suicide

Keats

June 10, 2025 by

Ale:
Do you want to start by telling me your name, your pronouns, your age, and where you’re from?

Keats:
I’m Keats Milles Wallace, my pronouns are they and them. I’m 32 years old, I’m from Seguin, Texas.

Ale:
So you’re a native Texan.

Keats:
Yeah. My mom’s family is half French and English, and the other half is Mex-Indigenous to this area. The border of Texas is where our people are from, so I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m home. We’re descendants of the Coahuiltecans who had been here for 10,000 years or more.

Ale:
Do you want to tell me what made you want to participate in the project?

Keats:
I’m in a local trans masc group chat, and someone posted a link to the project. We were just in the IVF process at that point [Keats and their partner], and not too many people do reciprocal IVF because it’s usually prohibitively expensive and invasive, so I thought our story could be helpful.

Ale:
How did you guys decide to go that way, and how were you able to afford it?

Keats:
My whole family, all the uterus-having folks in my world, have had major reproductive issues around 30, but Jessica [partner] doesn’t have that history, and we both wanted biological children. She doesn’t really care, at least at this point, but because it’s a short timeline, we said we gotta hurry up and do this. We decided to try my eggs first, that way I have a chance at biological children, and if they don’t work, we’ll figure something else out and use her eggs. We may still do that. Insurance covered most of it, but only after we had done four rounds of IUI. They cover regular IVF, but never reciprocal.

Ale:
Do you know why they don’t cover reciprocal IVF?

Keats:
I think because reciprocal IVF was something that could never happen naturally. We paid for the first round out of pocket, which was like $35k, but that occurred over two years, so we gave everything we had, all our savings towards it. For the next two rounds, I got mad about the insurance coverage, so we had Jessica’s boss write a letter to the company she works for because they’re really big about LGBTQ+ inclusion.

My articulation of it was that, sure, the insurance coverage for reproductive health that the company offers is based on equal treatment, but what they aren’t hitting is equity, which is that each partner has the ability to participate in the reproductive process. They have an opportunity where two same sex people can both participate, and they aren’t covering it, so they changed the coverage policy. We sent the letter and didn’t hear back, but then they put a section on the insurance that said they now cover reciprocal IVF. By the time we did round two or three in that same year, we hit the out-of-pocket max, so we didn’t pay for the next round.

Ale:
Around when did you and Jessica start the process?

Keats:
I think it was February 2021, almost four years ago now, and we finally both had jobs where we could make enough money to pay for it. We knew we were still gonna be strapped, but Jessica’s always wanted children, that is her life imperative, to be a mom, and mine was to be a pastor. She went along for all my school and getting me through, so I’m along for the ride with kids. I never really particularly wanted children, but didn’t not want them either and I think most of that came down to not wanting to carry children after thinking about it. We talked to our general practitioner and asked if she knew a good reproductive endocrinologist. We did lots of blood tests. They test for everything. I’ve never had so many vials of blood drawn at one time in my whole life.

Ale:
I might botch this, but in the simplest terms, reciprocal IVF is when they take someone’s eggs and put them inside another person – is that right?

Keats:
Yeah, usually you produce one egg at a time, sometimes more than one – they gave me two or three weeks worth of drugs to produce more eggs than normal so they can get many at one time. Regular people produce around twelve eggs.

“I don’t know why that was my worst fear my whole life – I imagine it’s probably due to being trans and forcing my body into a femininity in a really present way. The way people treat pregnant women, who identify and know themselves as women, is extraordinarily feminine. There isn’t a masculine version of being pregnant.”

Ale:
How many did you get?

Keats:
Thirty four.

Ale:
That’s good, right?

