sexual assault

Rosin

June 10, 2025 by

Ale:
So, we’re here to talk about the Repro Masculinity photo project. Would you mind telling me your name, pronouns, age, and where you’re from?

Rosin:
I am 42, and I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. I’m from NY in a way, but I’ve lived in many places, so I’m not sure where I’m from, but I was born in Brooklyn, New York.

Ale:
If I understand correctly, you’re going through IVF right now. You’re going through the process of trying to get pregnant and conceive. Do you just want to tell me when it started?

Rosin:
Well, IVF is what’s happening this week, but there’s more to it. I think I was originally drawn to this project because it was about trans-masc folks in reproductive health. I have been through a couple of years of hell in the reproductive health world, and I’m still in it. Going through IVF is just one chapter of it. It’s just one tiny chapter and it wasn’t my beginning.

Ale:
What was your beginning?

Rosin:
I guess the beginning was that I was trying to get pregnant, and I didn’t really know anything about that. My life as a queer person had been very far removed from the topic of reproduction and pregnancy and fertility, and it was something I never really got educated on, ever. Getting pregnant was never something I thought about. As a young queer person, we don’t think that’s an option.

At some point in my life, I had partners or friends who wanted to have kids together. We had already co-parented other friends’ kids, and I had a lot of friends in my life who were single parents who needed a lot of help. As a community, we raised the kids together. I did a lot of that in my early 20s and my early 30s. There were conversations with friends or partners about having kids someday, but I never thought I was going to carry a child, that I was going to get pregnant. I assumed someone else was going to get pregnant.

Ale:
Was the thought just not wanting to be in a pregnant body?

Rosin:
I never saw it as a thing for me. I guess, in my head, I’m the boy. At the time, I didn’t identify as a boy, but my body was so detached from a gender that could be pregnant, the concept of being pregnant was never something that crossed my mind. I knew I had body parts that do that thing, but I was so disconnected from that. I just never thought about being pregnant. If anything, I thought to myself, “that’d be so weird. I’d be a boy that’s pregnant. That doesn’t make any sense. It would look weird.”

At the time, I used to pass as a “he” without even trying, so if I did ever think of being pregnant, I stopped myself with thoughts like, “I’m already struggling looking like a boy who goes into the women’s bathroom. Imagine looking like a boy and having a pregnant belly,” It didn’t make any sense. I never wanted to go through that.

Ale:
You were struggling with just being perceived?

Rosin:
Yeah. It’s hard to be trans in this world, and when my body started to change and it was harder to pass as a boy, instead of going “it’s time to fully transition,” I was like, “it’s time to figure out a way to look that works with the way my body’s changing.” Because it felt too scary to transition.

Ale:
How old were you when that happened?

Rosin:
I must have been 29 or 30. My body started to develop more. I never had a chest and I didn’t have what we call a womanly body. I’m Jewish, and I think my body started to get that voluptuous, Jewish mom look. Up until that point I was genderless, or very easily passed for male, but when it started to shift I couldn’t wear what I was normally wearing, and with the things I was wearing my body parts were suddenly pushing through the shirt or pushing through the pants. When I didn’t look so obviously he it became harder to move through the world, and so I felt like I had to choose a direction. Instead of transitioning, I chose to find a way to dress that presented me as a female. Maybe I could be perceived as gay, but not a “he”. When I traveled, I would take my glasses off, and I’d wear a certain outfit to just look not even like a gay female. I was living in the South, and that just made it easier to go to gas stations.

Ale:
So you made these choices because it made it easier or safer to move through the world?

Rosin:
It was just so much easier, and at the time, I was traveling a lot, and I lived out of my truck and out of a backpack. Living out of a truck was fancy. There were times when I didn’t have a vehicle to live out of. I’ve spent a lot of my life not living in a standard home with four walls and a roof. If you’re living on the road or not living in a house, and you’re just moving through the world and you’re around all sorts of people, it’s harder to be a weirdo. For safety reasons, you don’t want attention and you’d do anything to get rid of attention. So on those days, I thought, “why would I be pregnant? That’s just gonna draw attention.”

I never thought I would be pregnant. I wanted kids and talked about it with people, but I always thought they would carry. I just assumed they were gonna carry. We were gonna have a baby, but they were gonna pop it out.

Ale:
Was it friends? Partners?

Rosin:
Yeah. There were platonic friends, also lovers—different people that I had made plans with and never happened. And then COVID hit, and I had a partner whom we were talking about having a kid with, but we lived in different states at the time, and we couldn’t visit each other. They were in Massachusetts and I was here in New York, but when the COVID lockdown happened, that relationship fell apart and we were isolated. So all of a sudden, I wasn’t dating, I wasn’t in a partnership, and I was living in a pandemic, and I turned 40 during the pandemic. By then, I’m sitting around thinking, “well, what am I doing with my life?” I had this whole plan, I thought this was the finale.

Ale:
So, you and your partner had talked about having kids together?

Rosin:
Yes, and I just assumed they would carry, right? It never crossed my mind that it would be the other way around. We both wanted kids, and we’re queer, and it’s hard to find other queers who are interested in that. So, the relationship was based on us wanting the same thing. We hadn’t been together long, but we were interested in exploring this family journey. We had even talked about how if we didn’t keep dating, we could be co-parents.

Then, in the spring of 2021, I had a job delivering alcohol and I was thinking a lot about what I was doing with my life. I really thought this baby was going to happen, and then I met some younger genderqueer person who helped me realize I could carry a baby even though I was single. I used to feel like I could do it single, but then I got stuck in the mind frame of needing a partner, but this person helped remind me that I could do it single and that there was a time when I used to feel that way.

Ale:
What were the feelings behind you not thinking that you could carry or be a single parent?

Rosin:
Years ago, I would have felt differently, but after I had helped co-parent and helped a few friends with kids more recently, I think watching their struggle, it suddenly didn’t seem so easy. And maybe it was being in New York City that made it look harder.

But this new friend was telling me how genderqueer and nonbinary trans people are getting pregnant all the time. They actually showed me a photo page, and I was like, oh wow, I didn’t realize this was a thing! I knew one trans man who had a baby, an old friend of mine from Canada, and that was the only person I’d ever known. I hadn’t seen or heard of other trans men doing it, except for this person. And so this friend is exposing me to what’s been happening and to this younger generation of nonbinary people having kids. They pumped me up and got me thinking about doing it. That same person then connected me to a doula, who told me about fertility and how to get knocked up at home.

Another thing that stopped me was not wanting to go into the medical system. One of the reasons I hadn’t fully transitioned was because I had issues with the medical world, but this doula taught me about my options, and we talked about fertility and what things might cost. I wanted to do it without drugs, and I wasn’t ready to go into the fertility clinic world because they weren’t necessarily going to respect my gender. I was gonna have to pretend to be a woman and just go along with that and just be okay with it.

