I'm a Pregnant Lesbian. Gender Ideology Would Have Stolen My Baby from Me

For most of my life, I knew I wanted kids. In my early twenties, my partner mentioned that maybe she didn’t want them after all, which upset me a great deal. It led to a dream where I was holding my newborn baby in my arms—a feeling that I couldn’t shake. A few years later, it was my turn to doubt children as I had dealt with a few bouts of depression and felt that not only did I not want to pass that on but that it wouldn’t make me a good parent. A couple of years later we discussed it again and found that we were on the same page. We did want kids after all! But now we ran up against the brick wall of biology.

When I was a young lesbian, it was easy to imagine that kids would somehow materialize when I decided I wanted them. I’d be willing to have up to four kids, I told myself, being one of four myself. How? Who knows! But it was bound to work out, right?

Well, Tara and I got to weighing our options. I was not thrilled about the prospect of a sperm bank. I didn’t want to make a child that didn’t know anything about half of their origins. We browsed a catalog once just for fun and it felt strange and disconnected. I don’t judge people who go this route or have a child who, for whatever reason, doesn’t know one parent. I don’t think it’s the end of the world or the most important part of raising a child. But if I could, I didn’t want to go that way.

So, about a year ago, we decided who to ask. And I couldn’t be happier about it. For the record, it’s no secret among friends and family, but I’m not about to blast his name all over the internet.

Then, last summer, we started reaching out to the fertility clinic. I’m not sure why we saw that as the only way to go. We knew some straight couples who were going through intrauterine insemination (IUI), so I guess we thought that would be our best shot as well. It seemed fairly straightforward and, while pricey, what these couples told us about the cost seemed manageable, at least. We figured it couldn’t be much different for us and our known donor.

Well, things didn’t quite go as expected. Let me quote here from a previous piece I wrote about our appointment in September 2023:

When my partner Tara and I first walked through the doors of the clinic, we felt good about it. We had our forms ready. She hadn’t filled out the part asking about her cycle because I was the one who wanted to get pregnant—there was no question about this.

The first hint of strangeness came when we were sitting in the room waiting for the doctor and a staff member came in to instruct Tara that she must fill out that section of the form. No biggie, we thought. If that’s protocol then that’s protocol.

Still, you might think that one of the first things the doctor would ask us would be who planned to carry the baby. Instead, we had to interject to make our plans clear when he started prattling off a list of options that we knew we wanted nothing to do with. We told him that I was carrying and that we had a donor picked out.

We didn’t imagine that it would be such a problematic thing to say.

Instantly, we felt pressured to go with an anonymous donor instead. It was much cheaper and a much more straightforward and quicker option. But we stuck to our guns. Shouldn’t it have been obvious that we probably already gave considerable thought to such a big step?

I’ll interject here to say that the cost quoted to us to go with our known donor was three times as expensive as what our straight friends were paying. I felt like I should have just come in with him and pretended to be a couple. I’m sure there are reasons for this, and I’m not about to cry discrimination (in a way, we had the lesbian privilege of not being told to try for a year before coming back, as straight couples are told to do), it was just quite a shock.

We also felt very pressured towards IVF rather than the IUI process that we originally had in mind, which would be at minimum $20,000 for one try.

I had zero interest in going through such an invasive and expensive process nor in creating embryos, and we made it clear that option was off the table. We were forced to take home an informational package about it anyway.

The doctor even suggested taking Tara’s eggs and implanting them in me, at which point I wanted to pull my hair out—we had come to them with very carefully considered desires about how we wanted this process to go, and we were being offered everything but the only path we were actually confident in and excited about!

Again putting our foot down and insisting we wanted to use our known donor and we didn’t want to experiment with every kind of reproductive tech known to humanity, we started getting some information about what that would look like.

Well, what that looked like was convoluted and expensive, but I chalked it up to regulations (a lot of the steps we had to take were indeed due to Health Canada regulations) and accepted the information.

We had agreed beforehand that we’d pay whatever we needed to pay and do what we needed to do. It wasn’t so much the costs that were eating at us (though the figures were daunting), but the feeling that this was not our process, that the clinic would only begrudgingly help us in the way we had decided on after so much thought and consideration.

We also discovered that I’d have to go through numerous types of diagnostics (one highly invasive) to make sure there were no issues with my fertility, even though I don’t have a reason to suspect any. Again, I chalked it up to regulations and protocol and was willing to do anything required of me.