Keats:
It’s terrible, I learned. I didn’t know I have PCOS, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, and I found out because of the procedure. They looked at the numbers and were like “oh shit, it’s PCOS” which means it drastically reduces your egg quality. They get tons of eggs, but only a couple were good, so we got thirty-two the first round and I think thirty-four the other rounds, and each time I got only two viable embryos. Our donor is a college friend who is a fabulous gay man and drag queen and ceramicist. He loves the idea of having children out in the world, but doesn’t want to raise them, but he told us he wanted to support us in any way he can. So we did all this genetic testing to find out whether they’re chromosomally normal, but we didn’t get enough genetic material to really find out, so we went with one that was undetermined. We tried the first one, got eight weeks in and then Jessica miscarried, and then April of last year we tried a second one and turns out the undetermined ones just wasn’t good. We found out that Jessica has silent endometriosis, which I didn’t know was a thing. You have endo but you don’t have symptoms.

Ale:
Given how famously horrible endo is, having it without symptoms sounds ideal, but ofcourse, it isn’t, right?

Keats:
Not having symptoms is delightful, but it still creates this protein in the lining of your uterus that makes it so you can’t carry children. Really! The egg can’t attach correctly to the lining, so you have like a 12% chance of getting pregnant without medical intervention. We found out that she had to be on hormones also for like, two months at a time.

Ale:
Do you know what kind of hormones, was it similar hormones as the ones you were taking for the egg retrieval?

Keats:
Different. She was on Lupron, which is designed to tamp down your hormone system as much as possible, so that you’re not producing estrogen almost at all. They had to do that so her lining wouldn’t grow as thick, and then do the implantation almost immediately after. It was a crazy process, but the third one worked.

Ale:
Third one was the charm! What hormones did they put you on this time around?

Keats:
They put me on a human growth hormone that time, which they say is like a Hail Mary thing. They don’t know why it works, and it works specifically in patients with PCOS. I’m a numbers nerd, so I was like “this one has to work, we can’t screw this up again”. I had a probability table of 11 different probabilities and I was looking at these studies about people who had used growth hormone. Almost every time people who used growth hormone got two embryos that were good, but my probability table said I might get one so I was not optimistic at all, but sure enough, we got two and we’re using one right now, and we have another one saved.

Ale:
It’s wild that people don’t know the science behind the growth hormones.

Keats:
Yeah, even the scientists don’t know the science. My reproductive endocrinologist is one of the top in her game, she is known throughout the country, she has a podcast and she says “honestly, this comes down to the art of medicine, not the science”. We don’t know why this works, we just know that it does.

Ale:
Interestingly, this happened to you, being that you’re a faith worker. I want to go back to something very key that you touched on earlier. You mentioned you never really thought about having children, but that was mostly because you didn’t want to give birth or be in a pregnant body. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?

Keats:
I don’t know if there’s a whole heck of a lot more to say, I just never wanted to be pregnant. I don’t know why that was my worst fear my whole life – I imagine it’s probably due to being trans and forcing my body into a femininity in a really present way. The way people treat pregnant women, who identify and know themselves as women, is extraordinarily feminine. There isn’t a masculine version of being pregnant. That was my worst fear throughout all of high school.

Then I met Jess, and I guess I didn’t understand myself as trans at the time, but something changed and I thought “you! I could raise children with.” There was something about that where the pressure was off all of a sudden, I guess because I wouldn’t have to carry, and now there’s a little one growing and I cannot wait. I get to be dad and all of my dreams come true that I didn’t even know I had. Growing up in really naive areas of South Texas I didn’t know trans people existed until I was in college, and then I didn’t know who I was until I was in seminary. And you just don’t have the exposure, you don’t know, to even have the idea.

Ale:
I relate very much to the feeling of not wanting to be pregnant, and for me it has a lot to do with how pregnancy is synonymous with femininity. It’s the ultimate form of womanhood that I want to run far away from.

Keats:
It’s an ick, right? Which is ridiculous because we have examples in nature like Seahorses, where the masculine parent is who carries a pregnancy, but we don’t have examples of that in our own culture that are held up in esteem. People look at seahorse daddies and they’re still like “I don’t know.”