It’s funny now, after everything I’ve been through, I don’t care about the gender thing. I just want a good doctor. Having gone through the journey that I’ve been on, I now realize that at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter about the trans stuff and the gender stuff, what matters is that you have a good doctor and I see that now and I just want good medical care. I’ve had doctors who were trans-friendly and so validating of my gender, and of my transness and what I want to call my body parts, but they didn’t give me high-quality medical care and now there’s a dead baby because of it.

We all deserve high-quality medical care no matter who we are, but instead, you have to think, “what do you want to sacrifice? How your gender is treated, or your medical experience?” At the end of the day, I’d rather not die or have a baby die than have someone respect my pronouns.

Ale:
Ideally, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to choose between the two.

I didn’t like the word pregnancy. I didn’t identify with it. It weirded me out, and I didn’t feel good about referring to that word, so we called it the science project.

Rosin:
Right, but when you get into the nitty-gritty of my “life’s on the line, a child’s life’s on the line, or causing permanent physical injuries is on the line,” you suddenly are like, “I don’t care what you call my crotch.” Anyway, after talking to Moss [doula], I started prepping myself for IUI and I embarked on a full-on science project, that’s actually what I referred to it as. When I started working with Moss, I didn’t like the word pregnancy. I didn’t identify with it. It weirded me out, and I didn’t feel good about referring to that word, so we called it the science project.

Ale:
How do you feel about it now?

Rosin:
Now I’m more comfortable with the word, but when I first started this journey, I didn’t feel comfortable with the pregnancy word. Now I don’t care, but it’s funny to think about how there was a time when I didn’t even want to say it.

Ale:
Do you think it was because pregnancy is usually so closely related to femininity?

Rosin:
Yeah. I felt very grossed out when people said it, and I asked them to please not use that word with me, so I just referred to it as the science project, which it was, and I learned so much through it. I learned about temperature spikes when ovulating and what signs to look out for when your eggs drop. Everything I was learning is stuff that women have been doing for 1000s of centuries. Our great, great, great grandmothers were probably doing this to figure out how to be or not be pregnant.

Ale:
There’s knowledge that our ancestors had that we never really got acquainted with.

Rosin:
Right, and I think some people are taught this by their mothers or grandmothers. Obviously, some people are figuring this out on their own if they don’t want to get pregnant and they even track their periods, but my mother never talked to me about any of this.

Ale:
Mine either.

Rosin:
I learned how all of that works through a midwife, and it’s been a wild journey. I had a friend do all this research on sperm, and the place I ended up working with is a place that ethically distributes and collects sperm. They have a limit to how much sperm can be given out from one sperm donor, and how many children can come out of one sperm donor. Depending on the sperm donor’s ethnic background, you can’t get that sperm if you or your partner are not of the same ethnic background as them.

Ale:
That’s cool. Who was this friend who helped you with this research?

I refer to this friend as “sperm daddy” because they were in charge of figuring out sperm. I basically gave different tasks to different friends because I didn’t have a partner at the time and I was doing it all on my own. I just collected different community members to have tasks to help me figure it all out because it’s a lot of work.

Rosin:
I refer to this friend as “sperm daddy” because they were in charge of figuring out sperm. I basically gave different tasks to different friends because I didn’t have a partner at the time and I was doing it all on my own. I just collected different community members to have tasks to help me figure it all out because it’s a lot of work.

Ale:
What were the other roles you gave to friends?

Rosin:
Some friends took care of me for the first IVF cycle, then there was a friend who I was co-parenting with at the time who lived with me. Her role was to carry the sperm to the IUI appointments because she received the sperm when I was at work. The sperm would show up at my house in the middle of the day and she worked from home.

Ale:
She was the sperm manager, haha

Rosin:
Yeah. Some friends knew about the tracking stuff, so I would talk to them about that, and Shira [midwife] and Moss [doula] individually were both very supportive despite all the hurdles. After trying to get pregnant for the first time, I got COVID, I lost a friend, went through a breakup, my dog died, and I was experiencing a lot of loss at that time, so I kept putting the pregnancy, the science project on hold. I was furious because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of this. That is all I wanted, so I tried maybe another three times. Together, it was about five times and a lot of money that I didn’t have.

Ale:
Wait, so how long after the first insemination did you get COVID?

Rosin:
Eight days later. I was still waiting to see if I was pregnant. At that point, I was like, “am I pregnant? Do I have COVID?” And I was terrified, and it was so stressful. I had to go to the ER because I had a terrible reaction to COVID and I realized a few years later that the reason why I had such a bad reaction and why I lost the pregnancy was because I was diagnosed with a rare blood clotting disorder, an autoimmune disease.

A while after that, I met my friend Danielle who was about to have a baby and who was also queer and single. She started talking to me about IVF and how long it takes to get an appointment, which at the time I didn’t want to do because I was convinced I didn’t have fertility issues. Around the same time, a partner/friend came into my life who found me a sperm donor by posting on Lex [an ads app for queeer people ]. They interviewed people for me, and we ended up meeting a trans woman who we wanted to embark on having her on my pregnancy journey. By then, I was involved with this partner/friend who had enough money and who wanted to financially support me, which shifted my options and made me feel like I could consider things that I couldn’t consider before. So I decided to make an appointment for IVF and at least have a conversation with the doctor. I said to myself if I’m not pregnant in six months, I might consider IVF.

Ale:
It sounds like having financial support is what shifted things.

Rosin:
With everything we’re talking about, the word “money” must be emphasized. It’s not as simple as saying “you should try this, or you should do that.” It’s actually about how much money you’re willing to spend. How much money can you get? So, I think it is important to know there’s tons of stuff you can do, but can you afford it?

Ale:
So, now that you had someone who was helping you out financially, you decided to go for IVF?

Rosin:
Yes, plus the sperm donor, which eases things out a little bit. Though there are a lot of legal loopholes to jump through when you’re dealing with a sperm bank and you’re queer. If you said it’s just a friend who’s giving you some sperm, they’ll tell you to wait six months before you can even use the sperm. You also need to be interviewed by a therapist, both of you, and to pass all these tests. While you’re doing all of this, you’re looking at an eight-month wait before we can even start doing anything. So basically, after talking to a few friends, I found out there are ways to communicate with fertility centers so that you don’t have to go through these loopholes. At one point, my friend/partner ended up saying she was our partner and we were a throuple, and that worked. My approach was to say she was my girlfriend, so the sperm donor became my partner. It was hard because a person who had only volunteered to give me sperm suddenly had to sign documents and give consent.

Ale:
So, there are ways you have to manage the bureaucracy of fertility clinics.

Rosin:
Yes, and effectively as my partner, she became the other parent, and anything I wanted to do with the embryo, I had to get legal consent from my partner.

Ale:
How was the other person doing? How was she feeling about it all?

Rosin:
She was great about it. She was amazing and so easy to do this with. I could see other people being more difficult, but this person was happy to help at the time. She’s been nothing but easy to work with when it came to the fertility clinic, jumping through the loopholes and pretending and playing the game.

