OMG

[bladespark]

Apparently I need to read more mpreg? Is this a thing? Or is this author just unexpectedly awesome in navigating roles and genders?

See, I am reading an Aziraphale mpreg fic (in which he has a vagina, huzzah. I think butt babies are both dumb and a little bit transphobic. Men can have vaginas, okay? That's a thing, it's okay.) and in this fic Crowley calls Aziraphale the baby's "mother" but still uses male pronouns for him, and just...I think I've died of relatable feels here.

I've had looks of incomprehension, I've had fights, I've had the "sigh, I won't even bother to explain" over this, and nobody ever, ever, ever seems to just get it. I'm a man, I'm male, I'm a guy, and I'm also my Goober's mother, not her father. That's just how it is. I carried her, I nursed her, I'm raising her, I have a maternal role.

I'm not saying that a man carrying a child has to feel maternal or be a mother. Everyone should get to define their own identity and roles.

But for fuck's sake, I get to define my identity and roles, and I am a mother, not a father, okay? That's what fits, that's how I feel, that's what I am. She has a father, it's not me.

It feels so exhausting, trying to explain this to people! At least most people out there at least have the concept of "transgender" to start from when I try to explain myself, but absolutely nobody seems to understand that it's still not binary, that being a man doesn't shove me into the stereotypically male gender box anymore than it does any given cis man. And (here's where I had a fight with somebody) feeling maternal doesn't mean I'm being "forced" into societal gender roles against my will. I tried feeling paternal about the kid, the closest I could come was "seahorse dad", and that's a male maternal role, really. I felt much more at home and at peace and less dysphoric about it all when I embraced "I'm a guy, I'm a mom" as my thing. That's me, that's what I want, nobody has forced it on me. I'm not required to reject societal norms and roles any more than I'm required to accept them!

But god, after all the struggles I've had getting this through anybody's head, to just have the exact same thing right there in a story that I didn't write is amazing!

Comments

[dreamwriteremmy]

Honestly, it's VARIABLE in mpreg. some folx do the 'butt babies' or some sort of 'psuedoscience-intersex' thing, i do intersex queers with binary and nonbinary gender identifications [most of the fandoms i write mpreg in are with nonhuman/supernatural maternal figures anyways so claiming the nonhuman mythological species is intersex works for me], some folx do the trans but has female sex organs thing. *shrugs* Also i want the link to that fic please! :o

[bladespark]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20143396/chapters/47722075 There you go. I'm not saying it's objectively a super amazing story, I actually can critique it quite a lot, but it's fun reading anyway.

[hitokage]

If you're gonna wade through mpreg tags, be sure to wear protection! There's a lot of variance from yikes to HOLY YIKES, BATMAN to okay that's actually well considered. Most of the mpreg I've written has been in an Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics context (I know, but I can't put the trope down) ... though come to think of it, the male-identifying moms I write outside that context, I haven't written much where any of them really actively think about that. Being "Mom" is just part of who they are, for them and for the kids.

[bladespark]

I haven't sought out mpreg, but I've tripped over enough to know about "HOLY YIKES, BATMAN". :D (And I kinda like some Alpha/beta/omega stuff myself, though most of it is eye-rollingly bad.)

[hitokage]

It's one of those tropes that, when it's done thoughtfully, can really go well! And when it's not (and the vast majority of the time, it's not), holy criminy does it plunge headlong into the badness. And yet I keep waddling into the tag, hoping to find something good.

[silveradept]

Representation is awesome, and even more so when it's well-done.

[bladespark]

The story itself is not without its flaws, but I very much enjoyed the fact that Aziraphale's mother/male identity is just *there*. Sometimes it's good when stories make such things present and explicit and explained, but sometimes it's just sweet to see them treated as totally normal and not even mentioned.

[angelwolfy]

okay pardon me for butting in stranger but... i also want to add that plenty people see cis character as "moms" when theyre raising kids/caring for them? i see people call steve harrington from stranger things a mom all the time! and several people call aizawa from boku no hero academia a mom? i mean im sure theres real life examples but at least in terms of maternal vs paternal men being moms isnt really THT outlandish so honestly dont get why someone would argue w you on it when its genuinely... not tht deep. i never have good luck w mpreg fics but the concept of it not being butt babies is ideal honest to god so i may check this one out :0

[heartonsnow]

The whole issue seems simple to me, as soon as people realise that gender is not black and white but a rainbow, everything will make sense but I don't think we are there yet.

[duskpeterson]

A recipe for patience that I frequently have to turn to is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, namely this:

"First Known Use of transgender: 1974."

"First Known Use of genderqueer: 1995."

All this is *new* to most people; they're still trying to wrap their minds around the idea of female-to-male and male-to-female, and oh no, now there's that nonbinary thing, and the only way they can cope with it is by trying to set up new rules. And if they're trans themselves, the consequences of *not* adhering to those rules could be deadly.

So they stick to what they know - binariness - and try to argue that they, and everyone around them is still binary, just in a different way.

So I stay patient. I explain. I share. And people do sometimes see, eventually. Obviously, some mpreg writers have seen for a while. :)

[bladespark]

Knowing that there are reasons for people to treat you like shit and being patient with people treating you like shit are entirely different things, alas. I know why, but it doesn't keep it from being difficult.