Our heads spinning, we finally finished the appointment. The first thing I said to Tara when we were outside was, “So, turkey baster?” I was half joking, half testing the waters.

Thankfully, later that day, my sister had the good sense to try to talk me into just doing it ourselves. One of her friends knew someone who had done it, she said. When I brought the idea up with another friend, she also knew a couple that took matters into their own hands. By the end of the day, I was convinced, and we decided to cut the clinic out of the process.

So, we got about doing it ourselves. I’ll spare you the details, but I’m happy to share tips with anyone considering or going through the process (just reach out to me!). And no, we didn’t use an actual turkey baster.

The first three attempts didn’t work, likely due to bad timing. Finally, I convinced myself that by the time my test trips showed my luteinizing hormone was surging, I had probably already ovulated. Conventional wisdom says that the egg is released 24-36 hours after a positive ovulation test. Who knows if I was really correct about this, but we were successful on the fourth try! This was in February, just a few days after I had told multiple news networks in Alberta that I was trying to have a baby. At least I wasn’t going to have to eat my words!

(Interestingly enough, ultrasound dating has put my baby gestationally four days further ahead than dating by the start of my last period, even though I have a 28-day cycle. It’s not a huge or uncommon discrepancy, but it does make me think I really do ovulate on the early side. Who knows. Throughout the process I kept saying that it felt like I was playing roulette in my womb.)

I’m 14 weeks today and it’s still hard to believe that it actually worked. Tara and I are thrilled and we can’t wait to meet our little one. Our families are thrilled too. In fact, I’ve been surprised by just how many people are getting joy out of this new arrival.

It has been quite a process, with many ups and downs. I naively thought the hard part, emotionally at least, was trying to get pregnant, since every negative pregnancy test was a big letdown. As I progressed through my very difficult first trimester and as I continue to get nearly daily migraines now, I laughed at my former self. That part was easy compared to what I was going through!

Despite this, I am happy to be able to go through this process at all. As I told the news outlets in Edmonton that day, “I really shudder at the thought that that would have been stolen from me.”

I was referencing the fact that if I was born a little later, or if I just happened to stumble into the wrong corners of the internet when I was younger, I would have very likely believed that I was “trans.” Along with that “identity” comes the risk of setting down a pathway of medicalization that ultimately leads to sterilization. And if that had happened then, well, I wouldn’t be looking forward to meeting my baby.

And no, this isn’t just something I am saying flippantly. As I explained in a piece for Reality’s Last Stand, I would have easily hit the DSM-5 criteria for childhood gender dysphoria. Plus, let’s not forget that today’s favored “gender-affirmation” approach throws out any criteria or gatekeeping entirely.

I Would Have Been a ‘Trans Kid’—Stop Medicalizing Gender Non-Conformity

It’s not that I am asking people to have sympathy for a hypothetical me that doesn’t actually exist. The truth is I did escape gender ideology growing up and therefore did preserve my fertility. I use myself as an example to get others to realize that there are many women like me who did not escape the clutches of this horrible ideology. Today, they can’t have children even though they wish they could.

Those who have made peace with that fact or who wouldn’t have wanted children anyway still have to deal with negative impacts on their sexual function and overall health. Bringing fertility into it grabs people viscerally, but even women (and men) who did not and continue to not want kids don’t deserve the harm that was done to them just because they were different.

There are so many children and young people growing up right now who have been sucked into this ideology and who will have to deal with their reality and regret in the future. So many of them are young girls just like I was, young girls who don’t realize they can be themselves and get everything they want out of life without pretending they are something they’re not and hurting their bodies along the way.

I feel powerless to stop them in any real way except for sharing my own story and hoping it lands on the right ears at the right time.

I do also feel grateful to live in a province that is starting to take action on this issue. When Alberta Premier Danielle Smith introduced the policy changes that would aim to ban surgeries and puberty blockers under certain ages, she talked about preserving the right to choose. Children deserve to have the opportunity to grow up and make choices like the ones I was able to make.

At the same time, while the ideology remains around, even policy changes aren’t going to prevent tragedy. People can still make these decisions at ages too young to really understand what they are doing, under the sway of dangerous cult-like ideas. That’s why it’s ultimately more important that Smith blew the conversation open.

You can’t legislate your way out of societal sickness, though the right legislation can provide some help. We need a cultural shift, one that can only happen through discussion, which is why the pressure to silence these discussions can be so immense. But they are happening, and things are changing, so all we have to do is not stop.