When I finally got a date for the egg retrieval, the fertility clinic canceled it because they forgot to clear me for an anesthesiologist. I had taken the day off work and I was already stretching it thin with the job I had at the time. I don’t know how people have full-time jobs and do this. I lost that job in this journey because it was impossible to try and get pregnant and get all the tests done and go to all the appointments while sticking to a set schedule and having a boss and meeting the boss’s needs.

But when I did the first egg retrieval in August of 2023, I had a really bad reaction to the drugs. By the way, even if you have health care, and even if your health care covers the procedures, your health care does not necessarily cover the drugs. I had health care that didn’t cover either, so I was looking at $20,000 just for the egg retrieval procedure, which doesn’t even include blood tests, but I figured out loopholes. I could get my blood drawn and get ultrasounds and the tests they wanted at a place that took my health insurance and just give them the results. You have to advocate for yourself and go to a different lab than the ones at the fertility clinics because they make it seem like your only option is to go through them, but it’s not.

But the egg retrieval procedure can range from $1,520 to $30,000 depending on what stuff you do and that does not include medication and that does not include anesthesia. You have to pay the anesthesiologist separately. So I had an allergic reaction to the drugs, but the doctors didn’t believe me. It was really scary and the medical doctors told me I should take a valium or some anxiety meds because it was probably just stress.

Ale:
What were some of your symptoms?

Rosin:
I was having chest pain and I had a cough. I was struggling to breathe and I couldn’t sleep lying down, so I had to sleep upright, because if I lay down, I felt a heavy pressure on my chest and it was hard to lean forward, and all they said was that I was having a panic attack. If I looked a different way, I don’t think they would have said this to me, but they rolled their eyes at me because to them I was just a difficult patient. I challenged them a lot on things like wanting to put the ultrasound tool inside of me myself, so when I told them about having these physical pains they told me “Oh, you’re having anxiety, you’re having stress.” At one point they told me it was the hormones kicking in, but I was so physically unwell I knew something was wrong.

It wasn’t until the very end that I was in tears and I told them I didn’t feel hormonal, but I felt like I had the flu and I was drowsy and physically unwell, when finally a doctor wanted me to go to the ER before attempting to do the trigger shot that makes your eggs drop. After a million tests, they found fluid in my lungs and they checked for blood clots and when that came up I called my mom, who I’m not very close to. My mom brought up my sister who had a rare blood clotting disorder that caused blood clots when she was pregnant. She told me how she almost lost her child, but they were able to catch it on time by putting her on blood thinners.

When I told the doctors this, they said they were going to test me for blood clotting disorder. They decided that I was not having a blood clot, but close to it and that it was from the hormones. As I had suspected, my body was reacting to the hormones from a drug I didn’t have to take anymore. The whole thing was very confusing and in the end, they admitted that it was a certain drug, but they also told me I was so close, that I should just keep going. They said they will make sure I was fine.

So finally, the day of the procedure comes and my stomach is huge and I feel close to death, but this is when the whole gender thing really comes into play for me. In reproductive health, there’s a lot happening with your crotch and for some people that can be really hard and triggering. It often involves a speculum and it fu**ing sucks. A speculum is a pretty intense tool that they put inside you and it feels like it rips you inside. I have trauma around my body and the only people that have ever put a speculum in me were my friends, myself, and a small handful of gynecologists.

So, suddenly I’m in this huge hospital, I don’t know who’s putting something in me while I’m under, and I’m freaking out. But the nurses were like, “what is wrong with you? This is a standard procedure, everything’s fine, and no one’s gonna hurt you.” I was someone who had never been in surgery my entire life, and surgery rooms are quite intimidating. I want to use the word scary, but maybe they won’t be scary for someone else. For me, they felt scary, intimidating, and overwhelming. I’m half naked, my legs are open, and they’re about to put a thing up my crotch, it’s very intense.

Ale:
Did they offer you anything?

Rosin:
They offered me drugs and I said no, I want to be very conscious, don’t give me fu**ing anything, you guys can’t just drug the problem away. You know, other people might have been like, “yeah, give me a Valium,” but I had to know what they were doing. I’ve been assaulted when I’m on drugs, so why would I want to take a Valium and let them basically assault me? I mean, to me, that’s what it sounded like, right in my trauma brain, you want to drug me and assault me? No, I want to know who’s touching me, I want to see them, I want them to know I have trauma, and I want them to know my boundaries.

And so I get into the surgery room, the actual people in the surgery room were so sweet. God bless the nurses who read or hear this interview, who are in surgery rooms. I deeply respect them and appreciate them. So, my legs are already spread open, and when the doctor came into the room, she grabbed my hand. The anesthesia hadn’t hit me yet, but I remember the doctor grabbing my hand and introducing herself. She explained everything that was going to happen and I was able to make my requests and voice my boundaries around how they touched me when I was under, which was the scariest thing in the world.

I don’t know if other people feel this way, but the idea of being unconscious and people going into your crotch is absolutely horrifying. Telling this story now I’m totally fine, but leading up to that moment I thought it was insane. I remember thinking, “who cares about the eggs retrieval? This procedure is totally unhinged and not okay.” But I guess I had also heard people tell their traumatic stories of childbirth and how doctors have unconsensually done things to their bodies so before anything happened, I was already advocating for myself. I went into this procedure, ready for battle, ready for war.

Ale:
So, all of this was going through your mind during your first egg retrieval. How do you feel about it now?

Rosin:
I’m about to do egg retrieval again this week, and I’m actually not nervous at all because I’ve already done it, but I’m wondering if the actual day I’ll start to feel different. I don’t know, I think now that I’ve been through it and met the doctors and seen the nurses, I understand that they are stressed out and I don’t blame any of them for the way they handle me. They have very stressful jobs and they’re overworked.

Ale:
So, egg retrieval happened. What was next?

Rosin:
That’s when the waiting game happened. The doctors told me I couldn’t implant the embryo until I got cleared about my blood clotting history from both a hematologist and a rheumatologist. It took nine months to get an appointment with each of these doctors and for them to give me the clear and just say, “yes, you can implant this.” I’m on Medicaid, and the doctors who took Medicaid had months-long appointments.

So, nine months later, I transferred the embryo, and I’m pregnant. At this point, I didn’t have an OBGYN because, why would I? I don’t even know what an OBGYN stands for, and I’ve steered clear of gynecologists because it’s weird for me with my gender doing that sort of thing, right? So suddenly I’m pregnant, and I’m panicking to find a doctor, and the fertility clinic connected me with a high-risk doctor. This doctor tells me he can’t see me because I’m not high-risk and there isn’t an issue yet, meaning I’ve never lost a baby and I haven’t had a blood clot. So I make these attempts to get an OBGYN, but it doesn’t go very well. At this point I’m pregnant, I’m freaking out, and I’m single again because I removed myself from the relationship with the person who was financially supporting me.

So finally, when I called the OBGYN again and mentioned that I’m on blood thinners because of my history with potential blood clots, he says he can see me. Once I meet him and we get to talking, he said he decided to take me on because he thinks I will have a more positive trans, queer experience with his office. He asks what I identify as, what are my pronouns? And that’s when I told him I actually don’t identify as a mom. At this point I’m like wow, no other doctor in this entire time has respected that.

