#8 Men, Masculinities, and Reproduction: Reproduction Beyond Sex

In the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, the landmark Supreme Court decision that determined the United States Constitution does not confer a right to an abortion, anti-abortion legislation across the United States began to define “woman” as “an individual whose biological sex is female, including an individual with XX chromosomes and an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity that the individual attempts to assert or claim (63 OK Stat § 1-745.32 (2025)). In a single sentence, womanhood is reduced to reproductive capacity, gender identity is legally irrelevant, and reproductive potential becomes the anchor for sex.

By tethering womanhood to the uterus, lawmakers accomplish three things at once: cis women without uteruses are excluded from the legal imagination of “real” womanhood; trans men with uteruses are absorbed into the category of women; and trans women are positioned as outsiders to reproductive politics altogether. Trans men, when they are considered, are often lumped in with cis women, which obscures the real ways their gender as men shapes how we think about reproductive rights. The current legal and political attack on abortion and on trans life draws from the same logic: that reproductive capacity is destiny, that reproductive function defines womanhood, and that the state has authority over both. Responding to this moment means rethinking not only gender but the connection between sex and reproduction itself.

Reproductive Potential as Weapon

The post-Dobbs wave of legislation has done more than ban abortion. It has reasserted a specific sexual metaphysics: that sex is fixed “at conception,” that reproduction is the natural means for determining gender, and that law can restabilize the connection between sex, reproduction, and gender through the bodies of trans people. In an executive order issued in the name of “protecting women,” Donald Trump defined sex through gamete production: “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” Sex is defined here not through assignment at birth, sex characteristics, chromosomes, hormones, or gender, but through reproductive potential. People are classified by their presumed relationship to reproduction, even when that capacity is hypothetical or unrealized.

Lauren Berlant (2018) calls this “genre flailing”: when established categories become unstable, institutions double down on the most reductive definitions to restore order. Lawmakers retreat to reproductive organs and their potential, and gender-critical movements do something similar when they argue that sex-based protections require defining women by reproductive anatomy. In both cases, the uterus is conscripted into service as the final determinant of gender, and reproduction becomes the anchor for violence and exclusion. I call this definition of personhood “cisgender reproductive capacity.” Trans women are portrayed as intruders into women’s spaces, often because they cannot gestate (Sariego 2026). Trans men are either understood as unreproductive or have their personhood defined through their reproductive capacity. But if pregnancy defines womanhood, then any woman who cannot or does not want to become pregnant becomes marginal to her own category, and any man who is pregnant is reduced to the gestational role he plays. Trans women are not the threat to women’s rights in this framework. The threat is the reduction of all people to reproductive function.

Feminist scholarship has shown that reproduction is shaped by race, class, citizenship, and power (Colen 1986; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995; Roberts 1997; Ross and Solinger 2017), yet pregnancy often remains tethered to gestation. Studies of trans reproduction typically focus on trans men who become pregnant (Light et al. 2014), which can reinforce the assumption that pregnancy plays a definitional role in gender. Instead of removing pregnancy from gender altogether, what if we asked: what is pregnancy? And does it need to be defined by gestation alone?

I understand pregnancy as a genre: a repeated, recognizable form of experience structured by shared conventions, aesthetic expectations, and feelings. Its scripts are racialized, gendered, classed, age-based, ableist, and nationalized, and they shape who is allowed to be pregnant, whose pregnancies are celebrated, and what counts as reproductive labor. Like any genre, it can be stretched without losing intelligibility. Gestation is one expression of pregnancy, but it need not be its totality. If pregnancy is a genre of becoming, then trans women are not outside of it. They can be participants in, challengers to, and re-makers of its conventions. And pregnancy can be part of how trans men understand themselves as men, instead of proof to the contrary.

Trans Men as Boundary Objects

Before turning to a transfeminist reading of pregnancy, I want to discuss the systematic exclusion of trans men from debates about pregnancy and gestation. In my work, I study the rise of anti-trans legislation in the United States, focusing on the regulation of transgender children’s reproductive potential. What caught my eye in this analysis was the legislative record’s hyper-focus on the bodies of trans minors who are female-to-male, or young trans men. Maternal identity and future motherhood, especially breastfeeding, are repeatedly invoked as evidence of the severe loss that comes with transition, in legislation and again in legal cases restricting gender-affirming care for trans minors (Sariego 2026). This introduces a puzzle: why is there such an intense focus on the loss of a maternal future? Why are these cases specifically interested in female-to-male minors? And why are legislators so insistent on ignoring the diversity of family-making that exists beyond narrow biological forms?

In this discourse, the true stakes of gender transition lie not in the present lives of trans children, but in the reproductive futures they might one day lose. In anti-trans legislation and in the broader cultural representation of trans reproduction, trans men are systematically reduced to their cisgender reproductive abilities, and the loss of the ability to reproduce in a distinctly cisgender way is treated as the loss of a pathway to personhood in the law. Trans women are treated differently. They are imagined as incapable of producing children and therefore as socially dangerous to the young trans men they are said to recruit. The threat attributed to trans people operates on both biological and social registers, but these registers follow a gender split. Trans women are rendered entirely social, and trans men entirely biological.

