Ale:
Would you mind starting by telling me your name, your pronouns, how old you are, and where you’re from?
Sen:
My name is Sen, my pronouns are they/them, I’m 31, and I was born in Pasadena, California, which is in Los Angeles County.
Ale:
We know each other through a mutual friend, but I want to know what made you want to participate in the project when I initially reached out to you about it.
Sen:
The part where trans masculinity is involved feels really specific, and I think it was the thing where I guessed I have a thing that I could share that feels relevant. I think that I feel pretty open to talking about that, and if you’re looking for people, I was happy to put my name in. I think it was less about needing to be featured, but more about whether it’s helpful, I would love to share.
Ale:
That’s the best position to be coming from and kind of the point of the project. Some stories absolutely need to make it out into the world, but this is more about your everyday masc person sharing their experience with repro health for people to have that information and perspective. When we talked, you mentioned you had an abortion. Is that a story you want to share with me still?
Sen:
So I’ve actually had two abortions, and the first one was through a pretty whirlwind, U-Haul, extremely dramatic, toxic relationship experience. It was with a friend of a friend whom I had only met once, and many years later, they were driving around the country during shelter in place, and happened to be in the Bay Area. We ended up meeting, and ironically, they didn’t have housing that night, or housing onwards from that moment. I happened to be house-sitting for a friend of mine in their beautiful marital home in the Berkeley Hills for two months, and I was like, “If you need a place to crash, feel free to crash here.” And basically, it just became this really intense U-Haul situation, really explosive.
Ale:
Wait, so you had only met once, link up again, and then U-Haul? That’s a lesbian man.
Sen:
Hahahahah I know! Then we had an explosive separation, they went to LA, and after a couple of weeks, we started talking again. I went to LA to meet up with them, and when we got to the hotel room, I was like “haha, I think I might be pregnant,” and I hadn’t taken a pregnancy test yet, but I could feel it in my body. Instinctually, in that moment, they knew that I probably was because I smelled different to them.
Ale:
So your body odor changed? How long had it been since you thought that maybe you were pregnant?
Sen:
In terms of missing a period and being like, what’s up with my boobs? It had probably been six weeks since my last period.
Ale:
That’s so early.
Sen:
So early that I’m not 100% sure a pregnancy test would’ve told me. They ended up coming back with me to the Bay Area and supporting me through the abortion, and I think one of the trippiest things about it was, one of the things I was not really prepared to deal with, is that I had never really wanted kids, but then I was pregnant and then a really deep core part of myself was like “I really want this kid” but then also intellectually, I did not want this child.
There was a lot to sort through right – it was a really complex relationship, we didn’t really know each other and I had a lot of friends, especially like cis female friends, who sometime in their 20s, their body was like “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby” and when I heard that I was like “y’all are weird”
“I think grappling with really wanting a kid was kind of dysphoric, very strange. Intellectually, I knew I had to have an abortion.”
Ale:
I always wonder how much of that is social conditioning and how much of that is actually your body telling you to get pregnant at that age? I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer, some people just genuinely feel it in their bodies.
Sen:
The other crazy thing is, I have this body work teacher who is super woowoo, and we did this whole ceremony on Mount Shasta where she welcomed us all into the ceremony by passing some fur branch over our bodies and when she moves the branch over my stomach, I literally heard my uterus tell me that I wanted to have a child, and I was like, this is awful haha. I think for me, it felt really physical, what was happening to me.
Ale:
I mean, it literally was happening to you, and your body was going through immediate changes.
Sen:
I think grappling with really wanting a kid was kind of dysphoric, very strange. Intellectually, I knew I had to have an abortion, I’m not gonna do this, but I think it was also interesting talking through this with this other person, because they were really trying hard to be supportive and really trying to contain their own feelings of “this would completely fuck up my life” and instead be like “I want whatever you want.”
Ale:
They were giving you agency, giving you the autonomy because it’s your body, you’re the one doing it, yeah?
Sen:
Yeah. It was interesting because I was saying things like “I know that you don’t want to have a kid, and therefore, I don’t want to have a kid with you,” and then they were like “it shouldn’t be about what I want. If you were to have a kid, I would support that child.” When we were talking about it, I remember us debriefing it months later, and them saying to me that they knew they had to stop talking because if they didn’t stop talking, they would convince me into having this kid, which I did not want. I feel like there were all these little weird decision points where there was a world in which they could have talked me into having that kid.
Ale:
Both things could live simultaneously, right? You could have wanted that kid very much, and this person could do it with you, but intellectually, you knew there’s no way that you could’ve done it. How do you feel about it now?