Ale:
Seahorse daddies are still such a spectacle, and add to that the men trying to get pregnant having to deal with so many conflicting feelings. Given the complications, what do you think would’ve happened if you had to be the one who was pregnant?

Keats:
I would have just have said no. I mean, it’s just not even an option for me because emotionally, it would be such a horrifying place that I can’t take myself there. In High School, as was probably the case for most of us, it was an awful, horrible emotional time, some of the most depressed I’ve ever been, a suicidal teenager sort of thing. And I promised myself I will never put myself in a position to be back there if I can help it.

Ale:
You know yourself enough to know it will be something that will put you back into that emotional state.

Keats:
It would take me back there, and I’m not doing it. That was my gift to myself after each egg retrieval. For the first one, my gift to myself was top surgery because I had to do something to fix this.

Ale:
Haha had to balance it out somehow.

Ketas:
Yes! I did something extraordinarily feminine, and then I had to dip into masculinity. And then I started testosterone for the second one because uuughhh I can’t do it.

Ale:
I want to talk about you being a trans pastor. How did you become a pastor, and how was that journey?

Keats:
It started in this room. Jessica is a lifelong Lutheran and I grew up Southern Baptist, which was not a great experience for me, as you might imagine.

Ale:
I grew up Catholic, so it’s a little more forgiving, but still. Tell me more.

Keats:
Ours wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t the hardcore Southern Baptist church, but it was a little bit there.
I remember growing up there was a woman of Asian descent who would attend church, and she would always sit in the front pew by herself. And I don’t know how I recognized the kinship with her at like five years old, but I did, and I always thought it was sad that she was by herself. And so we never got the “you’re going to hell” sort of preaching, but we did get that really open example of being ostracized, which is almost as bad as the you’re going to hell preaching.

I always kind of knew this is not going to be a place where I can stay and in High School, I ran away from organized religion, but did deep dives into religion as a whole. I got into school here at Texas Lutheran and we were required to take six hours of religion to complete our degree. I took intro to theology with Dr. Norm Beck, the dude’s like 92 and has been here forever, but he did this thing where he would take us on these trips, and we went to the Jewish synagogue, and we went to the Hindi temple and the Buddhist temple, and we worshiped with them. Through that experience, I felt like I was still worshiping Jesus of Nazareth in these places, but in a different way, so I was like oh maybe I am a Christian. Then I met Jessica my sophomore year, and she was going to Ash Wednesday.

Ale:
Fun! That’s one of my favorite ones!

Keats:
I’d never been to Ash Wednesday because Baptists don’t do Ash Wednesday. I was like, all right, I guess I’ll go. So I went, and it was gorgeous, how could you not love Ash Wednesday? So I was like being a pastor would be a pretty cool job because it’s here, it’s a university service, but it also serves the area community and anyone can come to the Ash Wednesday service. We’ve got several pastors that were on the faculty imposing ashes on people and I got to see this neat moment of my teachers being pastors.

And then the next year, Jess was like, I don’t want to go to Ash Wednesday, I’m tired, and I was like, I’m going and if you want to spend time with me, that’s where I’ll be. So I came here and there was a woman in the back of the church who I guess is a community member, and she came forward with four children, and Harry Foster [professor] – a gruff, tough, masculine man – is starting to weep as he proclaims your dust into dust shall return on the forehead of this new baby. I was like that is it, I need to live in that moment, in that tension of life and death and beauty and pain and all of this just all mixed up together.

So I looked at Jessica and I was like “hey actually, what if I was a pastor?” I was expecting her to be like, “no that’s silly, you’re in the middle of a marketing degree,” but she was like “I could see it, sounds like a good idea, you should talk to pastor Greg about it.” Then I went and talked to pastor Greg and I wasn’t baptized, I wasn’t a Lutheran, any of these things and I also expected pastor Greg to be like no here are all these barriers.

