Ale:
I’m gonna change the mic just in case, I’m gonna put it on here. Would you mind telling me your name, your pronouns, where you’re from, and how old are you?
Derek:
My name is Derek, my pronouns are he/him, I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, but I live in Cincinnati now, and I am 33 years old.
Ale:
So am I, I’m also 33 – I want to know how you heard about the project, and also what made you want to participate.
Derek:
I heard about the project on Instagram. A friend of mine shared it with me and was like, hey I think you’d be really dope as part of this project. I think you have a really cool reproductive justice story – you are a birthing parent, and that is a part of your journey. I didn’t even think I was going to be of interest to be honest. There are other people out there, fighting the justice fight in a bigger, better way than I am right now.
Ale:
Are there? I don’t know. I feel like everyone’s fighting their own fights, in their own ways, and as best as they can.
Derek:
I definitely agree. Sometimes I have that inferiority complex where I’m not doing enough to change the world and then I have friends who have to remind me that just existing is enough, especially within such an interconnected experience, I’m on the cusp of so many different communities.
Ale:
Tell me all of the cusps of the communities that you’re in.
Derek:
I’m African American or Black, I’m a transgender man, I’m a birthing parent, I’m also disabled, I’m polyamorous, and I’m gay.
Ale:
We have some overlapping experiences. Can you recall your earliest memories of dealing with either your reproductive health or your gender? Whatever parallel you can think of.
Derek:
I think I would say my gender journey came first. My dad was a single parent, and raising a little Black girl in the early 90s was hard for him. He didn’t have much experience or really an understanding of what to do. I was a tomboy most of my life, and I didn’t really know what transgender was, I never heard that word or met anyone of that experience. I didn’t even know what gay or bisexual was until I was in middle school because my dad sheltered me from those kinds of things.
He was really young when he had me — my mom was addicted to drugs for a very long time, and so he left her and took me with him and got full custody, which at that time it was rare, statistically speaking, for Black men to step up in that way, for them to want to raise a little girl by themselves. I remember distinctly my gender journey starting when I felt very uncomfortable with my body. I was very mature-looking very early. I think I got my period in like third grade and thought I was dying.
“Out in the world, with my physical appearance, I can manipulate to match however I want to feel that day, whether it’s masculine or feminine, whatever. But with pregnancy, you can’t hide that, and then my framework back then, before I even knew trans pregnant men existed, I had the mindset that only women could be pregnant, being pregnant was a womanly thing. So to be pregnant, it was too much, take some of it back.”
Ale:
Oh no! How did your dad react?
Derek:
He got a bunch of books from the library and gave them to me, and then went to the store and bought everything in the feminine aisle hahaha. He was like, “I don’t know what to do, call your grandma, I have no answers for you right now.” Looking back on that experience, I remember being like I hate this, I hate everything about being a girl right now, this sucks. None of the other girls in my class are dealing with things like this. I was also a heavy child, I was pretty fat, and for me to be heavier and more developed and having what I felt were womanly problems at such a young age, felt like something was off that shouldn’t be. I wasn’t experiencing the normal gender journey I was supposed to be experiencing.
Ale:
You just wanted to be a kid.
Derek:
I definitely think I just bottled those things away and was just like, this is my life, and I gotta make the best of it. In middle school, I started thinking I’m gay and then I started playing volleyball, and that was more of a defining moment for me, of being a sports person. In that moment, I was much more masculine. At that time, I thought I was a lesbian, so I thought I’m gonna have to be as girly as possible, because I don’t want to end up being the butch lesbian. Then I decided to join the church, which is a weird far left turn from where I was going.
Ale:
How old were you when that happened, when you started with the church?
Derek:
It was in eighth grade. That’s when I started going to this very white church that was called First Presbyterian Church of Marietta.
Ale:
What made you want to join the church?
Derek:
I had this overwhelming feeling that what I was doing was wrong and I had this experience in seventh grade when it had gotten out that I was a lesbian, and one of my friends who was in the crowd of the popular kids said they can’t hang out with me anymore because I was gay and they were Christian. It was very much a Janice moment. When I told them I’m not gay, they said they don’t believe me, so I joined the church. Obviously, I’m not gay if I’m here in the church teaching the youth.
Ale:
So much hiding.