So at this point, I’m very pregnant and a lot is happening emotionally and physically. I’m actively ill from the pregnancy and I felt sad and depressed, and I ended up getting COVID during the beginning of the pregnancy. The concept of being pregnant was so alien and I felt so confused. I never felt so unhappy with my appearance and it was so hard to figure out what to wear. I didn’t know what I looked like anymore. “What is my gender? Do I just look like a fat man right now? Am I just a pregnant, gendered human? Who am I? Like, what the fuck is going on? Am I even pregnant?” All of this was going through my head.

Ale:
Will you go as far as to say you were feeling dysphoric?

Rosin:
Yes. I guess that’s the word haha, and I did not expect that. Suddenly, more than ever I cared about how I looked and I cared about wearing men’s clothes. Suddenly, I couldn’t leave the house if I didn’t have very masculine men’s clothing on. I went on this epic shopping spree to get the largest size men’s clothing I could find that would fit my body and cover any signs of anything going on, that would cover my boobs. None of this was stuff I cared about prior to this, it was very intense and suddenly I was like, “oh my god, I can’t believe I never had top surgery.
What was I thinking?” This shit that I couldn’t care about, I suddenly cared so much, and I was like, “if I have this baby, I’m getting top surgery right after.” But then the thought of how am I gonna have a baby and get top surgery at the same time crept in. Who’s gonna hold the baby if I’m a single parent and I can’t use my arms?

I felt like I had fucked up. I felt so depressed and so unhappy about my body and my gender and I felt so unsexy, so un-hot. I have never hated my appearance as much as I hated my appearance during that 20 week period. It was really intense, and I didn’t feel comfortable saying I was pregnant or being referred to as a pregnant person, so I told the doctor I still wanted to refer to it as “the science project.”

Ale:
Were you talking to anyone while you were going through all of this?

Rosin:
To the midwife. I called up the midwife that I had worked with before, but at that point it had been almost two years and I hadn’t talked to her in a very long time. So I I texted her and told her I’m not okay, I’m pregnant, and we had a FaceTime. The midwife was very helpful because prior to her, I didn’t understand anything they were talking to me about, all I cared about was getting pregnant, having a baby, and not dying. They asked me about my preferences for birth and how I wanted to do it, and I didn’t really care. All I knew was that it all sounded horrible and traumatizing and I certainly didn’t want anyone on the other end of my crotch, but I didn’t have a choice about it.

Ale:
So you’re going through a lot of physical changes, and you don’t understand a lot of what they’re offering you?

Rosin:
I didn’t understand what the doctor was saying to me half the time, but I did know he was telling me how he was going to respect my parent identity, and my pronouns, and my body. When I asked about the rare disease and how my hematologist said my tests are really bad and I’m very high-risk, he said it doesn’t matter and that it was no reason for concern. At this point, I’ve been going to my prenatal visits once a month, and on my last visit at sixteen weeks of pregnancy, he tells me he’ll see me in a month. But I tell him again that both my hematologist and my rheumatologist said I had to make sure my OBGYN sees me every two weeks, and that the baby’s heart needed to be checked because of the risk of having issues, but he said he wasn’t going to do that.

Ale:
How long was it until you saw him again?

Rosin:
So, the next time I go back I’m already twenty weeks pregnant, I’m past the first trimester, and I’m supposedly in the clear. It’s rare at this point that you would lose a baby. I go in for this appointment and they’re doing the ultrasound and they don’t find a heartbeat, and tell me the baby is dead. It was very intense and traumatic and at this point, I’m like, now what? They start explaining to me my options. I can either give birth by taking this pill that will induce my water to break, or I can have a Dilation and Extraction [D&E].

Ale:
Can you recall any details of the options they offered you?

Rosin:
There are two separate procedures they offer me, one of them is for a very small fetus, and the other one is if the baby has died. Most states in America would force you to give birth even if the fetus has died, but in New York City, I had the legal right to have the extraction of the body [D&E]. This means they go in with a tool and they pull apart the baby’s body and pull out each limb and each body part in the smallest size that can fit through your cervix, which is not legal everywhere else. And actually this summer, a woman died in Georgia because they couldn’t do that procedure, and she got an infection from the dead baby. So, suddenly I’m processing that there’s this dead baby in me, and I still hadn’t even fully processed that I was pregnant, so it was a lot.

(The name of the woman who died in Georgia was Amber Nicole Thurman. She died right after the state of Georgia made it illegal for people to get a procedure called Dilation and Curettage [D&C], which ensures all fetal tissue is expelled from a person’s body after an abortion or miscarriage.)

Ale:
Did you get the procedure done right away?

Rosin:
No, it was a rough few days. I could feel the baby at that point, which was weird because the baby had actually been dead for weeks. Your body takes a few weeks to recognize that you’re not pregnant, so my body was still acting as though it was pregnant, but I had just hit a marker in that timeline where my body was recognizing I wasn’t pregnant anymore, so my body was shifting. My belly was getting smaller and I could feel a heavy dead weight instead of a bloated, tight belly. It was a terrible few days, and I was so angry at this doctor because the baby had actually died around the two-week marker of when these other doctors wanted me to be seen. I was so mad. When I got the extraction procedure, it was the best medical experience I had in this entire journey. After every doctor I met, after everything I went through, the best medical experience I had in all of my reproductive experience was with the woman who performed the D&E, including her staff, and including the anesthesiologist she gave me.

Ale:
Do you know how long it lasted?

Rosin:
Maybe 25 or 30 minutes, I’m not sure. My memory of this really intense procedure to get a dead baby out of me was that the doctors were phenomenal. I didn’t even have to talk about my pronouns or my crotch, which is maybe how it should always be while having such an intense procedure. The last thing a trans or queer person should have to worry about at that point is having to explain themselves. I had a blessed experience—the finale to a terrible outcome was having the best medical staff yet in my whole medical experience.

Ale:
Did you have any friends or community care after the procedure?

Rosin:
I was brought home and I was put in bed, and there was a group chat going. I think different people were signed up to come sit with me and be with me for the next few days. Different people showed up at my house and would be with me for a few hours. For the first three nights, I was not alone, so a different person slept over every night, and a different friend was with me every day. People took shifts. You know, you’re in New York City and no one here has time, so a lot of different people switched and swapped out and my ex-partner took my dog.

Ale:
Can you tell me more about this network of care?

Rosin:
When I found out, I texted a few people and I called a close friend who is someone who identifies as my son. We have a father-son dynamic and they had been supporting me a lot during the pregnancy, but unfortunately that happened the day they couldn’t come with me to the appointment. We had already been planning to meet after the appointment, so when I called them and told them what happened, they told me to get in a cab and get to them immediately. I was very not okay, but this was emotional for them as well. They were supporting me, but they also needed to be supported. When we got to my house, they called people to support them, they called people to support me and people showed up so that we could fall apart. It was multiple layers of support because everyone needed help. But it’s been interesting being on this journey in a community where pregnancy and childbirth are not as common or present.

