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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our celebration of LGBTQ Pride Month with segments every Thursday in June, and it's a month with five Thursdays this year. We've got two to go, one right now, one next week. So far in this series, we've spoken about your favorite LGBTQ representation in movies and television, ballroom culture, and we've taken a look at gender euphoria. They talk about gender dysphoria, we asked, what is your gender euphoria and what it's actually like to be trans? If you missed those segments, you can find them at wnyc.org. Now, we take a look at non-binary parenthood.

Sometimes on the show, I use the term pregnant people to include the experiences of those who get pregnant but do not consider themselves to be women or mothers. I use both. I say pregnant women, sometimes I say pregnant people. Yet nearly every time I say pregnant people, someone out there listening, calls, tweets, or texts to criticize using that term at all. While sensationalized imagery of pregnant masculine people isn't uncommon, we rarely hear in depth about the experience of carrying a child while not identifying with womanhood. These individuals and these families exist.

But judging from the responses we get, whenever my language reflects their existence, it's clear that their stories aren't told enough, their experiences aren't widely understood, and their existence is often questioned. Let's take this opportunity to shine a spotlight on gestational parents who are not women, by not just talking about them, but talking to one. Joining me now is Krys Malcolm Belc, he/him. He's the author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood. In his book, he documents his experience of being pregnant while not existing in the gender binary, and of eventually becoming a father who gave birth to his son Samson. Now he shares his story with us. Krys, thanks so much for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Krys: Thank you so much for having me today.

Brian Lehrer: Gestational parent. That's a term that I learned from your book. It's what you call yourself as opposed to a mother. Why is it important to you to separate yourself from motherhood despite carrying and birthing your child?

Krys: Well, in my family in particular, my children have a mother and it's not me. I am partnered to cis woman Anna, who gave birth to two of our children and she's their mother. I've attended four births in my life, and they were the births of my four children, and I saw her become a mother in a traditional way of birthing her children twice. Her experience of doing that was just very different from mine. I didn't really feel like the experiences of motherhood that she had had and that my mother had had and her mother and all of the mothers in my life.

I felt like there was something just slightly different about the experience that I had because in giving birth, I was not becoming a mother. I was becoming a dad. There isn't really a term for that. Gestational fatherhood is one that some people use, but I use gestational parenthood just to make it as all-encompassing as I can because I have had now multiple experiences of where my gender was pinpointed. If there's a spectrum or a more three-dimensional version of a spectrum, I've been in different places and I think gestational parenthood is the easiest way to describe it. I wish that there was a sleeker term, but there just isn't.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, are you a gestational parent who is not a mother? We open the lines for your voices to be added to this conversation. What is something you want others to know about your experience being pregnant, giving birth, and raising a child you carried while being a man or presenting masculine or non-binary? What do you think about the term pregnant person as opposed to pregnant woman or mother? Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parent. I'm sorry, I misspoke the last word, A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood, obviously. I apologize.

The label gestational parent implies that you've experienced pregnancy, an experience most fathers cannot fathom. There's a couple of instances in your book where you mentioned that people often look at you when you're with your children and tell you you're a great father. Whereas in the past, before you began hormone replacement therapy, you were granted what you call the assumption of connection because people thought you were a woman. When people tell you you're a great father, what do you think the underlying assumption is and why is it different from the assumption of connection that you previously received?

Krys: I think it's a really complicated question just because I think our expectations of what dad figures can do and what they should be doing is pretty low. I think a lot of that has to do with misogyny and with assumptions that moms are going to take on most of the labor if children have moms and they're the ones who are going to be doing most of the planning and executing of the non-fun tasks of parenting. I think that when people see me, I've been the primary caretaker of our children for most of their lives now. My oldest child's about to turn 11.

It's been a minute, and I think when people see me with four kids at the grocery store or four kids running some other unglamorous errand, they're just like, "Wow," because it's not really something that you see a lot. When I perhaps presented a little bit more ambiguously and would occasionally be read as my children's mother, it was just like, yes, a mom taking her kids to the grocery store. That's just what's supposed to happen. Part of it is that, and I think that part of what I was trying to write about in my book and something that I'm still thinking through is this push and pull of wanting to be seen and not seen.