Derek:
Oh my gosh, the amount of covering and masking I did back then is ridiculous because in ninth and tenth grade, I was the wrestling manager, and then in 11th grade, I started wrestling.
Ale:
That’s a very queer move.
Derek:
Oh yeah! I did theater, and all of my roles were men. I always say to this day that my theater director knew something before I did because he never cast me as a female. My gender journey was very interesting because when I got to college, that was the first time I had ever heard of the word transgender. My girlfriend at the time would always tell me, “hey you seem volatile at times, you’re up and down, you’re left and right, you go from zero to a million very quickly, and you stay in a million for days, you’re not sleeping, you’re not eating and I need you to figure out what’s going on.” I wanted to try therapy, but I was really resistant.
Ale:
I’m not sure about you, but growing up that was never a thing. People who try to go to therapy or seek help were just labeled as crazy.
Derek:
So trigger warning, I had all kinds of mental health things in High School. I was a cutter, I attempted suicide, and we tried therapy, and that therapist asked too many questions to my dad about his background, and my dad felt so uncomfortable, so we never went back. I asked him about that one time a couple of years ago, and he said, “you know, therapy’s taboo, it’s a white people science, it’s not for our people.”
Ale:
It was similar for me, I could’ve saved myself so much pain when I was in high school, if I at least had been on some meds or got some extra help, but that was for Gringos.
Derek:
Exactly. When Andrea [college girlfriend] gave me that kind of permission to seek help, I started some meds, but they didn’t really work, and then I started dating Robert [pseudonym].
Ale:
Who’s Robert?
Derek:
Robert is a biological man and the bane of my existence, and did something that I find absolutely deplorable. On Valentine’s Day, Robert and I decided to have sex, first time having it and when we switched positions, he took off the condom. I found out about it six weeks later when I didn’t get my period.
After taking the fifth pregnancy test, I found out I was pregnant. My friend Randy was like, “well, you have options, and you know this because you’ve volunteered at the clinic before,” and I didn’t have any kind of moral dilemma around abortions. I knew that I never wanted kids, and I’m a sophomore in college, not even 21 yet, and I just got my first job six months prior.
Ale:
What did you end up doing?
Derek:
I ended up at the clinic, and if I’m not mistaken, they offered me the pill, and they told me I had some time to think about it. I had about one to two weeks to think it over so I went home and I thought about it, and thought this is literally my dad’s only opportunity to have a grandchild, because I ain’t doing this shit. I will not do this of my own accord in the future. So I decided to have a baby, which is wild, because he’s a freaking 12 year old now.
Ale:
I kinda love that, you wanted to make an informed choice, not based on morals or what anyone else thought, and this is the one you made. Want to tell me more?
Derek:
I always tell people that I love my son with everything in me, but I hated pregnancy with everything in me. That was my moment. You know how every trans person has their aha moment?
Ale:
That was it for you, the pregnancy.
Derek:
That whole nine months from six weeks forward, I would jokingly call it a parasite, but that’s because I felt that way sometimes. I really had to work through it in therapy to understand why it was feeling so uncomfortable. I was like, my body shouldn’t be doing this, I don’t know what it should be doing, but it’s not this, everything hurts.
My back hurts, and my body is stretching in ways it’s never stretched before. My boobs are massive and they were already massive. I can’t enjoy anything anymore, it felt very constraining, especially as a 20-year-old college student, who’s eight hours away from home. I had family around, they were distant, married family, but I didn’t want to be bothersome to them either. I didn’t have a car, so all of it made the whole experience really terrible for me. Not to mention that aha moment of being like this is not it, this is not the move right here.
Ale:
I want to hear more about how you felt in your body when you were pregnant, about that aha moment that got you to that point.
Derek:
I think for me, every time that kid would move, it always felt uncomfortable for me. Every time I would lie down, it felt like he was moving into my throat, like I would have visceral dreams that I was pregnant with five kids, and I didn’t know, and I just kept giving birth. It was so frightening. Or I would have dreams that I would give birth and he would come out as some little mini Hitler, and I would be like, I didn’t raise him like this. I don’t know what happened.
He has ADHD up the wazoo so he came out doing flips, so much so that I heard the doctor be like woah because he had flipped over right when he came out. When they were trying to check his temperature, they stuck the thermometer in his butt, and he did a flip to get away from it, and they were like “you are a strong, active kid.” He has been like that since he was big enough to move.