Ale:
Tell me more. How are you feeling about it now?

I have a partner right now and I’m still on this fertility journey, and I think what I’ve learned in this process and being so engraved in the reproductive world is that in the queer community, there’s more room to think outside the box of a two people couple dynamic. Community is all you have, and I don’t think two people are enough for this.

Rosin:
I have a partner right now and I’m still on this fertility journey, and I think what I’ve learned in this process and being so engraved in the reproductive world is that in the queer community, there’s more room to think outside the box of a two people couple dynamic. Community is all you have, and I don’t think two people are enough for this. But sometimes I feel like my queer community didn’t show up when I was pregnant, but when the baby died – damn, do queer people know how to show up for death.

Ale:
How long did it take after this experience for you to want to do IVF again?

Rosin:
It’s very interesting you ask that. In the first 24 hours, the doctor calls me to tell me, “I’m so sorry this happened, let me know when you’re pregnant again, I’d love to work with you.” And I was like are you insane? I have no money left, I was about to give birth, I’m broke, and I’m single. But I started this journey when I was 38, and I’m 41 now, so it took about 48 hours for me to say it’s on again. When it all started to settle, I knew I wasn’t done being pregnant. For me, there was a baby still coming.

Ale:
How was the process of coming to that decision this time around?

Rosin:
Originally, I didn’t want to do egg retrieval again because of my reaction to the drugs, but none of it mattered. I didn’t know how it was going to happen yet, but I spent the week after I lost the baby sitting here contemplating, and I probably contacted the fertility doctor before the D&E even happened. So here we are now—the baby was due this week, but instead of giving birth, I’m doing another egg retrieval.

Ale:
How are you feeling about it this time around? How’s your reaction to the drugs?

Rosin:
I don’t feel as sick yet, and the main difference is that I’m on blood thinners while I’m taking the hormones, which I wasn’t on last time. The difference this time is that I went out of my way to make phone calls, to put people in a place to support me. This time around, I had an ex-partner show up at my house, so they were here when I went into the appointment Wednesday morning, which was a very rough appointment. I was not okay when I got home, but there was someone here to take care of me, and having them made all the difference.

For information on ethical sperm donation, visit

Chiron

June 10, 2025 by

Ale:
Do you mind saying your name, your pronouns? How old are you, and where are you from?

Chiron:
I think I told you my name was Zaire, but in between that time, I changed my name to Chiron. I’m 37, living in El Cerrito right now, originally from North Carolina, and I use they/them pronouns.

Ale:
There have been a couple of people whom I’ve been talking to who also had a name changed since starting the project. Trans people and our name changes!

Chiron:
My birth name is gender neutral, but it just feels like time for something new, and an identity I get to pick, not pick and hand it to me.

Ale:
What do you think is going to be new with Chiron?

Chiron:
So it’s partially related to the chaplaincy stuff. I’m in school, I’m in seminary right now, and Chiron is the wounded healer. The longer I am in school for chaplaincy, the more I notice all my wounding. But also, I’m walking through this world as this incredibly wounded person, and I’m tasked with helping people make sense of their lives, especially towards the end of their lives or when they’re in crisis. It feels very fitting.

Ale:
Cool! So I know you agreed to participate in the project because we have a friend in common who asked you to, but if it hadn’t been because of that, what would make you want to participate in something like this?

Chiron:
I think I actually saw it a few days before Sol [friend in common] sent it. Since I was 17, anything having to do with my reproductive health has always been really fucked, but in the past few years, especially up to my hysterectomy, it was just very eye opening. Before my hysterectomy, I thought I wanted to push a little person out into this world, and that’s when I started to be more focused on Black maternal mortality rates, and when I started having really intense pain. I’ve always had pain with my periods, but then I started to have pain outside of my period, and I didn’t know what was going on. I wasn’t even supposed to be having periods, I’m on testosterone.

Ale:
The T never took them completely away?

Chiron:
It would make them come once every three months.

Ale:
For me, having gone off and on T, that’s the whole point — don’t give me periods anymore.

Chiron:
Yeah! I was talking to my doctor, asking why I’m having incredibly painful, two-week-long periods, and they just said it happens to some people on testosterone, but it didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to know what some people experience, I wanted to know what I’m experiencing and why. There’s a lot to unpack and definitely a lot of experiences with having my reproductive health ignored. Even now, when I go to the hospital and I tell them I don’t even have a uterus anymore, they still give me a pregnancy test.

Ale:
What is that about, you think?

Chiron:
Maybe they don’t know what a hysterectomy is. Maybe they don’t know what surgeries are haha

Ale:
Or maybe it’s racism and transphobia haha — the gaslighting of it all and treating you like you don’t know your own body.

Chiron:
It’s frustrating, to say the least.

“Everyone talks about trans guys getting the T rage and stuff, and I was fucking chilling. Even now in periods when I pause the testosterone, I feel so fucking crazy, like I feel so goddamn crazy, and then when I start it again, I’m just chilling again. I feel comfortable in myself, I feel calm.”

Ale:
It sounds like you’ve had plenty of experiences with your reproductive health throughout the years, but I want to start at the beginning. Do you want to walk me back to when you were 17?

Chiron:
When I was 17, I was diagnosed with PCOS, but honestly, since I was 12 or 13, which is when my period started, it was always very painful. I couldn’t get out of bed, I was passing massive blood clots, them being big enough for me to go to the doctor and the doctor being like “that’s normal, but if they get this big tell us,” and them getting that big and them telling me again “that’s normal.” How is everything fucking normal? You told me to come back when this happens.

So when I was 17, I officially got diagnosed with PCOS. At the time, they put me on Metformin, which is what they do to everyone when they first get diagnosed with PCOS. It didn’t do anything, it didn’t help, and it didn’t even out my periods.

Ale:
Do you know what’s on Metformin?

Chiron:
It’s usually a medication they give to people with diabetes, sometimes it’s used as a weight loss medication. It’s supposed to help balance out hormones, but I don’t really know how it works. The way that somebody explained it to me, is that the medication is supposed to teach your hormones to work in the way that they’re supposed to work. It’s crazy that they figured out a medication to do that, but a lot of people have a lot of side effects on it. It’s not the best medication to be putting people on, but it’s been around for a long time, and doctors like medications.

Ale:
Doctors really love to medicate the problem, but not solve it. It’s like putting a little band-aid because it’s been around forever.

Chiron:
That’s the thing with most doctors and the thing that pisses me off about healthcare in the U.S. in general. Let’s treat the symptoms, but what’s the point of treating a symptom if the cause is still there.

Ale:
Did you have any side effects?