Sen:
I’m extremely grateful not to have a child. I don’t think I’m capable of supporting a child right now at all, let alone have a child with them. I think also, it would have really messed up my life in some pretty big ways. I think there are a lot of social, cultural things I would have had to deal with. They were Black, and I don’t feel equipped to raise a Black child on my own, but then I also feel like it would have been really stressful to try to stay in that relationship just for this kid, when the two of us were absolutely not compatible. I think it would have caused really big problems with my family, who’s really conservative, and not to say that I was gonna make that decision based on them, fuck my family, but I think of the larger context and all the different ways in which one would want to be prepared to have a kid. One thing I really didn’t love after that abortion was that the doctor, after I finished getting my abortion, she asked what kind of birth control I wanted to get on, not do I want to go on birth control.
Ale:
So they assumed that you were going to get on birth control?
Sen:
I actually didn’t want to be on birth control, but the way they phrased it was guilt-inducing. I ended up getting an IUD, and then it was deeply terrible. I had cramps that were worse than having an abortion every month for like up to a year when I finally got it out.
Ale:
When this was happening, when you were having the abortion, where were you in your gender journey, or how were you feeling in relation to your gender?
Sen:
I identified as nonbinary, and I also identified as masc-of-center, but I think that it’s been hard for me to claim the term trans masculine because I feel impostor syndrome in terms of my own internal gender sense. I had been identifying as masc-of-center for several years. I think it was something that I felt wasn’t fully sorted in my sex life, but it was also because I didn’t feel completely seen by my partners in that way. I think there were still aspects of dysphoria and my relationships.
Ale:
When you found out you were pregnant, what did that do to you? Did it give you any dysphoria?
Sen:
I feel like I have a relatively fluid relationship with my gender. I feel pretty good about being in the body that I am in and being trans masc, and that’s obviously its own journey. I think that it brought up a lot of weird feelings around the idea of being a mother, especially because I have a terrible relationship with my mother, who was both absent and abusive. I think my relationship with motherhood is extremely fraught, and I low-key hate that word, and I don’t identify myself with it at all.
Ale:
Do you think it’s because motherhood it’s so inherently feminine that it fucks with our sense of gender or is it because we’re always grappling with historically bad relationships with our mothers? Is it chronic mommy issues, or is it my gender? Haha, not that it’s inherently separate.
“I’m extremely grateful not to have a child. I don’t think I’m capable of supporting a child right now at all, let alone have a child with them. I think also, it would have really messed up my life in some pretty big ways.”
Sen:
Totally, it’s a good question. I think the biggest thing that was really throwing me off was how much I wanted this child, in a way that felt like it came from this crazy place inside me, and I couldn’t control it. I didn’t know that I was capable of that crazy, intense, possessive feeling about having a child. I still feel it from time to time and I think damn I still miss that child. It’s funny because I have had two abortions, and that’s not how I feel about the second one.
Ale:
You still think about how it felt in your body?
Sen:
Yeah, my body really wanted to have a child with that person. That person literally smelled intoxicating to me, nobody has ever smelled as intoxicating to me as them.
Ale:
Did that person was ever able to see you in your gender or how you wanted to be seen at the time?
Sen:
I don’t think so. I think it was difficult because they also weren’t fully realized in their own gender journey. I think that they were on a trans femme path, but also had really strong cis male energy in a lot of ways, and it’s hard to see somebody else’s gender if you haven’t figured out your own and how you relate to theirs.
Ale:
It could be one of those things that when you’re processing it yourself, you don’t have space to do it for somebody else. Did you have anyone that you were talking to about it at the time? What kind of support or care were you getting?
Sen:
I definitely talked to some friends about it afterwards, but I think at the time it was just us because our relationship felt so all-encompassing. It’s the only relationship in my life where I feel that I was not super present in my other relationships. I had a friend talk to me about her miscarriage experience and it was interesting because my friends and I talk about a lot of shit, we’re not afraid to go places, but even then, it felt difficult to talk about it.
Within modern queer women and nonbinary people, there’s a weird shame or dissonance around both wanting and not wanting a child. I definitely received the support that I needed, but I don’t think I was able to talk to anyone who felt the way that I did. I talked to certain friends, but their experiences and what happened to them were so different from mine. I never really found anyone to be like “Oh my god, it’s so crazy that I wanted this baby so much, and how the fuck do you deal with that?”
Ale:
There’s a certain judgment that could come from folks, especially if you’re not doing the version of transness or queerness that they do.
Sen:
That’s something else I’m realizing. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a trans masc person about it before. I think it’s probably an aspect of why I haven’t found the same resonance and experience. I think it’s also been very dysphoric for cis friends of mine who never wanted to have a child. It’s also really upsetting for them because they might feel like breeders or whatever.
Ale:
I feel like anyone who has a body can feel dysphoria, this is not just for trans people, haha. Especially when I talk to people about their emotions around births, there’s a plethora of experiences, I’ve never gotten the same answer from anyone.