[duskpeterson]

I'm sorry if I made it sound as though I was counselling you on how to handle people around you. I'm not in your shoes; I don't know what sort of people you're dealing with. I guess all I was saying was: I empathize, here's the situation I'm in, and here's how I've coped.

The circumstances themselves haven't always been easy. I've been barred from membership in a trans organization, for not being trans enough. I've been verbally harassed for being too trans. I once got screamed at online for being a woman trying to pose as a man; then, a few weeks later, I was screamed at online for being a man trying to pose as a woman. I had a mentor I adored tell me he couldn't deal with me because I kept switching between boy and girl.

My transman apprentice has similar stories. I think every human does, whether or not the topic is gender. So that's how I cope when attacked: by remembering that the other person has been attacked and hurt too, and that chances are good that they mistake me as a threat.

That's my coping mechanism. I wish you well in finding yours.

[bladespark]

I know everyone has their own way to deal with these issues.

Just. I keep running into the idea that I need to be kind and gentle and caring and educational to bigots and it makes me want to scream. I have spent so much energy futilely trying to get even the tiniest scrap of understanding into the minds of bigots I have reasons to care about, who are family, who are close to me, who I give a shit about, and it goes fucking nowhere. The idea of my being somehow obligated to spend even one erg of further energy on the comfort of strangers makes me want to be violent.

Maybe also not a healthy reaction, but I'm so fucking tired of trying to explain things to people who repeatedly refuse to understand. Why bother to explain anything to anybody?

P.S. I also don't say this to start a fight or anything, but something coming into the language 45 years ago doesn't make it new. It's literally older than I am as a term, and much older than that as a concept, and if you haven't heard of "transgender" by now you're living under a rock. Ignorance is zero excuse on that one.

[duskpeterson]

(Creaky old person remembers to say transgender rather than transsexual. Even creakier old person recalls that "transvestite" is out of fashion too.)

Sorry that I was showing my age. :) My parents are in their eighties, so they didn't grow up with transgenderism in the media all the time. For that matter, neither did I. I can't recall encountering a single transgender person on TV, in movies, or in books while I was growing up. If I chanced across any mentions of transgender people in the newspaper, I didn't understand what I was reading. So I didn't know that such people existed till I found books about them in the university library when I was 18, in 1981. That was around the time I doscovered the "sweet transvestite" in "Rocky Horror" too; man, was that a shock. But outside of the LGBT community, I encountered - oh, I think one memoir and one TV show about transgenderism till the mid-1990s.

Then matters got worse. When I realized in 1997 that I was nonbinary, the concept of such people hadn't even hit the trans community yet. Ten years later, I was still having to explain my identity to LGBT folks.

I obviously have a far higher tolerance for this sort of thing than the average person, or, much more likely, have talked about it with far fewer people. But I just went through the whole "please call me Dusk or Mx. Peterson" routine this summer at my doctors' offices, and it was nervewracking, especially when I was escorted in shortly thereafter to see a doctor who had a MAGA cap facing my seat.

I know that I've been incredibly blessed by encountering less bigotry than most trans people. I shudder to think what it must have been like for you, growing up amidst bigotry. My parents had/have a hard time understanding, but they're Tolerance personified.

Now, about tactics: I repeat that I wasn't trying to offer a universal prescriptive. I've known for over a decade that there are marginalized folks out there who strongly feel they are under no obligation to educate the ignorant. I'm awfully sorry that I upset you by sharing my story. I won't derail your threads in the future by mentioning my circumstances.

[bladespark]

I'm 41. I was raised Mormon. My entire family and youthful social circle was shocked and scandalized by the very idea that "bisexual" might be a thing. I KNOW this.

But it's not an excuse!

When I was a dyed-in-the-wool Mormon who believed that all humans were inherently Daughters or Sons of God, I still used "hir" in chatrooms for random strangers who wanted that as their pronoun in 1998. Basic civility doesn't take deep understanding and people who won't even try get none of my patience.

That's the thing. "Old" or "I wasn't raised with this" is NO fucking excuse I personally know that intimately.

[duskpeterson]

Um . . . I think I was saying the same thing by praising my parents' tolerance?

I have to go to bed - I've been up for nearly 48 hours straight - and just as you don't deal well with talk of being civil to bigots, I'm afraid I don't deal well with angry discussions. Abuse survivor here. So I think this is the best place for us to wrap up this conversation, but I do hope you find your way out of this dilemma.

Good night! (Or good morning, if that's what it is where you are.)

[bladespark]

Sorry, I think I'm doing the thing where I rehash arguments I've had with other people.

[duskpeterson]

Either that, or I was being obtuse again. :)

[the_siobhan]

I was thinking about this post this morning because I'm reading a WIP where Crowley gets pregnant. One of the things I am loving about it is that Crowley is written as gender-fluid and the writer very clearly delineates when she is female and when he is a male with a vagina/uterus. And the term "mother" is used regardless.

(It's Divine Misconceptions if you are interested. Really the whole series is a hoot.

[bladespark]

Ooo, I haven't read that one yet. *bookmarks*

[bladespark]

Okay, this is amazing. I knew I'd love it half way through the first chapter. I'm at the end of chapter two now and I have laughed SO MUCH.

And actually I'd read the first two in that series! Need to read the rest too, at some point.

[the_siobhan]

I won't lie, the snake penis thing also reminded me of yours. :-)

[bladespark]

Hah! Well, I'm hardly the first to do that one. But it's a very irresistible fact for a smut writer once you find out about it.