded when she was 14.
This coincided with her parents splitting up — a break-up which had a devastating impact.
‘Her mother couldn’t cope after Desmond left and she eventually called in social services,’ says Mr Hodson.
The upshot was that, aged 15, Paige was placed with foster parents. She cut off her hair and stopped wearing ‘girly’ clothes.
Her transformation is captured in pictures on Facebook where Paige is dressed like a gangster rapper, wearing an assortment of tracksuits, hoodies, gold chain necklaces and baseball caps next to slogans such as: ‘I Am what I Am. If you don’t like me, turn your head and walk away. Simple as that.’
It is worth noting, however, that when shorn of her femininity, she still had a relationship with a boy — a liaison which began when she was 16 and would last for around 18 months. Shortly afterwards, she
met Shane Hope, a key figure in this drama. ‘Shane’s mum lives on an estate near us,’ said Mr Hodson.
‘Paige met him when she was staying at ours. Shane is transgender as well.
‘At around the time she met him, Paige started wearing a chest binder [compression undergarments used by transitioning men to flatten their breasts.]
‘Sometimes we wonder that if circumstances had been different Paige would be settled down [with a boyfriend] and have two or three kids by now.’
Mr Hope, 26, who was born Sandra Clair Hope in Dagenham, East London, became Paige’s best friend and confidante. On social media, there is a photograph of the two of them captioned: ‘Celebrate Pride.’
It was Shane Hope who ordered the deed poll forms for Paige to legally change her name to Hayden Cross three years ago.
Then he began receiving genderchange counselling at a local clinic run by the 2gether NHS Foundation Trust before starting hormone treatment.
At this stage, Hayden had no plans to become pregnant. If the NHS hadn’t refused to freeze his eggs, he says: ‘I wouldn’t have had kids until I was at least 25.’
The decision led him down a disturbing road.
Following a change in the law, all children conceived as a result of sperm donation after April 1, 2005, have the right to know the identity of their father when they turn 18.
This has led to a chronic shortage of donor sperm at licensed clinics and a surge in the number of unregulated sperm donor services on the internet.
One Facebook donor group has 7,500 UK members. Potential donors are told: ‘There is no sex involved — you just fill a pot and hand it over.’
The risks are obvious. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority says that, health risks aside, one other consequence of Hayden’s decision to use such a ‘service’ is that there is no way of telling who else the anonymous donor might have given sperm to, leading to the possibility that any child conceived in this way could unknowingly meet with a halfsibling later in life.
Still, a pink ribbon was fluttering in the wind outside the home of Hayden’s mother yesterday.
The other side of Hayden’s family view her ‘ support’ in a different light.
‘ She isn’t bothered because she’s not that sort of mum,’ said Mr Hodson.
SADLy, Hayden has now lost touch with his father and has become increasingly estranged from his grandmother — they have not spoken in months.
The person Hayden relies on most now is Shane Hope (who calls himself ‘ Mad Monkey’ and ‘ Monkeyboii’ on Facebook). Hayden has chosen Shane to be his birthing partner.
For now, Mr Hodson, like other members of the family, is struggling to accept his niece’s decision to become a man — and the pregnancy.
In a frank and honest admission, he said: ‘I cannot get it into my head that she is changing from a girl to a boy. It’s so difficult to even grasp it, because we’ve known her since she was a baby.’
After his child is born, Hayden will return to the clinic and continue the gender-transition process. The next stage will involve removing Hayden’s breasts before his ovaries are taken out.
‘The whole point of telling my story was to explain that I have been placed in an impossible position,’ Hayden told the Mail yesterday.
‘The choice I was left with was to have a biological baby much younger than I wanted, or delay being a man and live unhappily as a woman for many years.
‘ This situation means my position isn’t as perfect as it could be which is why I came forward publicly, to help change the situation.
‘I truly believe the transgender community is having to overcome the same prejudices as the gay community has come through. Most people now don’t question why people are gay, but accept it rather than trying to explain it.
‘ Sadly, transphobia tries to rationalise why people change the gender they were born with rather than accept who they are.
‘Similarly, bigots used to say that people had become gay because they hung out with gay people.
‘Of course, the truth is they gravitated towards people like themselves who understood each other. This is why I have a closeknit transgender group of friends, of which I am very grateful.
‘These sort of prejudices are what has led me to receiving death threats this week. But hopefully I can help change that for others going forward.
‘Anyone who’s been pregnant knows how vulnerable you feel, and I want to thank those who have congratulated me on being pregnant and offered me support.’