Chiron:
At that time, it didn’t give me side effects, but in my early 20s, they started me on it again and I don’t know what the fuck happened. Maybe the dose was too high, but that shit fucked me up the first night I took it. Maybe it had been the second night that I took it that I started getting really sick. No one told me that it can make your blood sugar get too low and I woke up, and everything in the room was spinning and everything was hazy. I was trying to call my partner at the time, but I couldn’t remember their name.

Ale:
So, memory lost?

Chiron:
I was looking at them, and I was trying to say help, and the words wouldn’t come out. Then eventually my brain was just like, try harder, try harder, stay healthy, scream help. I finally yelled for help, they looked up some of the meds and said we had to get some food in me. I was trying to eat food, but I was puking the food back up because my body was already freaking the fuck out.

Once the medication kind of cleared off my system, my body was so traumatized that I started having night terrors again, which is really rare for adults, but I started having night terrors, and I couldn’t eat for a month. I couldn’t be alone because, not even mentally, but my body was convinced that at any moment I was going to die, and to feel that in my body from taking a medication for two days — I didn’t go back to that doctor. It took me like a month or two to finally mellow out and calm down and return to myself.

Ale:
It’s so scary to start taking meds and immediately have those kinds of side effects.

Chiron:
It was two days, and that would have been only the fourth dose, it wasn’t even that long. We lived in Maine at the time, so with the night terrors I would come back to myself and I would be standing butt ass naked in the alley, trying to run from whatever my dream was and my partner is at the door trying to get me inside and I’m just like “what happened?”

All this because I wanted to feel better in my body, and the reason I went back to that doctor is because of my periods. I was having a period every four months but it was the most painful shit of my fucking life. My period cramps used to be so bad that sometimes it felt like I needed to push.

Ale:
Kind of like to give birth to them, right?

Chiron:
Yeah! I would be walking around and, you know how you pass blood clots so big you can feel when they’re coming out, and the cramps are getting worse, and then suddenly it’s better once there’s a gush of blood. That’s kind of how I lived for a while.

Ale:
So you were in chronic pain every four months?

Chiron:
Yeah, and then at some point my partner was like “hey, you’re kind of evil” when my PMS was happening [both Chiron and Ale laughed loudly]. I’m pretty sure it was PMDD. I don’t know what was happening in my brain, but I needed to fight everyone close to me or to start arguments with strangers, I just had to be a cruel person. There would be times when they would say something to me, and I would snap. They started calling it my demon spawning.

Ale:
Haha so you gave it a name and everything?
Chiron:
Yeah, and I don’t know why I needed to fight. I would be super sad, the saddest I’ve ever been, and then argue, and then super sad again.

Ale:
And this all is happening right as you were PMSing that you were feeling possessed?

Chiron:
Yes exactly. And then the last day I would just be crying and then I was fine, but every single time I’d be like, why do I feel so violent? I know a lot of people with the sad version of PMDD, and part of me wished I had that, but I just wanted to fight everything. At that period of my life, I was going out to bars and hoped that a cis man would try to hit on me just so I could fight them. There were a few times when my partner had to be like, “hey, you can’t keep fighting strange men, you might lose one day,” and from the PMDD space I would be like “that’s crazy” but then once I would come out of it, I’d be like yes, it makes sense that I should probably stop trying to fight.

Ale:
Yeah, maybe it wasn’t the safest. You also mentioned that you’ve had a miscarriage?

Chiron:
When I was 17, I also had a miscarriage. At that time, I woke up and the bed was just covered in so much blood and I was like, this is not normal. I went to the emergency room and they didn’t do a pregnancy test for some reason. I think they’re excuse was that based on my timeline, I would have been really early, so the test wouldn’t have come out as positive.

Anyway, the experience was so fucking shitty because they were like “no, you don’t need a pad or anything” but there was blood running down my legs, and I’m like “Can I have a towel? Can I have anything?” And they said, well someone has to examine you first. I’m in this hospital bed, in the hospital gown, and everything’s getting soaked, that’s how much I was fucking bleeding, but they’re still telling me it’s fine. Finally, I stand up and ask, “can I just please get some help?” And everybody looked and saw the blood drip. It took them seeing the blood dripping on the floor, and the mattress covered to be like, yes.

Ale:
They could’ve just believed you.

Chiron:
Yeah, why did y’all think I came here? Like, y’all have me gowned up, clearly you think something’s fucking wrong, could you have just helped me the first fucking time? And then they got me cleaned up and gave me a bunch of towels, and that’s when they got the doctor to do some exams and labs and stuff.

Ale:
When this happened, did you know you were pregnant?

Chiron:
I had an idea. I don’t know, it feels really weird to say I’m glad I had that miscarriage. I’m not happy that I miscarried, but I’m so glad I did not have a baby.

Ale:
You were only 17!

Chiron:
For sure. That was a complicated dodging of a bullet.

Ale:
Since we’re going back through your reproductive health journey, I also want to ask about your gender journey. Were you out by then?

Chiron:
I came out as bisexual, but I was not bisexual. At that point and for a very long time, I was just having sex with men because it was the thing to do. It’s so messy because the person who got me pregnant, I actually fuck his sister, she was the first girl that I had ever had sex with, the first girl that I was ever in love with. That ended because my sister found out and called us both out on it. My brain at 17 was just so fucking stuck in trauma world that I didn’t understand the decisions that I made could actually impact people, I didn’t realize that people cared about me enough or that fucking her brother could hurt her feelings.

Ale:
Most people at 17 are not fully aware of themselves. The awareness of 17-year-olds is not exactly known for being great.

Chiron:
Yeah! At that time, I was just bisexual, and then maybe a year later, I remember watching MTV’s True Life, that show they used to have, and realizing I’m genderqueer. I watched that, and I was like, oh shit that’s what I am. That’s when the shift in my gender identity started happening. Everyone was very like, you can just be a lesbian, you don’t have to do anything to be different, people didn’t really appreciate it. And at the time, I wasn’t even asking to be called they/them, I didn’t care what they called me, I just knew this is what I am.

Ale:
So you had your first miscarriage, what happened then?

Chiron:
I was like 21 and I had just gotten to SF, and I was staying in a homeless youth shelter. I met this friend there, we used to fuck at night and that person got me pregnant, and that’s when I had my second miscarriage. That miscarriage was very, very painful, it was very clear that my body was pushing a baby out. And I remember I hadn’t had a period in so long and I thought it was just PCOS, it was fucking intense. That’s when I first started dating a person who became my partner, and I was at their house, and I didn’t know what was wrong. I was cold, sweating, and shivering and I was feeling these cramps on steroids, it was fucking awful. Then I felt this thing in my underwear, and I went to check on that, and then I had a three-week period after that.

Ale:
So you felt the mass, and you just took it to the bathroom?

Chiron:
I should probably have gone to the hospital, but at that time, I was very anti-doctor. It was out, the baby was out, and I didn’t do anything because I was just very not trusting the doctors. I was like, what are they gonna do? Now I know they need to check a lot of things, but obviously, I lived through it. A couple of periods after that, my periods were so bad, and I was just passing these massive clots. I’m not easily grossed out, so I would grab them and text my partner asking, “do you want to see how big my blood clot is today?”