I think that all the pushback about terms like pregnant person, it's tough because I do want to be included in things like reproductive healthcare and conversations about abortion and conversations about fertility. I am part of that conversation, but at the same time, there are things about me where I'm just like I'm just a regular guy, I just want my life. I don't want to have that attention. There is always this push and pull for me.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I think a lot of trans people in various circumstances experience that. They just want to live their lives, but everybody's paying so much attention these days. You did write the book. When talking about your experience of your gender during pregnancy, in the book you write that nothing about being pregnant made you feel feminine. Why was this the case and what do you mean by feminine in that context?

Krys: I think because my major experience with pregnancy had been watching my partner carry our first child soon before I had Samson. She really saw it as a very gender-affirming thing and I think felt welcomed into a community of women because people were always approaching her to talk about how exciting it was. She's a nurse so when she would go to work everybody would be commenting on it and asking her how far along she was and all of that stuff. I do feel like she had this communal experience of pregnancy that when I was pregnant it was really not like that. I think people were a little afraid to engage with me over it.

I wasn't really being particularly welcomed into a community because there's not really a script for doing that. I had worried that because she had the experience she had that I would feel very much like what was happening to my body was becoming more womanly. I didn't, I experienced, I think a lot of cis women can probably relate to pregnancy as almost like an alien takeover experience versus something that has to do with other aspects of humanity. I was just very much focused on feeling strange bodily sensations that I'd never felt and feeling like I was a little bit outside myself, but it didn't particularly have a gendered component to it in the way that I was worried it would.

What did have a gendered component for me, and I think what ended up being a really big motivator for me personally to engage with medical transition was how I felt after having the baby, the postpartum period in particular. Breastfeeding also were two things that made me really feel like gender dysphoria in a way that I hadn't before. Those were the things that made me feel more like, wow, I think I really need to take steps to masculinize my experience of embodiment after giving birth.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, that was an interesting part of your book where you detail how you breastfed your son for two years despite the feelings of gender dysphoria toward your chest that you document in the memoir. Can you explain that a little more to people who may not understand what that is or feels like? Did breastfeeding alter your feelings toward your body?

Krys: Definitely for me, breastfeeding significantly altered my experience of having breasts in general. I am a trans guy or trans masculine person. I use different terms. It's all really interchangeable to me, honestly. I have small breasts and I had always been an athlete. Wearing a sports bra around town, it just wasn't really a huge impact on my life. After giving birth, my breasts became significantly larger, and I started just feeling them there in a way that I feel like I don't notice that I have wrists or that I have kneecaps. They are parts of the body that I use them, but I don't really recognize that they're there. When you're breastfeeding, you're on tap all the time.

My demand to eat at any time in any place. I really felt my breasts. They would fill with milk, and they would tingle when the baby would feed. I just had all these bodily sensations that made me recognize them and then have an aversion to having them in a way that maybe hadn't been as intense for me before. I think if you had given me a yes or no option to opt into them as a teenager, I would have said no, thank you. I would rather not have them. They didn't have a huge impact on my life until breastfeeding.

Brian: You couldn't dissociate or disassociate breastfeeding from womanhood, if I'm hearing you right. You couldn't breastfeed your child, but in a non-woman identified way. Am I gathering that right?

Krys: For me personally, it's not really about an ephemeral sense of gender or an internalized sense of gender so much as it is like now that I have these big boobs and I can't wear a binder, so everyone can see that I have them and there's no outfit that could hide them. Also, I'm taking all my kids to the park and the baby might get hungry, so then I'm going to have to breastfeed the baby and then clearly everyone's going to see what's going on. It's more of a public awareness that people are looking at me, which then makes me think about them more, if that makes sense.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some phone calls. As I said, we have a couple of people on the line already. Just reinforcing that you can call up and share your own story of being a gestational parent who does not identify as a woman, or ask a question of my guest, which you can always do, Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Non-Binary Parenthood. 212-433, WNYC. 212-433-9692. Obviously, pregnancy is historically strongly associated with womanhood, which is probably why we always receive questions or criticism when I say pregnant people instead of pregnant women. As I said earlier, I use them interchangeably, and I'll say one time and another another time.

I don't want to lock the term pregnant women out, but I think some people respond negatively to pregnant people for different reasons. Some because they're just anti-trans, whether it's for religious reasons or just hate toward people who they otherize. They can't stand hearing pregnant people because they hate trans. For some people, they see it as a marginalization of women when women have been so discriminated against over time in the patriarchy. They don't want pregnant women to fall out of the language when still 99% or something like that of pregnant people are pregnant women. How do you relate to that conversation when you hear it?