Ale:
I want to talk about the barriers, it seems like a lot of queer folks have a hard time accessing organized religion.

Keats:
Definitely true. In 2009 the church agreed to ordain LGBTQ clergy, and in the 70s, we agreed to ordain women, but there’s still issues, right? Those things are long term turnovers, they didn’t happen overnight. I was talking to Greg about this in 2013 so only four years after that decision to ordain LGBTQ folks, but I didn’t even know that happened and it didn’t occur to me that it would be an issue at the time. He told me “why don’t you and I meet weekly and let’s talk about your sense of faith and just see where you’re at.” We get to the end of six weeks, and he’s like “actually, based on what you’re saying, I think you’ve been Lutheran your whole life, so you’re gonna get baptized and confirmed on Sunday” it was a Wednesday.

Ale:
Only three days later!

Keats:
Then with the Lutherans you have to do this whole process, you do an entrance interview where a local pastor who’s been kind of pre-picked by the bishop will interview you and just see who you are and what your call to faith is and how you got here. Then you get to meet with a candidacy committee, and they determine whether you move forward or not. Through the whole process I expected barriers but no, the only thing they had a problem with was that I was kinda young. They told me to wait a year for seminary, but then I got a full tuition scholarship, and they told me to go because I might not get it again. I went out to the Bay Area and did three years of seminary and then a year internship in Ohio. That’s when I started to kind of realize the gender aspect of who I was.

“Which is the wildest thing about a lot of these bills that say God didn’t make mistakes, you are who you are born to be. I could use the same language and mean something very different. My thing is, I don’t understand why people believe that God stops working when we’re born, that’s ridiculous. God works throughout our lives entirely.”

Ale:
In Ohio or in California?

Keats:
In California. I was out as gay at the time, but I wasn’t out as trans. Then I was starting to figure it out in California and then I got to Ohio, and was really having a hell of a time. My internship was really hard because my supervisor claimed that he was accepting, but really didn’t know what that meant, and said a lot of really terrible things.

Ale:
Like what kind of things? A lot of microaggressions?

Keats:
And macro. He would say things like “doesn’t Jesus say to deny yourself? You shouldn’t be out,” but that’s not what that means. That’s when I started to kind of hit the walls and the barriers in the church and I was wildly depressed. I think I was figuring out that some of my discomfort around that was being treated in a way that was very feminine. So I told Jessica, “I’m not sure I’m cisgender,” and then I brought it up again a few years ago, and I was like, “no, but really, I think we may need to change some things like pronouns and my name.”

So we started doing that and she’s been cool with it. My Bishop was cool with it too because he has trans children. I’ve learned really quickly that being a trans person of faith, the more public you are, the better. There are so few of us that you get put into positions of relative power pretty quickly. I’m on two ELCA national task forces and I spoke at the ELCA youth gathering in front of 16,000 kids this last summer because when you’re willing to stand up and say who you are, people say “that’s awesome, you want to do it again?” and then your opinion typically gets valued pretty well, because again, the pool of us is very small. I think I get extra tokenized because I’m transmasculine, but also Mex-Indigenous. It gets irritating sometimes, but mostly I’m just glad to have the seat at the table because I’m not gonna sit there quietly.

Ale:
When you were coming to terms with your gender, was there anyone you could talk to? Even within the church—the seminary—did you have community?

Keats:
The ELCA has a group called Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. Before they decided to ordain LGBTQ folks, they had a group who said “you know what, we’re borrowing our authority from the future, we’re gonna ordain queer people ahead of time.” Once the 2009 decision happened they brought those people onto the ELCA roster, but Extraordinary Lutheran Ministry still existed and we had a group of LGBTQ pastors and deacons that we called Proclaim.