Ale:
So just on a purely physical level, it was really uncomfortable.
Derek:
Everything about the experience for me was uncomfortable, in the sense that it made me unsure about my body, my ability to do this whole parent thing, and the way that it changed my hormones. It made everything feel weird, like my body felt very weird, and I had multiple scares of bleeding, which I already didn’t like bleeding every month.
Ale:
The hyper feminization when you’re pregnant and how you start going through these hormone changes that make you feel even more feminine doesn’t sound good. It sounds like at that point, it was too much.
Derek:
Yes. It felt hyper womanly in a very stereotypical way that I couldn’t escape. Out in the world, with my physical appearance, I can manipulate to match however I want to feel that day, whether it’s masculine or feminine, whatever. But with pregnancy, you can’t hide that, and then my framework back then, before I even knew trans pregnant men existed, I had the mindset that only women could be pregnant, being pregnant was a womanly thing. So to be pregnant, it was too much, take some of it back.
Ale:
It sounds like you were not feeling in your body at all.
Derek:
Yeah! Do you watch Dr. Who? Have you ever seen the inside of a Dalek?
Ale:
I have, but do you mind telling me what it is?
Derek:
It’s like a little gross brain thing that controls the Dalek, little nerves. I felt like I was the outside shell of a Dalek, and my baby was controlling everything, plus I was having really awful experiences with Robert, with the hospitals, with my prenatal care.
“Everyone always asks, “what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” And I think being a pregnant Black woman is top tier the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because the medical system treats you like shit”
Ale:
What was happening with Robert and everyone else around you?
Derek:
First off, he said there’s no way I was pregnant, that he’s sterile because he’s never gotten a girl pregnant before. I said “that does not mean you’re fucking sterile, God you’re so dumb.” He is a very stereotypical bodybuilder, very attractive. I started doing research into him, because I will be fair, there were other options who could have been the father, but it couldn’t have been them because none of them decided to take off the condom, Robert fully admitted that. Turns out Robert was actually a really big bigot and didn’t want to admit it, and when I told him that I was pregnant, his exact response was “I wanted to try a Black girl and not make a baby with one.”
Ale:
That is textbook bigot behavior.
Derek:
We had a 10-year age difference, and the healthcare providers kept treating me like I was a statistic, “you’re a single, pregnant Black woman, and you’re in college, and you’re probably gonna drop out now and stay on food stamps forever”. That’s how it felt every time I had to go to the food stamps office, every time I had to go to my WIC appointments and then they also simultaneously treated me like “you’re a young dumbass because you don’t know how to raise a baby and you still got milk on your breath.” One person actually said that to me at the WIC office. For me, it felt like doing the opposite would have been a huge sacrifice and like a huge disrespect to my dad and to myself.
Ale:
Ultimately, it’s your decision—what you want to do with your body and life, it’s up to you.
Derek:
I felt very selfless to be able to say, I’m gonna have this child because I want to bring goodness into this world, I want to bring light into this world. Everyone always asks, “what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” And I think being a pregnant Black woman is top tier the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because the medical system treats you like shit. So there were times when I was experiencing so much pain, and they thought I was drug-seeking. And there were times when I fainted full out, fainted during work, when I had been overworking myself because I needed to pay for things. At one point, I was told that I was being irresponsible by working as much as I was, that I let myself get dehydrated, and that it was detrimental to the baby, and if I cared about the baby, I would take better care of myself.
Ale:
It sounds like people felt very entitled to school you because you were younger than them. They overlooked you and doubted your decision.
Derek:
It was so patronizing to sit in clinics and doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, and hear you’re just gonna be another statistic, you’re probably gonna get pregnant again within the next couple of years, when that was never gonna be my journey. I felt like I was doing a beautiful thing, having my kid has always been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever done, so it was very hard to have those moments happen.
Ale:
It’s massive gaslighting. A decision that feels inherently good to you and everyone around you is telling you that it’s not.
Derek:
At this point, I was over it. For the rest of college, I raised my son and kept my head down, I volunteered where I could, I did a lot for student government programs, got a bunch of awards, graduated with a very low GPA, but I graduated. At the end of college, I cut my hair off, and that was my first sign of liking myself better this way. Then I started dressing more masculine, I moved to Louisville, and my dad took my kid for the summer.