This move misses the way that transition and processes like gestation can be generative for trans people. In my work, I interview trans men about their experiences with gestation. Their experiences vary widely, but what is clear from their narratives is that hyper-binary physical experiences like gestation are intertwined with social reproduction, including the reproduction of the self. The men I interview often describe pregnancy as both creating a child and creating themselves, and they describe the work they do to understand themselves as men who are pregnant. For trans men, pregnancy is a genre challenge: how to understand themselves within a genre that is so hyper-gendered. The result is a creative intertwining of the biological and social processes of reproduction, in which trans men reconnect with the complex experience of creating life for themselves and their children.

Kayden Coleman writes about this in his blog post “Navigating US pregnancy care as a transgender man.” At first, his gender kept him from the reproductive care he needed: he was routinely denied a pregnancy test when he came to his doctor with the symptoms of early pregnancy. Before his doctors knew he was pregnant, they treated his reproductive capacity as the same as a cisgender man’s. There was no way he could be gestating a child. Once he found out he was pregnant, his medical treatment changed completely. Suddenly he was reduced to his reproductive function, and he describes the dehumanizing process that cis women also experience during gestation: lack of autonomy, violation of his wishes for his birth, and persistent prioritization of his role as a gestator over his role as a person. These violations were punctuated by gender. He writes: “I was told that I would not be able to have a C-section because it was too risky and because ‘all of the women on the labor and delivery unit would prefer a natural birth.’” Coleman ceased to be a man once his reproductive capacity became evident, and that capacity was then used to dehumanize him.

The language used to control Coleman’s birth speaks directly to broader concerns about the stability of reproductive dimorphism. The pregnant trans man becomes the point at which anxieties about unstable sex categories are re-articulated and enforced through the reproductive potential of the body. A man doing what is supposed to be a woman’s work sticks out. If men can gestate, shouldn’t that mean gestation is not inherently feminine? Recognizing trans men as doing gestational work as men poses a real risk to the gendered division of reproductive labor, so instead of taking trans men at their word, the genre flails. Trans men get lumped in with cisgender women, and trans women are relegated to the social realm of reproduction and figured as threatening. Men are rendered unintelligible when it comes to pregnancy and gestation. Cisgender men are understood as irrelevant because they cannot gestate, and trans men, who can, are labeled “women” and subjected to the same violent reproductive treatment that cisgender women experience through gestation and birth. By tethering legal personhood to reproductive capacity, the law makes trans men subjects of control as well.

Transition as Reproductive Becoming

When I interview transgender adults, I find that reproduction and transition are overlapping and often indistinguishable processes. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) has been criticized for making this comparison, but I believe it has value. Both involve extreme hormonal shifts, bodily transformation, invasive questions about what is going on with our bodies, and a reorientation toward the future. Treated as intertwined rather than oppositional, they open up more generative possibilities for reproductive solidarity.

In “Performing Transgender Rage” (1994), Susan Stryker describes witnessing her partner give birth, holding both the joy of participating and the pain of where her participation must end, since her body cannot gestate. Yet she describes transition itself as a kind of rebirth. Imagining a return to the “anarchic Womb,” she writes, “In birthing my rage, my rage has rebirthed me,” she writes (Stryker 1994: 241). Without claiming literal gestation, she recognizes that pregnancy is not only about producing another body; it is about producing a self. This is speculative reproduction: using narrative, imagination, and emotion to remake the boundaries of what counts as a reproductive experience. To compare transition and pregnancy is not to collapse the two experiences. It is to recognize that gestation is not the only site where birth and becoming occur. When trans women are excluded from reproductive politics on the grounds that they cannot gestate, what is being denied is not only a biological function but participation in the broader genre of reproductive becoming.

Reproductive Speculation and DIY Futures

Artist and theorist micha cárdenas takes this idea further. In her bioart project Pregnancy, she documents her attempt to produce sperm after going off estrogen, aiming to conceive a child with her partner. Frustrated by the medical system, she turns to DIY science, monitoring sperm under a microscope and chronicling her hormonal shifts in routines that mirror conventional pregnancy. “I'm a trans woman, and I'm pregnant,” she writes (cárdenas 2016). Here, pregnancy is not confined to the uterus. It is a hormonal process, a labor of care, and a refusal of a world that assumes trans women are sterile or disposable. Reproductive speculation, the imagining and enacting of possible reproductive futures, shapes the present. Anti-trans legislators speculate about social collapse and anti-abortion activists about fetal personhood; transfeminist politics do their own speculative work, imagining a future where solidarity rests on a foundation beyond reproductive organs.