So as I was figuring this out [transness], there were several people that had done this before and I had some really, really good discussions with people who were going through not just the gender side of what I was going through, but understood also the pastoral side and how complicated that can be. Then also in the fertility side, I know a trans pastor, a seahorse dad and when I was dealing with the egg retrieval side of it, not carrying, but still really having to deal with my anatomy, I called that friend and I was like “what do I do? Why am I freaking out?” and “I don’t know how to handle this.” And he really walked me through how he handled his own two pregnancies.

Ale:
So there’s a whole group of people in the intersection of the pastoral side and the trans side, both the worlds that you needed guidance with?

Keats:
Yeah, I have a group chat right now that’s trans masc pastors and we all bitch about stuff to each other. Two are in California, one northern California, one southern, one is in Ohio and then me. It’s a little group of four of us, all parents or soon to be parents. We’re getting really niche now but I’ve found people like me, even in my denomination.

Ale:
That’s cool – how often do you guys talk?

Keats:
We text back and forth almost every day. I mean, not lengthy conversations necessarily, but we’ll be like, guess what my kid did? Did you see this article? It’s just casual conversation, but we decided to do that because the state of the world sucks right now and we can’t safely talk on social media anymore, so we have a signal group. Then we were like, actually, to be even safer than digital communication, why don’t we start writing letters to each other, so we’re also pen pals.

Ale:
I love that. Would you say this group has gotten you through tough times?

Keats:
Yeah, absolutely and Proclaim has had its ups and downs, so has Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries. In my understanding, at this point in time it’s at a turning point of either it’s going to fall apart or it’s gonna have to become something new.

Ale:
Why is that, what is happening?

Keats:
I mean, it’s the same reality of queer communities where you have your cis gay men who occupy a certain space of privilege that don’t always seem to understand it, and then a little bit of a smattering of everybody else that are trying to help them understand. So we had that divide in the first place and then race became a big issue, which is also a big issue in the general queer community. I just kind of fizzled over that, so that the broader community hasn’t been as helpful. But the friends that I made there I’ve kept, and they’ve been really an anchor through whatever bullshit is going on.

Ale:
A lot of masc folks don’t feel like reaching out for support is accessible to them, which is really sad, but it sounds like it is accessible for you.

Keats:
We’re predisposed to community as clergy. I think it’s such a unique experience of life and professional world that we already are predisposed to talk to one another about what’s going on in our church or what’s going on in ministry, so it was really easy to make that leap.

Ale:
Queer folks are already so community-oriented, we have to find each other to survive, but for you, community is coming from both sides, the pastoral and the queer.

Keats:
Yeah – I got the jackpot of finding people.

Ale:
In that same note, how do you think your relationship with being trans and being a pastor are the most similar or different, or how are they sometimes conflicting?

Keats:
When people ask that sort of question, it’s the same as if they ask, “how did you know that you were trans?” You just make a decision every day over and over again, it’s almost the same as my sense of call to ministry. It feels like God is guiding me to myself, and it feels the same way with gender. God’s like remember to watch that one movie that’s gonna make you cry and think about things. It feels so much the same way. And so when I get into arguments with people, hopefully not too often, about how you get to gender and understanding what yours is, I tell them to just listen for God. God tells you who you are, will lead you to who you’re supposed to be.

Which is the wildest thing about a lot of these bills that say God didn’t make mistakes, you are who you are born to be. I could use the same language and mean something very different. My thing is, I don’t understand why people believe that God stops working when we’re born, that’s ridiculous. God works throughout our lives entirely. Everything that we do maybe isn’t necessarily like God moving the pieces, but I think God inspires us to different understandings and might put things in front of us that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen, or at least knows our truest selves better than we do, and it can help reveal that to us.

The other side of it is the social side of transitioning as a pastor and what that looks like. I thought it was going to be a bigger problem, and it hasn’t been. I now have half the male privilege of my male colleagues, which is great especially in the clergy world, where men dominate and that’s been really, really interesting.

Ale:
Let’s talk about that a little bit – since you transitioned and became one of the guys, has there been a shift in attitude from your colleagues?