Krys: It's a really difficult conversation for me to wrap my mind around I think because a lot of my life is very family focused for the last couple of years just because I have all these children and domestic life is at the forefront of my mind. My partner is a labor and delivery nurse who is extremely sympathetic and also active about the health care needs of women. That's the passion that started to go into this field. I found that affirming providers and other people who are interested in providing full spectrum health care, including abortion care, fertility care, et cetera, the health and safety of women is the center of their life.

They're just trying to make a little bit of space for folks who might need that care who aren't women. There is nothing about their comportment or practice that has any interest at all in erasing women or motherhood. In fact, they're trying to preserve the lives and safety of women as much as possible. I feel a little confused about the conversation just because people-- It's mostly on the internet that I see people saying, "Well, why are you trying to erase my experience of motherhood?" I'm like, "Nobody who says pregnant people wants to erase your experience of motherhood at all. They're really dedicating their lives to making motherhood a possibility for you and a safe possibility for you."

I feel a little alienated from it. I think it's hard to understand why it's important to make space for what is ultimately a pretty small number of people. I think it's important to remember that trans people seeking any kind of health care are going to be marginalized, both because providers don't understand our needs, but also because it's difficult for a lot of people to get past the dysphoria of doing something like going for a pap smear. Seeing that inclusive language will actually help more people access the care that will make the most people safe and healthy. I just think that you can do both.

I'm all about policies that will benefit moms because at the end of the day, moms are the people who suffer because there's not affordable health care and childcare. You can also make space for people like me to feel comfortable going to the doctor's office.

Brian: Tiffany in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Tiffany.

Tiffany: Hi. Good morning, Brian. It's awesome. My first time actually calling your show, so I'm happy I was able to get through. I have a simple question, and your guest is amazing and has really enlightened me in a lot of ways. Here's my question. From my understanding, you are presenting, or you are a man, he and him pronouns, and I totally get that. I'm just wondering, help me think through this, as you've decided to live life as a man, which is great, what was the first impetus for you to want to become pregnant?

I'm a cis woman, so in my mind's eye, that's a very womanly thing to do, and also just physically speaking, walking around with a pregnant belly, just so to me speaks woman. I'm just wondering the initial decision for you to say, I'm a man, I want to be a man, however, I do want to take this pregnancy journey and very respectfully submit it, just trying to think through it myself. I'm done. That's it.

Brian: Tiffany, thank you. Call us again. Krys?

Krys: Thanks, Tiffany. I think a lot of folks might have this question. I do think that in a lot of relationships where there's a possibility that the trans person wouldn't carry the baby. That's what folks often do. In a family like mine, the cis woman might carry all the babies. A trans person might be more likely to carry babies if their partner is a trans woman or a cis man, or someone who can't carry the baby for them. For me, it was really a practical decision the first time. To give listeners just a little more information, I've carried two pregnancies. I gave birth to my son Samson, who I wrote about in the book, and he's about to turn 10 years old.

Then I also have a seven-month-old at home who I gave birth to as well, our fourth and very much final baby. 10 years ago, my partner Anna and I, really wanted to have children close together. I think that at that time in my early mid 20s, I hadn't really figured out my gender enough to know that it wasn't a strange thing to do or a different thing to do. I was just like, "She did it, and now I got to do it, because that's the easiest way to have children close in age, and it's a sharing of labor and all of those kinds of things." A lot of the thoughts that I had about it that went into the book came after when I finally did the thinking about it when Samson was about five years old.

I was like, "Hey, wait a minute. I need to think about this experience." Then going into a second pregnancy, many years after taking testosterone and presenting as a man in public, I made the decision for a lot of reasons. One of them was that we decided we want another child. I do think that if I can share in the physical labor of having a baby, which lasts a lot longer than 9 to 10 months of pregnancy, but is really about the recovery period, the breastfeeding period. It's really a total body experience that can take up to two years.

My partner was at a point in her career where she just didn't want to do that, but we wanted to have another baby, so it was practical again. I also was interested in the way that I've experienced. I listened to your segment on gender euphoria, Brian, and I had so many experiences of gender euphoria in the years since starting hormones. I was on testosterone for five years before getting pregnant. I just felt embodied in a way that I never had before where I didn't have to make any decisions about the direction my body was going. I just was like, "It's a great body and I'm just living my regular life."

