Transgender Parents Who Conceived Two Sons Naturally

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Available Summary:

Bianca and Nick Bowser, who were born male and female, respectively, conceived their two sons naturally. While the couple both identify as transgender, they have not gone through gender reassignment -- which caused Nick to carry the pregnancies.

-ABC News (America), YouTube.

Jack's Summary:

There is a wonderful story here, about two people finding love and starting a family together, but the news organisation which created this video does its utmost to undermine that story.

The interview is sensationalist in its framing of trans people's mere existence as being a wild secret, and implies that acquaintances have a right to know about a trans person's past. The reporter dramatically remarks, for example, that the pair are a "mom and dad who haven't told the neighbours that they weren't born this way," as if neighbours even need to know any person's private history.

A similar approach to disclosure/authenticity can be seen in Girls to Men (2015), where the filmmakers depict an average bloke's past as a titillating secret, dramatically revealing that he's actually trans to strangers on the street. The idea that a trans man might exist, without his past being shouted from the rooftops, is oh-so scandalous!

The video ends with the reporter, bafflingly, asking, "How many people here know that, while you look like a man and a woman, underneath right now you are still," gesturing to Bianca, "a man," and, gesturing to Nick, "a woman?" This, again, is similar to Girls to Men in that such comments land very differently depending on who is speaking, and what their perspective is. For example, a trans man saying, "I don't want to be a woman under my clothes," is very different from a cis person asserting that any person's identity is illegitimate based on what surgeries they have undergone. Many men do not, or cannot, access bottom surgeries, for example. Some men are comfortable with that. It does not mean that they are not real men and, unless their neighbours are seeing their genitals, why would it be relevant to how they are seen in everyday society? Any one individual experience of dysphoria or gender is no excuse for cis commentators to project a narrative of deception or illegitimacy onto trans people.

Very harmful is the interview's framing of the pair's sexual life, and particularly the narration which accompanies the interview footage. "Their most intimate moments require literally reverting to the sexual identities with which they were born," narrates the reporter, as though trans men and women stop being who we are due to the ways in which we choose to have sex. What makes this so harmful, beyond the rhetoric itself, is the fact that this framing survived the post-interview editing, despite being contradicted by the interviewees themselves. "I don't view Bianca as a man," Nick insisted, as Bianca looked increasingly uncomfortable in response to the reporter's comments; evidently, the editors, script-writers, and the reporter herself did not care to absorb Nick's words or the couple's discomfort. They were not heard.

The reporter also describes Nick's choice to carry their child as him "becoming a mother". It is worth noting that most trans men who do carry their own children consider themselves fathers, as is deeply explored in Transgender Parents (2013). Perhaps this choice of words reflects Nick's own view of the journey he went on but, given the rest of the interview, I would not assume so. Certainly, Nick describes at length the dysphoria which pregnancy caused him, but he never uses the word "mother".

The video ends with Nick saying that the pair are "no different than anybody else," which is a lovely sentiment which somehow survives despite the reporter's best efforts to refute it.