So I’m in Louisville, living my best life, living with my friend Caitlin who tells me “hey, I want you to meet someone” and introduces me to Micah and all these people who worked at Play Louisville, which is a bar there for drag kings. Thursday nights they were having auditions for drag kings, so I decided to start drag. My name was Ryder H Long [H for Houston], and after that, I got into a really abusive relationship and stayed in that relationship way too long, but during that relationship is when I realized I was trans.
Ale:
Who did you go to when this happened, and how was the process of coming out during that relationship?
Derek:
I called my best friend Jaden, who had just come out as trans. He said “I’ve always known you were trans” and not in a negative way, but in a way saying “I’ve been trans for as long as I’ve known you, and you’ve been trans for as long as you’ve known me, and it wasn’t my business to tell you, but I’ve been waiting for this call, and I’m so excited for you, welcome”.
I remember that summer talking to my now ex, and she was like, “if you feel this way, it’s time to tell people, I don’t want you to live in a world where you don’t feel like you can be yourself.” So we worked out different names, and she was the first person I told my name was Derek, and I think that was a really special moment for me, just because when I said it, it felt real. Then I changed my name on Facebook, had my fade, and had my kid transition from calling me mommy to daddy.
Ale:
How old were you and your kid when this happened, and how was the shift?
Derek:
I was 25 and my kid was 4 years old. It was an overnight thing, and he literally took two hours to start calling me Daddy.
Ale:
It sounds like it was a pleasant experience.
Derek:
Yes, and I’m not saying it hasn’t been hard, but once I met Hannah [current partner], that was kind of the uptick in my life. My ex made my transition a lot about her, which was hard for me. My first T shot, she had to do it, for my name change order, she had to type it up for me, everything had to be about her. When I met Hannah, for once in my life as Derek, it was about Derek, and that felt weird and uncomfortable. I was like, “you’re too good for me.”
At that point, I needed to check myself in somewhere because I was not healthy and I was not doing things that were good for myself. It was becoming a struggle to stay safe for my kid, and at the end of the day, since I’ve had him, that has been my number one reason to keep going at all given times.
Ale:
When you’ve had a lot of bad experiences, it’s almost like your body rejects something good when it happens; your body rejects the care, but tell me more.
Derek:
I’m a hot ball of a mess, you don’t want these problems. I was not medicated the way I needed to be, I was not in therapy, and it was some rough times. I’m not saying that me and Hannah haven’t had rough times, but it has been easy to be in the trenches with Hannah. It’s been the easiest thing I’ve done in my life, to love them and to love my kid too. It’s been an amazing experience to have someone who supports me and uplifts me and has been there for all of the rough times of my gender journey.
Ale:
What kind of support did you receive during these tough times?
Derek:
I had to fight insurance companies to get coverage for a surgery I needed because I had cancer. That was the hardest thing to do, constantly hearing things like “that’s a female surgery, and you have a male gender marker,” so they can’t do that without having me explain to people why I need it, and they still being like “we can’t do it.”
Ale:
Was this when you got your hysterectomy? Want to tell me more?
Derek:
Yes. So I had been getting weird pains in my ovaries, and they went in and they found some cysts on them, and those cysts were cancerous. So they ask what do you want to do? And I said, I’m not using them, so snip them out, matter of fact, take the whole pack haha. I have made my one, I have contributed to this earth, and I’m good to go. The insurance company told my doctor they couldn’t approve it, and I remember him in his office, yelling at the insurance company, asking them what don’t you understand? He was mad for me because they’re not listening to him about the fact that I won’t need these things [ovaries] again, and they keep saying, what if he wants to have kids, or what if x, y, and z?
Ale:
It sounds like because of who you are, the doubting and questioning has been a recurring theme when you’re voicing your decisions or something that feels so true to you. What ended up happening?
Derek:
All this time, I’m still in pain, I’m hurting every day in terrible pain, and Hannah does the most selfless act anyone has ever done for me. First off, does a bunch of research for days trying to find trans affirming healthcare providers in Louisville, then gets a job with a place that they hate so that they could get trans inclusive insurance, so they could do the surgery no matter the gender marker. That also allowed me to get my top surgery by one of the best surgeons in the U.S. – Hannah has been so supportive through every part of everything that I have had to go through for my inner version to match my outer appearance.