I wanted to know what it would be like to have the experience of pregnancy at a time when I did feel a little less disassociated and unsure about my body. You don't have a baby because you want to be pregnant and go on this vanity project at all. We were very invested in having a fourth child, but for many reasons, it just felt like the right thing for me to do. It has been a really empowering and affirming experience. More so I think since I've transitioned than it was before when I was presenting in a very androgynous way and providers and people in the community were unsure about what was happening this time.

I was just clearly a pregnant guy and I'm lucky to live in a part of Philadelphia where it wasn't an issue, but because I don't think pregnancy makes me feel womanly at all, that wasn't really a concern for me. I think if I lived in an area of the country where I thought I would get negative attention like when my family lived in upper Michigan, for example, I might not have done this. I just knew that I would be safe and taken care of. It made sense for us.

Brian Lehrer: It's amazing that you live in a place, whatever part of Philadelphia that is, where presenting as a pregnant man explicitly is not a thing. That drew a lot of reactions because I could only imagine that people would look at you weird if they were strangers or you would get nasty comments here and there from bigots. But you're saying you were able to insulate yourself from that a lot.

Krys: Yes, I'm very privileged in a lot of ways. I'm a White guy and we're middle-class, but I really think the community we live in is another way in which I've been really lucky about my experience as I actually had. This time around, I had a trans midwife deliver my baby. Even the healthcare that I got was just very affirming and positive. I think a lot of parenting regardless of gender or what the issue is, you might not agree with what people are doing or you might think that it's strange, but it's best for my parenting if I stay out of other people's decision-making as long as it's not unsafe.

I think a lot of folks in my community, Philadelphia is known as being a pretty rude city, but I think at the end of the day, people were focused on what they were doing and like, all right, well, this guy's doing what he's doing, but that's not really affecting anyone in a negative way so it's fine.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Shelley in Westport, you're on WNYC. Hi, Shelley.

Shelley: Thank you for taking the call a long time. When a young couple or an old couple announces to us, so excited, they go, "Mom, dad, we are pregnant." We're like, "Oh, we're so happy," and isn't it wonderful because we know whether it's a pregnancy or other life-changing situation, it is the couple that's involved, but we'd never criticize our son and daughter-in-law saying we are pregnant. How come when it's coming from the other side talking about pregnant people, some people are choosing to get into such a huff about it?

How silly. When there are medical restrictions, I would like to believe people who are about to become parents understand that it's only the one with the fetus in the body that needs to restrict the wine amount. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea if both pregnant people restricted their wine amount as preparation for parenthood. Good luck. Everybody should just live and love and be healthy and let every baby be wanted and born healthy. Congratulations on your struggle, your growth, and the example you are willing to set for other people to be true to themselves and the people they care about.

Brian Lehrer: That's so sweet. Shelley, thank you very much. Anything you want to say briefly to her, Krys?

Krys: Thank you. I really appreciate it and I do feel like it's been a really big gift in my life that I've gotten. I have this very full family and I have gotten to be on both sides, which I think not a lot of people get to be the supportive partner or not as supportive as they want to be. That was something that I learned in my experience the first time around when we had our first, that maybe I hadn't been the best support person to my partner. Once I was on the other side and had a baby, I realized things that I could have done better. I do think that it has given me a perspective that not a lot of people get to have. For that reason, I'm very grateful to be trans. I feel like if I was a cis guy, I wouldn't have the life that I've had and I wouldn't have these experiences, so thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe that answers the final question I was going to ask you because you said you listened to our earlier segment on what gives people gender euphoria. I was going to ask, what about you? What gives you gender euphoria?

Krys: For me, it's a lot of external stuff that you do to the outer portions of the body or stuff that you put on the body. Although I'm a very square person, a little bit of a nerd, a little bit of a video game nerd, and I teach creative writing for a living, so I'm very nerdy but I have lots of piercings and tattoos and I love getting a good haircut at the barber. That's an experience I wrote about in my book when you find a gender-affirming barber who's going to give you a great haircut. Those are the things that really do it for me. Clothing, jewellery. I think in that way I'm similar to really a lot of cis people because that's how cis people affirm their gender and what they wear and that kind of stuff. That's really it for me.

Brian Lehrer: Krys Malcolm Belc, author of The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood. Thank you for being so open with us and with our callers and happy pride.

Krys: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

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