Against Inclusion

Not all trans engagements with pregnancy are radical. Some seek legitimacy by adhering to existing norms and reproduce those norms as they go. In 1969, Dawn Langley Hall, a white trans woman in South Carolina, publicly announced her pregnancy after marrying a Black man. Though she did not gestate the child, she performed pregnancy in newspapers, cradling her belly and invoking medical science and divine miracle. Her performance drew on racialized scripts of white womanhood and obscured the labor of the Black woman who actually carried the child (Sariego 2025). Trans reproduction is not inherently subversive. It can reproduce racial hierarchies when norms go unchallenged.

Performance artist Vaginal Davis, by contrast, challenges these genre norms head on. In the 1986 short film That Fertile Feeling, Davis plays an over-the-top pregnant character alongside Fertile La Toya Jackson, who gives birth to 11-tuplets. The film parodies racialized reproductive tropes about Black women while exposing the absurdity of the genre’s expectations. Trans women of color navigate a terrain where their reproduction is either erased or hypersexualized, and when trans women are positioned as threats to “real women,” it is often white, middle-class womanhood that is implicitly being protected. A transfeminist politics must attend to these racial scripts rather than seek inclusion into existing norms.

Still, studies of the family warn against overburdening trans and queer people with the responsibility of reinventing entrenched norms (Matthiesen 2024; Gutterman et al. 2024). Living at the edge of impossible conditions more often produces creative repurposing of norms within the limits of culture, material resources, and political safety (Ammann and Miller 2025).

Toward a Transfeminist Reimagining of Pregnancy

When abortion is banned, when IVF is threatened under fetal personhood doctrines, when miscarriage becomes grounds for criminal investigation, and when trans healthcare is restricted under the banner of protecting children, we are witnessing the same underlying logic: that certain bodies are reproductive vessels subject to state management. Calling pregnancy a genre does not deny its material reality. Gestation involves blood, risk, pain, joy, and mortality. It is also a narrative structure through which the state organizes futurity, national belonging, racial continuity, economic labor, and moral virtue.

If we cling to a purely biological definition of pregnancy, we cede conceptual ground to those who wish to police and control our bodies. If we detach it entirely from biology, we ignore inequalities like Black maternal mortality, forced sterilization, and criminalized miscarriage. A transfeminist politics holds both the material and the speculative, seeing gestation as embodied and embodiment as exceeding anatomy. Pregnancy does not equal womanhood, and womanhood should not hinge on reproduction at all. But pregnancy, as a genre of becoming, can create unexpected solidarities across cis and trans lives. For reproductive justice to survive this political moment, we must build it on something sturdier than our reproductive organs: shared commitments to bodily autonomy, collective care, and the freedom to imagine different futures. What we imagine can change, and what we change can reshape what becomes possible.

Works Cited

• Ammann, Carole, and Peter S. Miller. 2025. “Queerying Doing Family: Gay, Bisexual, and Trans Parents in Switzerland.” LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal 0(0):1–16. doi:10.1080/27703371.2025.2556010.

• cárdenas, micha. 2016. “Pregnancy: Reproductive Futures in Trans of Color Feminism.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3(1–2):48–57. doi:10.1215/23289252-3334187.

• cárdenas, micha. n.d. “Pregnancy | Micha Cárdenas.” Retrieved April 10, 2024. https://michacardenas.sites.ucsc.edu/pregnancy/.

• Colen, Shellee. 1986. “With Respect and Feelings’: Voices of West Indian Child Care Workers in New York City.” J. B. New York: Free Press. 46–70.

• Ginsburg, Faye D., Rayna Rapp, Rayna R. Reiter, and Rayna Rapp Rapp. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. University of California Press.

• Gutterman, Lauren Jae, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Stephen Vider. 2024. “How to Queer the Domestic.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 30(4):361–68. doi:10.1215/10642684-11331066.

• Light, Alexis D., Juno Obedin-Maliver, Jae M. Sevelius, and Jennifer L. Kerns. 2014. “Transgender Men Who Experienced Pregnancy After Female-to-Male Gender Transitioning.” Obstetrics & Gynecology 124(6):1120. doi:10.1097/AOG.0000000000000540.

• Matthiesen, Sara. 2024. “The Discipline Of Family: Queering the History of Reproductive Labor.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 30(4):541–45. doi:10.1215/10642684-11331042.

• Nelson, Maggie. 2015. The Argonauts: A Memoir. First Edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press.

• Roberts, Dorothy E. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Vintage Books.

• Ross, Loretta, and Rickie Solinger. 2017. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. Univ of California Press.

• Sariego, Carlo. 2025. “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire.” Feminist Theory 14647001251326047. doi:10.1177/14647001251326047.

• Sariego, Carlo. 2026. ““Critical Fertilities.”” Yale University, New Haven,CT, Dissertation. Dissertation.

• Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” in When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader. DUKE University Press.

• University of Chicago, and Lauren Berlant. 2018. “Genre Flailing.” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 156–62. doi:10.22387/CAP2018.16.