Keats:
Yes and no. The way that the ELCA made the decision to ordain queer clergy is one that was really incredibly divisive. Half the churches left and what was still here, some of them were really supportive of that decision and some of them were like, I don’t support it, but I’m not leaving. So the pastors who are in the “I don’t support it, but I’m not leaving” camp, are still like “you can be over there, we don’t need to pull you into our ranks” and I’m like, “good I don’t really want to be there.”

But then of the supportive clergy in the area, it’s been interesting. Some of the guys have been like “you’re kind of one of us now” and have brought me into that loop – we go axe throwing! I think some of the more supportive women clergy also still see me very much as one of them, which is both upsetting and not. On the one hand, I’m not a woman, that’s not who I am anymore, but on the other hand, you still aren’t afraid of me and that’s a good thing. I’m happy to not receive the fear of you’re a man. So it’s been kind of an interesting in-between and I think that’s part of being trans masculine, but not a trans man, right? I’m in between, and people don’t know what to do about me, but not in a bad way.

Ale:
Do you think you could get to a place when you’re talking with the women and they recognize your masculinity, but is still trusting and still feel comfortable with you?

Keats:
We’re getting there. I think the longer I’m on testosterone the better. My voice has dropped pretty significantly in the last four months. I know one friend in particular has been like “you’re bringing in the low notes” and I’m like “yeah, I wonder why” hahaha.

Ale:
I want to go back to what we talk about yesterday and about your becoming a dad. Jess is pregnant and you live in Texas. Did you guys had a conversation about the implications of doing this in this time and place?

Keats:
We didn’t even think about it that clearly to begin with and now looking back, I’m like, why did we not talk about this? Because the abortion ban went into place once we were really getting moving with things, but it’s been a continuous part of the conversation as she’s been pregnant. Especially during the first pregnancy that we lost because she could have done a D&C [Dilation and Curettage] but there are a lot of complications, or we could have just let her miscarry on her own.

“it’s just been such a thought process of, okay if things go south, what the fuck are we gonna do? What state do we run to if there’s an anatomical issue?.”

But I was flying to Nashville three days later and we had to figure out another way so the easier way was to go get Mifepristone, which is a drug use when you need to induce a miscarriage. We were in the room when the doctor told us there was nothing viable, and that was awful and then they put us in a room where we could just kind of process things for a little while. Then the doctor came back and said here are your options for what to do and the drugs were the easiest option.

We went to go get the medicine almost immediately after, and I just remember being so angry preemptively, like if anyone messes with my sobbing wife, who just lost her pregnancy, I will lose my shit. So we walk up and there’s this guy standing in the pharmacy in casual clothes and a cowboy hat, and I kept thinking that if he is the one we have to talk to you, I can tell this is gonna go poorly and I will get in a fist fight with a man in an HEB. We ended up getting a female pharmacist who was so helpful.

Ale:
How did the female pharmacist react?

Keats:
The woman pharmacist who was giving us the consults on the drugs was just chipper, ready to give us the consult and she looked down and saw what it was, and I was prepared to be like “oh here we go, this is the moment where it all falls apart,” but she started crying. She could see that we were broken up, I’m sure, because we were red-eyed and teary and whatever, and she was so incredibly supportive. So we had this huge moment of grace through this whole horrible process, and in a state where even though it’s legal, the Governor and the Attorney General and the Lieutenant Governor like to make lists, so I’m probably on a list somewhere for having bought Mifepristone. It’s been really interesting.

Ale:
How do you feel about the new pregnancy now, after that experience?

Keats:
As she’s been pregnant this time, the constant worry is we can’t be too far from the hospital. We know this hospital will provide whatever care they need to and that it won’t be an issue. We know our OB is a really good, liberal OB who will do what needs done and we made sure that we got a good OB for that reason. But it’s just been such a thought process of, okay if things go south, what the fuck are we gonna do? What state do we run to if there’s an anatomical issue? What friend could house us for a week or two at a time? It’s been a really complex thought process through the whole thing.