Sen:
It’s interesting because where I feel like I am in my gender journey right now is embracing the notion of gender as drag. I want to be both more femme and more masc, and I just get to do whatever I want and not feel super tortured about it. I feel pretty good about my body, and I think I feel really grateful to have thought about going on hormones, but knowing that I don’t need that right now in order to feel good in my body.
Ale:
So much of gender is about perception, and questioning how much of what you’re doing is for you or how much is it for other people, and how I want them to perceive me. None of it is wrong, it’s just what we grapple with as trans folks. Do you want to tell me about your second abortion?
Sen:
Are you familiar with Mewtwo the Pokémon?
Ale:
Can you remind me which one that is?
Sen:
It’s from the first Pokémon movie where there’s a legendary Pokémon named Mew who’s really cute and femme, and mysterious and hard to find. Then this crazy scientist starts making fucked up duplicates of all Pokemon, and makes Mewtwo which is a fucked up duplicate of Mew. Mewtwo’s whole thing is asking, “why do I exist? Who is my father? I have no purpose on this earth, just a massive existential crisis.”
So I don’t remember how this happened, but at some point, we were joking about it and ended up naming my fetus Mewtwo, and when I was getting my abortion, I asked if I could have a picture? They were so weird about it because they couldn’t understand why I wanted a picture of the baby that I was aborting, but I labeled it Mewtwo.
Ale:
That’s hilarious. How come you wanted to name it?
Sen:
I think it’s one of the ways in which I felt like I was able to reclaim that story for myself a little bit. I also wanted to come up with a name for my car, which I literally bought with the person that I had the abortion with. They went with me to the dealership together on one of our first dates – so I ended up naming her [the car] Mew because she’s badass, fast and powerful, but also protects me. I think naming her was a helpful way for me to feel like I was processing it and moving on.
Ale:
Maybe Mew the car was meant to be your actual baby. How was the rest of the experience getting the second abortion?
Sen:
It was funny because as soon as I knew that I was pregnant, my immediate bodily feeling about it was “get this thing out of me”. My partner at the time smelled worse to me, I didn’t want to be around them when I was pregnant. It was such a fascinating parallel experience because I had no feelings about it. They [partner] were having all the feelings about it, because it’s their first abortion.
Ale:
How do you feel about your abortions now in relation to your gender or sense of self in general?
“I have never really thought about having a breeder kink because it’s not super feasible for me, biologically, but then it came up once, and the idea of role playing with the notion that I can get somebody else pregnant blew my mind.”
Sen:
I have a new partner now who is nonbinary, leaning trans femme and I think I have never really thought about having a breeder kink because it’s not super feasible for me, biologically, but then it came up once, and the idea of role playing with the notion that I can get somebody else pregnant blew my mind. I think that was a really interesting moment for me, because exploring this was a helpful way to contextualize all these experiences that I’ve had with abortion and my gender, and feeling a certain type of sex that has been really hard for me to access in my life.
I think that relationship is something that doesn’t feel entirely resolved for me, now that I know that apparently my uterus really wants to have a baby. I also know that I don’t really want one. Intellectually, I don’t particularly want to have a child, but I also recognize that I’m fighting against the fact that my body seems to desperately want to have one. Who knows what will, like, happen?
Ale:
It’s true, you can always change your mind… or not.
Sen:
Even thinking about the idea of actually bringing a child to term, or breastfeeding, I don’t like that. But then I think there are other aspects of the idea of holding a child that I have birthed in my arms that can seem pretty cool. I think it’s possible that it [abortion] has helped me accept my body more and recognize and accept things that could be inconsistencies. My friends and I joke pretty frequently about how I want to have kids, and I definitely feel like they see my gender, so it’s nice that these things can coexist easily.
Ale:
You also mentioned that because of the sex that you were having, you didn’t feel fully seen by your partners?
Sen:
I stopped dating cis men for the most part many years ago, and the two partners that I had who were long-term partners were both nonbinary, trans leaning, or what I would say were on the trans femme journey.
Ale:
They were eggs.
Sen:
They were eggs, but both of them devolved. I think with both of them, there were ways in which they were trying to access trans femininity for themselves, but it was also easier for them to move around in the world as cis men. I think especially in the bedroom, they related to me mostly as cis men, and that felt really dysphoric for me. I think it’s been really nice with the person I’m seeing now that they refer to me as their boyfriend, and I call them my girlfriend, partially as a joke, but also because it feels like the words actually feel accessible. It has been really nice to feel like my gender is being respected, like in all aspects of our relationship.
To find out more about whole-person healing services in Oakland, visit Freedom Community Clinic (FCC).