Ale:
Do you look back at when you were pregnant, and how difficult your pregnancy was, and wish you had a Hannah in your life?
Derek:
Yes, God have mercy. It would have been so much easier, but I don’t think I would have had my aha moment. I think it would have been too easy, because Hannah would have made it flawlessly easy.
“I needed to be by myself to have my aha moment. I needed that solitude, I needed that resilience, I needed to be in that grit for a second to kind of understand by myself that “hey, you are more resilient than you think you are, but also this may be deeper than you think it is.” And although it took me three and a half more years, four years to vocalize that, being pregnant was that moment where I could finally put words to how it was feeling.”
Ale:
You needed to go through that by yourself to come to terms with your gender.
Derek:
Yeah. I needed to be by myself to have my aha moment. I needed that solitude, I needed that resilience, I needed to be in that grit for a second to kind of understand by myself that “hey, you are more resilient than you think you are, but also this may be deeper than you think it is.” And although it took me three and a half more years, four years to vocalize that, being pregnant was that moment where I could finally put words to how it was feeling.
Ale:
You were not only physically giving birth to a child, but it was almost as if you were giving birth to your new sense of self.
Derek:
Yeah, definitely! I think I transitioned a long time before I transitioned. I honestly think I did, and that’s a beautiful part of my gender journey that I don’t think a lot of people get to experience. My friend said that after I gave birth, I tried to be feminine for like six more months, then it hyper swung and I went left so fast haha. I look back and sometimes I get sad that I don’t have the same experience and feelings about motherhood that some people have, mostly cisgender women, because cisgender women, some of them, love being pregnant, and I didn’t love any aspect of it other than having my kid.
Ale:
So many people talk about how pregnancy is this beautiful, magical thing, and how great of an experience they have, but then there are a lot of people who have the same experience as you, but they don’t talk about it.
Derek:
I suffered from postpartum depression, and I struggled. My baby had colic, he had Pyloric Stenosis, which meant that his belly flap wasn’t opening all the way, so he wasn’t getting much of his food, and would scream all day and night about it. I had to have an emergency C-section that I did not want, which was forced upon me, and things happened that I was not okay with while I was under the influence of medication. I was signing paperwork that I probably shouldn’t have been signing.
Ale:
So basically, at the hospital, they ignored all of your requests.
Derek:
I had a C-section, and I didn’t want that to happen. Nothing in my birthing plan was followed. I gave laminated copies of my birth plan to everyone, but because I went into labor on a weekend, none of my regular staff were there. Not only that, my doctor, my OBGYN was down the hall giving birth herself. There were just all of these things that a lot of people don’t talk about, the negative sides of giving birth, because people will shame you for hating being pregnant. People are like, how could you say that about your kid? Mind you, I said nothing about my kid, I loved my kid, my kid is the best thing about my life, but I hated being pregnant. Those are not the same things.
Ale:
Absolutely. These are life-defining experiences that can’t be generalized. You also mentioned that you had an abortion at some point, would you want to talk about that?
Derek:
It was in my freshman year. I had been dating this guy through the summer, and I felt like everything was fine, but I was not using protection the way I should have been using protection, and was not taking the pill as I should have been taking it. I missed one of my periods, took the tests, and it came back inconclusive. I kid you not, the way I was at the abortion clinic the next morning, telling them I think I’m pregnant.
They asked me if I wanted to do an ultrasound or an examination, and I just wanted the pill because I knew. They wanted to do an exam first, not a very invasive one, just to be safe, but they could not tell either, they said it was too early to tell. I ask if I can have the pill just in case because I hadn’t been as safe, and something didn’t feel so right.
Ale:
You already knew something was going on in your body, and you decided to take action.
Derek:
Right, so I went ahead and took the pill, and sure enough, I passed a bunch of blood, and then I started my period the next day. I had seen my friends take the pill before, and I just knew it wasn’t the right decision for me. It wasn’t like when I had been pregnant with my son. That time something in me said, “this is meant for you right now”, and I don’t know what it was. Everyone always says, since you hated pregnancy, would you take it back? And I say, no, I would never take it back. It was one of the most defining moments of my life.
To learn more about the way trans communities of color are changing how we talk about gender and masculinity, visit The Brow Boi Project