Ale:
You could technically keep them in a mason jar hahaha. When did you start taking T, and did it have any effects on your period?

Chiron:
When I came back to SF, I started hormones, and the testosterone for a while did take my periods away, but I would get my periods randomly, and it would be a surprise. Sometimes there were clues, I would be evil and fighting people, but sometimes it really would just be like “I have my period now” and I would be bleeding out with no supplies, because I don’t know when this shit was coming. When I started T I knew that I wanted to eventually get rid of my tits, but I thought I do want kids one day, so I’m just gonna keep it [uterus] for now. Except for the random periods, my uterine health was pretty ok after I started T.

“My energy shifted a lot after the surgery and I think part of it was, what does it mean to have a part of your body removed that is the site of so much pain and trauma, and not even from the initial things that caused you trauma, which was the sexual trauma, but also from people ignoring your pain and people mistreating you and telling you that your pain is normal, and you just have to exist with that pain.”

Ale:
Did you know that was gonna happen at all? That T was going to regulate your health a bit?

Chiron:
I didn’t know it was gonna happen, and honestly, the T kind of mellowed out my mood too. Everyone talks about trans guys getting the T rage and stuff, and I was fucking chilling. Even now in periods when I pause the testosterone, I feel so fucking crazy, like I feel so goddamn crazy, and then when I start it again, I’m just chilling again. I feel comfortable in myself, I feel calm. My doctors are always like “testosterone can make you a little bit frustrated,” but I was frustrated off of it. Me off T, I don’t know that person.

Ale:
And then you later got a hysterectomy?

Chiron:
When did I get my hysterectomy? I think in March of 2023 I got my hysterectomy because for maybe about a year beforehand, when I was having the periods that I wasn’t supposed to be having, I started having testosterone periods again. I was getting these terrible fucking periods and even when I wasn’t having a period, it just felt like there was something sitting in there. I can’t describe the feeling. It felt like somebody put — at one point it was a baseball, and then it was a grapefruit, and then the object just kept feeling fucking bigger and bigger. Finally, I went to the doctor for it and they said “oh, you have adenomyosis.”

Ale:
I don’t think I know what that is.

Chiron:
The way I explain it is like if endometriosis had a sister. Instead of the lining of my uterus growing everywhere, it was growing within the uterine muscle itself, so it was making my uterus become this big, misshapen blob. It was hurting so much because when it was shedding it had nowhere to go except to get bigger, that’s why the object that I felt kept feeling bigger, is because every period it was getting bigger.

I dealt with that for almost a year, and I was like, this is crazy. I was talking to the surgeon throughout that time, and they told me we could try hormonal treatment, that it has helped some people, but I wasn’t going to be on T and also take birth control, that’s crazy. I know they were saying that it’s a low-risk profile, but there’s a part of my brain that very much still identifies as a Black woman, even though I also identify as trans masc. I just don’t feel like the U.S. medical system does right by women when it comes to Black women, when it comes to picking birth control with good safety profiles. So I was like “no, I’m not gonna do it.”

Ale:
Given the history of this country and the birth mortality rate for Black femmes, ofcourse you can’t trust the medical system.

Chiron:
I have a friend who is Latinx, and she was on birth control because she started fucking with this dude and watching her moods, I was like take that shit out. We had the conversation about how, I still have my ovaries, if at some point I wanted to have a baby and take the eggs out and put in someone else, that’s a possibility. But at that point there was so much trauma in this body from years of dealing with my reproductive organs.

Ale:
I relate to that so much.

Chiron:
To rewind a little bit, when I was 33, I wanted to have a baby, that was the year that I wanted to have a baby and that’s when I met my current partner.

Ale:
How long after you met your partner did you decide you wanted to have a baby?

Chiron:
Not even that long, but I had decided before I met them that I was gonna try to have a baby. It was like “hey, new relationship energy, you don’t know me, I don’t know you, but I want a baby” hahaha. It was so intense, I even had an appointment with someone who specializes in fertility stuff for trans masc people, and I was really leaning towards it. There was a moment when I was like I want a baby, I feel ready for a baby, spiritually and emotionally it feels right, but you’re poor, and you have a lot of health issues, could I realistically survive a pregnancy? I don’t know that San Francisco’s queer and trans clinic is the medical access I want to have while I’m trying to have a baby as a person who would be considered high risk.

Ale:
Knowing your health history, you need high quality fucking care if you’re gonna do that.

Chiron:
Yeah, I was absolutely not gonna get that care, so it seemed like a lot to take on, so I ended up not having a baby at the time. I just met my partner too, it’s not a good time to have a baby. When I got my hysterectomy, there was a part of me that was really, really sad, because even though this body might not be able to safely hold a baby, it feels really hard to just have that choice taken away. The adenomyosis would have made it an even higher risk pregnancy because you got this big, lumpy uterus that can’t stretch in the right places, and the fact that I already had two miscarriages beforehand.

Ale:
Even if you couldn’t carry a baby, you still wanted to have the option.

Chiron:
Yeah, it was hard. I was really sad after my hysterectomy, but I was also like “wow, I don’t have this site of pain anymore, and it’s great.” There was also this wonderful shift in my internal energy. I have a lot of sexual trauma, my pu**y was a site of so much pain and trauma. To get that part of me removed felt like somebody had just taken a giant energetic cinder block out of my body, and I felt more open to connection and more open to experiencing and sharing my emotions. There was just this huge shift in how I was energetically. And I don’t know if that’s other people’s experiences with hysterectomies, who also had a lot of sexual trauma, but it was definitely mine. I realized that I was crying more, and I felt safe to cry. When people were expressing interest in me, I wasn’t like, “oh no.”

Ale:
So before your hysto, all of these emotions felt hard to access?

Chiron:
Before the hysterectomy, the way that I was having sex was with only my partner, but I felt so internally muddled to be receiving. It just really fucked with my head, to be in this position where I’m letting someone in my body touch me this way. Literally the second, maybe the day after I was back home from the hospital, my brain was like you just got your shit taken out, but I’m horny. My body was horny and I wanted something in me, and I was like, that’s weird, it’s weird that you would say that, body, haha.

I remember my surgeon saying obviously you can’t do penetrative stuff for six to eight weeks, but after your surgery, if you’re horny, you can masturbate, and I was like, wow, she done that. I had asked a little bit about sex and my surgeon is this amazing trans woman who’s in community with me. When we were deciding which procedure to do, she was trying to find a professional way to tell me “I know that you’re a top, and usually we do this procedure on people who have receptive sex” but when I said “well, I get fisted” she was like “great, this is the way we’ll do it.”

Ale:
So talking about aftercare with your surgeon, it’s what started shifting things in your brain.

Chiron:
Yeah. I remember the day after surgery, my partner and their twin, who were the main people who took care of me, they were in their room and they thought that I was asleep and I wanted to try it [masturbating]. I came and then I wasn’t hurting crazy, and I was like “I can have sex without pain, this is great,” even though part of my brain was nervous to not have a cervix anymore.