Ale:
So many complicated feelings when you least need them.

Keats:
In the twenty-week ultrasound where you do your anatomy scan, we saw everything was good and we were like, “Oh God, we were so close to absolute fear,” especially because PCOS does degrade your egg quality. What if genetically we’re normal, but we don’t produce correctly? What could happen here? But everything’s good.

Ale:
Do you have anyone here in Texas to talk about these things—what if something was wrong?

Keats:
Not too much. It’s been mostly just between Jessica and I which I think is also kind of a matter of safety sort of thing, because our abortion law is written where it’s a bounty law. So if it’s a civil bounty law it’s not a criminal penalty. If you were to talk about abortion out loud, and someone heard that you did or thought that you might, they could take you into civil court and win $10,000.

Ale:
They’re applying the same bounty law to undocumented immigrants.

Keats:
And trans people. Here right now, there’s a bounty bill that is unlikely to pass, but it’s a bill that if you are supportive of a trans person, say you use someone’s name or pronouns, you would owe anywhere between $10 million, which is wild specially because it’s metered on whether it’s targeted at minors. So if you support a minor, and if that care or support that you provide leads to a surgery which would sterilize them, then it’s the $10 million award. Which it is insane and I think most legislators understand that it’s insane.

Ale:
They know these tactics are obviously not working, so now they’re going after companies that facilitate payments for abortions and gender-affirming health. They’re also going after organizations that help people leave the state seeking care.

Keats:
Most of the bills that I’m tracking right now are targeted more at identity documents and birth certificates, which is really interesting. They don’t want you to be able to change your birth certificate at any point in time, and then all these subsequent things that rely on your birth certificate. They’re really forcing people to out themselves as trans as much as possible and I think that’s what Oliverson’s gender identity fraud bill is getting at. You need to say who you are, but you know when we do that, we get killed, right? I’m talking with a lot of those legislators, most of them don’t want anybody to get hurt, is what I’m understanding, which is good, that’s a nice pro in this horrible legislation and many of them say they’re just trying to start a conversation, but there are other ways to start a conversation that don’t potentially impact people’s lives. So they’re definitely going after out-of-state for abortions and for surgeries, they’re trying to get lists of everybody for everything.

Ale:
To finish it off, how are your colleagues and everyone you know receiving the news that you’re going to be a dad?

Keats:
Really, really well. I think part of it is that no one’s been like “what’s your kid gonna call you?” I think they’re just kind of waiting to see, they don’t want to be rude in asking the question which I respect. I think most of them are just excited, most of them know what the fertility process is like for queer folks and folks who struggle in general, so I think they’re really happy that we’re finally finding our feet and getting somewhere. Also, my wife and I were talking about this the other day, our generation doesn’t really have kids very often, and to have a kid, people are excited. You don’t see babies anymore.

Ale:
I don’t think any of my queer friends are having kids.

Keats:
No, because we’re all broke and tired and figuring ourselves out first, which isn’t a bad thing, but I think it ends up being really, really exciting for people. We’ve had to do two baby showers because we couldn’t fit everybody at one, it’s been really neat. We’ve realized over the years that there are a lot of people who love you but never tell you, so we said anybody who wants to come to the baby shower can, even people I don’t particularly like, that’s fine.

We just kind of said, if you want an invitation, you need to give me your address, and we sent out all these invitations and folks that I wouldn’t have expected showed up and brought gifts and are excited. I think that’s one of the biggest learnings in my last few years – genuinely, there are people out there who love you that you just don’t know and if you don’t give them the opportunity to show that in a way that they know how, you never figure it out.

Ale:
Meet people where they are, right?

Keats:
Yeah. Sometimes you have to say, “all right, I don’t really want you to come, you wouldn’t be someone that I would go out of my way to invite, but if you want to be there, okay.”

Derek

May 30, 2025 by

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

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