Crisis in the house: this trans-woman’s desire to sire a child

The word ‘sire’ used with intent.  

Before embarking on hormone therapy in earnest, I paused for a moment and thought hard about whether I should preserve my sperm.  Many people advised me to, though I never discussed it with any of my therapists.  Probably should have.  I read a lot about it in online chat rooms and forums, where people were dealing with the same issues.

In the end, I didn’t do it.  And now, I am questioning my decision.  What was my logic at the time?

I figured a lot of things.  First, I had already been self-medicating with bootleg hormones I brought back from Mexico for two months.  Second, I had been drinking herbal teas which are rich in phyto-oestrogens, eating estrogenic foods, and taking estrogenic supplements for a year or so with increasing focus and intensity.  In other words, that stuff, those changes, were already in my body.  How long for the traces to come out?

As we age, both men and women produce increasingly risky sperm and eggs.  Risky in the sense of possible birth defects.  Men can sire children until late in life for sure, and the body has a tendency to not hold through term foetuses that have serious issues.  But it can happen.

I am also not a spring chicken, even if I feel as though I am.  And perhaps a part of me never thought that I would find someone to have kids with.  Perhaps my resentment towards my father for having fxxked up his first marriage and writing it and us off, and starting over, without having done any of the work, was a serious block.

I also have wonderful children whom I love very much.  As the child of divorce and of a father who remarried a younger woman and had children of his own, I also lived the experience as a child.  I didn’t like the feeling that he had abandoned us and had a new family and was hyper-sensitive to the myriad ways that he favoured his new family.  I was younger by far than my own children are now—he remarried when I was 6 but was shacked up with her already when I was four.

On the other hand, I developed a beautiful relationship with my stepmother, and literally had in her both friend and surrogate mother.  Still, how would my children feel?  Should how they might feel have any bearing on this at all?  One of my closest friends thinks so.  She’s angry at me for even considering it.

And what is going on here?

Well, there are three things.  First, I am daunted by income uncertainty and the likely challenges I would face were I to continue to attempt to stay in the corporate world in which I navigate.  This is scary, particularly as I am alone and severely depleted as the result of my divorce.

Second, surgery, which for me is the gateway to the prize I want most, the absence of a penis, that flat terrain between my legs which changes everything for me physically, is scary.  Surgery is scary.  It is a serious operation.  I spent an hour on video with a potential surgeon yesterday and most of it was about the process and recovery, and it is a heavy-duty operation.  Recovery time one year.  Potential side effects can be severe.

Third, as I find myself on the dating circuit, the woman who are dating me are young.  They are all at peak fertility, perhaps 28-34, and many of them want to have children.  It speaks to their reality that they usually tell me on the first date whether they want to have children or not, ever.  And this includes women who “date” me without ever having any intention of dating me…if you know what I mean.

And it was on a date recently where this topic came up, and she asked if I had frozen my sperm, and I said no, and that in all probability I am now forever sterile.  That I had thought about it, and had to start, couldn’t wait, and so had chosen not to preserve my sperm, but probably should have.  And she agreed.  As a general insurance policy, because ‘you never know’.  And she is right.  One does never know.

A male Dom friend of mine who is in the scene told me at one point that I needed to be careful, that dominant women, pro-Dommes included, who were in the scene would want to have babies with me.  I won’t get into the politics of that statement; I am simply reporting what he said.  When he said it, my thought was, I would kind of like that.  Kinky response was that being bred is hot.  Rational response was ‘why not’?  I’d probably want it too.  After all, if I had gotten that close to her, I would absolutely have found her attractive.

Okay.  What is really going on here?  Am I coming with an excuse to postpone that which lies ahead, a series of very scary steps?  Or is it the last hurrah of a narcissistic man-child who is revelling in male power and his ability to attract a younger mate?  Or is having a child a way to not remove myself from the consideration set of women who I am finding very attractive and who are finding something in me too?  I think it is the latter.  That I don’t want to rule myself out from someone I might be otherwise attracted to.

I love children.  Do I have a burning need to have children at this point?  Not at all.  Would life be easier and more pleasurable to contemplate without another 20 years of my life dedicated to raising a child or children?  Most certainly.  Can kinky me find plenty of workarounds?  You bet, but vanilla me really doesn’t like those thoughts.

If I could just go to the doctor and have them extract the cells in hopes of success, that would be one thing.  But I can’t.  To even try at this point would mean stopping hormones for between 3-6 months, with no guarantee of success.  I also think about consciously having a last male orgasm in a proper fashion, or even what it might feel like to be sexually male in a conjugal way with a woman with whom I later had a child with.  There would be a kind of poetic beauty in that, even though by the time the child would be born, my male anatomy would be gone.

In all of these scenarios, I figure large, but the child does not.  That’s my rear-view assessment.  The reasons in the plus column all seem self-serving and false.  The reasons in the negative column all seem positive and pure.

Still, I cannot help but feel a wistful sadness about it.  One of my girlfriends is angry and disappointed with me for even raising some of these issues with her.  It triggered her own feelings about how women are positioned in society, how older women are cast aside, and here I am entertaining younger women and even contemplating having children again when for her just getting a date is tough—despite her being gorgeous.  My wife, also gorgeous, makes the same arguments.  At least in my wife’s case I can say that she chose to go out that door, I didn’t push her out.  But now, I am so glad she did.  I can finally be with someone as me, who doesn’t demand of me to be something I am not just to satisfy her needs.

It shouldn’t be hard to think this through.  It shouldn’t be hard to feel good about the decision.  The best decision is surely to preserve optionality.  Perhaps it isn’t too late.  But do I really want to stop this process for even one minute?

No.  Not even for one minute.  That doesn’t make it any easier.