My energy shifted a lot after the surgery and I think part of it was, what does it mean to have a part of your body removed that is the site of so much pain and trauma, and not even from the initial things that caused you trauma, which was the sexual trauma, but also from people ignoring your pain and people mistreating you and telling you that your pain is normal, and you just have to exist with that pain. To drastically shift from having that and holding that, in that being in your experience, and literally you wake up, and then your experience is that you don’t have to have that pain anymore. I don’t know how that wouldn’t shift shit for people.

Ale:
Even if it was purely psychological, it’s enough symbolism to take the pain away, to experience new things.

Chiron:
Leading up to the surgery, I was making a lot of art, and I was trying to visualize what it felt like to have this surgery. I made this drawing of me with my legs open and just a bunch of garbage spilling out of my pu**y. That’s kind of what it felt like once it happened, I was like, “oh, there’s not a fucking bag of trash in me.” The care that I had through the surgery was really nice. I remember there were certain moments when I was bleeding and I shouldn’t have been bleeding anymore, and people were so responsive, there was a number I could call 24 hours to be like “this thing is happening, is this normal?”

Ale:
Was this the first time you had a health practitioner be receptive to your experience?

Chiron:
It was the first time I had that happen for anything around reproductive health. When I had my top surgery that surgeon was available, but I never had anyone be like “hey, we care about what’s happening in this area of your body,” so it was a big shift, it was really different to have my pu**y cared for, to have somebody say “we see you, we hear you, we believe you, and this is what we can do.” It had been three months after my recovery, and I started working, and the first day at work I started bleeding. I called my surgeon, and they told me to go to the nearest UCSF emergency room, which happens to be a children’s hospital.

I get there and the people at the hospital know that I’m coming, they know why I’m coming, the Gyno in-call is meeting me there, everything is immediately taken care of. It’s not anything I’ve experienced as a Black person, or as a trans person, or as a poor person, or as a disabled person. It was really nice to have this weird thing happened, and feel scared and not have anyone played me in my fucking face about it. I was geared up to fight, but I didn’t have to do that.

Ale:
Did you have anyone else when this was happening to take care of you? Who was around, aside from the doctors?

Chiron:
It was just my partner and their twin. I wish that I had scheduled for people to come visit, and had opened up to people in that way, but mostly I was just tired and sleeping, but also I really didn’t know how to accept support, and I didn’t know how to ask for it. I think even now, I kind of struggle with that. I mentioned I have my spine surgery coming up. I’m good at saying I need funds for this thing, for this part of care, but it’s more emotional to be like hey, will you come see me when I’m in this very vulnerable state and I’m in pain and I might be emotional? If I go to the bathroom, I might need you to help me stand up. That’s so fucking intimate.

Ale:
You reach a new level of intimacy when that happens.

Chiron:
It was a very intimate time. My partner helped me shower and wash my hair. My partner has had to help me do those things through bouts of really, really intense pain but it’s still really hard. There are times when I feel guilty. I think a lot of disabled people experience that guilt of moments when you have to rely on your partner, but you just want to let them be your partner, and not this person who has to help you get through the day. I wish that I had asked people to come hang out, but I didn’t, so it was just the two of them. For my spine surgery, that is a change that I’m making. I’m like, please come watch scary movies with me, come hold my fucking hand.

Ale:
I love scary movies! In the previous times when you had miscarriages, who did you go to talk to? Who did you go to for care?

Chiron:
I didn’t tell anyone. The second time I had a miscarriage at my partner’s house, I just threw it away, they didn’t know. The first time I was in North Carolina, I woke up and there was blood everywhere, and I just washed the sheets. I cleaned up, tried to get as much blood as possible off the mattress, and I walked two miles to the hospital. It was summer in North Carolina, so it was like 90 degrees, fucking hot. North Carolina is one of those places where it feels like everything sticks, like you might just choke from the humidity. When I was 17, there was so much emotion behind it. I remember calling my sister and asking for a ride back from the hospital, and she said she couldn’t.

Ale:
How do you feel about receiving care now?

Chiron:
I don’t know. Last night I was talking to a friend, and they were like, I feel like there are a lot of people who want to support you and I was like you’re probably right, and I’m probably not opening myself to it. I have a lot of attachment trauma, and part of that is when my peers were learning how to connect with people, those were the years when I was hiding from the people that I knew so that I wouldn’t be abused. So when people approach me for connection, even if I say I want to connect, my brain gets terrified.

Ale:
I feel like a lot of people can relate to that. I want to go back to your reproductive health journey for a bit. Did it ever bring up any feelings about your gender or your sense of masculinity?

“When I am moving through the world, I’m holding all of me, this experience belongs to all of me. And there’s no way to separate my Black womanhood from my trans masculinity. I think that’s really confusing for some people, but for me, I’m just a whole person, I have a whole brain and a whole heart and a whole spirit and a whole identity that can’t just be contained.”

Chiron:
Honestly, I didn’t feel that complicated. As a kid, I learned that if I held an identity, or I was interested in something, that I could just hold it close to me and it could still be mine, and it didn’t need to be anyone else’s. Part of that was because my family was very critical, but I appreciated the process of learning that this can just be who I am, and it doesn’t have to matter to anyone else. There’s this part of me that’s always said I don’t identify as a woman, but identify as a Black woman. That’s a specific political identity that I hold. My brain was never like “you’re trans, but you’re a black woman and to which identity does this bitch belong to? It belongs to all of them.”

When I am moving through the world, I’m holding all of me, this experience belongs to all of me. And there’s no way to separate my Black womanhood from my trans masculinity. I think that’s really confusing for some people, but for me, I’m just a whole person, I have a whole brain and a whole heart and a whole spirit and a whole identity that can’t just be contained. I understand that people really do find safety in identities, but I think sometimes when you have to hold an identity so close to you, you deny yourself the death of your own personhood, and I don’t ever want to do that, because other people have done that for me. I don’t need to do it, too.

Even when I was trying to get pregnant, that was a moment when felt very deeply connected to my Black womanhood and my transness, and I’m doing this as a Black woman who is a trans man, and we’re gonna have a fucking baby, and this is going to be a wild ass experience. All of me is going to be there, because this baby deserves all of me to be present. It felt like such a spiritual process to be taking on, but it’s that same thing where I didn’t need to separate my identities, I actually needed them all to be present and for me to be like the whole of myself, to get through the process.

Ale:
In other words, would you say that you’re able to embody your Black womanhood and your transness because of each other?

Chiron:
Yeah. I want to blend them, because the Black woman me is like “yeah bitch, be cute” and my trans masculinity is like b”e cute but I don’t know what to wear, we have a T-shirt and a pair of pants.” I don’t know. Part of me, and I really hate that I’m saying this, but part of me likes the soft boy esthetic, because it says that I can wear the masc clothes and also the jewelry and I can be this cute thing out in the world where I don’t have to choose between boxes, but there’s a cute middle place.

sexual assault

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