Baby?

There is a baby in my bedroom. I’m at the bottom of the stairs, staring upwards towards the door which is bolted closed with a medieval drawbar. Faint crying is drifting down. I realise I’m climbing the stairs, getting increasingly agitated as the crying turns into shrieks, and it is very important to me that I get to the other side of the door. As my foot touches the top step the bar falls off, and the door swings open. The shrieks get louder. A wicker cot is in the centre of the floor, rocking slightly from side to side. I approach it slowly. 

It’s just a baby. Swaddled in a soft grey blanket, only its face is visible. The baby looks at me, and stops crying. Giant brown eyes and a face that breaks out into a mischievous wide smile. It raises its hands towards me and gurgles. All my fear and agitation falls away, and I reach down to pick it up. As soon as the baby touches my chest, it explodes.

I’ve had this recurring dream for the last few years. It’s always the same. The baby’s skull splinters as if stamped upon with leather boots, grey and red matter blinding my eyes and filling my nostrils. Bones shoot inside my torso, piercing my lower stomach and knocking me off my feet. The blanket becomes heavy with blood, no longer a recognisable shape. All organs and teeth. The final image is one of tiny bones piercing through my pelvis, charred black. 

The first time it happened, it felt so real I had to check to make sure baby organs weren’t spattered across the room. I couldn’t shake the taste of blood from my mouth and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Whenever I shut my eyes I saw the baby’s skull. It frightened me so much I never spoke of it.

This was in the winter of 2023. For whatever reason, I had the dream at least once a week for nearly a year. Each time, my body response became less and less pronounced. The visceral, raw body horror became numb, and the heart palpitations would be shaken off sometimes within minutes. I wouldn’t need to check under my bed for blood. It was still upsetting, still always somehow a surprise, but transformed into a regular unsettling fixture that felt oddly comforting. The same emotion as when I listened to Joy Division as an adult: the catharsis of wallowing in the dramatic sadness and scream-crying every single lyric that you still know by heart.

I started to focus more on the baby itself. How its oval shaped face, contorted into earth-shattering shrieks, relaxed as soon as I came through the door. How its limbs moved underneath the grey blanket, its tiny fingers balled into fists as it reached up to me in hope. These became the images that haunted my closed eyes.

When I moved back home, the dream stopped. I should have been delighted - I was finally starting to get better. But I also began to grieve the baby. Even though my only interactions were trying desperately to reach it, holding it in my arms and watching it die - that was a presence. For a few seconds every week I got to hold a baby that looked only to me for comfort, that smiled at me with recognition. That presence that was now gone, and the absence was worse.

As I am writing this I can picture it. It looks similar to me and my mother as newborns, but not exactly the same. Its skin is more olive, with lighter hair and longer fingers. We cannot dream of faces we have not already seen, and I feel that I know this baby, that it is mine.

It is now 2025. It's been nearly a year since I had the dream, but I am thinking about it more than ever. Because my health has deteriorated, and numerous doctors have told me over the last year that my decision to medically transition for the last decade has rendered me infertile. That I will never conceive through my own decision to take HRT. And I don't believe them

They said it casually. One doctor whilst the speculum was still inside me. This conversation is harder to have with women, who want children. I couldn’t see her face at all as she told me, hidden behind my legs as she looked at the lopsided strings coming out of my cervix, and found myself biting back tears staring at the chipped paint on the ceiling of her office. In her mind, this conversation did not meet the gravitas necessary for eye contact. And why should it? It should not have been a surprise, as this is what is expected to happen to transgender men. I chose this, so why would it bother me? This is what you wanted?

With women, who want children. This conversation was ‘easy’ because, as a transsexual, I should not want to raise children - because of the assumption that infertility is something I consciously chose, and the more pervasive, unspoken belief that it would be wrong for me to. That transsexuals are too deviant, being inherently self-immolating and narcissistic and too unstable to be a parent, let alone to conceive a child themselves. Or perhaps she was being more gentle and thought that, since the medical mechanisms of trans pregnancy have become so undignified, I would never want to subject myself to them.

If I were to become pregnant now, after the EHRC ruling, I could not be kept in a maternity ward nor could I be in either male or female wards. I would be unable to access many maternity support services because my male appearance could cause “alarm” to cisgender women. I could not be registered as a father on my baby’s birth certificate. I could perhaps be denied paternity support services on those grounds, or because I am not a cisgender male. 

Over the summer, I read about a transgender man whose Gender Recognition Certificate was denied on the basis that he was trying to naturally conceive. To get pregnant. I read the articles: how this ruling flies in the face of the Gender Recognition Act which “never” required trans patients to be sterilised, and how this establishes a eugenic precedent that trans people must be childless to be seen as people. I read about his case on the way to a pelvic ultrasound appointment where I was told, once again, that I am infertile and damaged by a doctor who radiated nervous pity. Checking into that waiting room, sat next to women who looked at me with polite confusion and mild hostility, sitting with the feeling of being visibly and pointedly other, was an insight into my future in this country that I do not think I am prepared for.

I asked all the doctors how they could know that I am infertile. I keep regularly menstruating. I haven’t gotten my tubes tied or a hysterectomy, and testosterone alone cannot cause permanent sterility - so how can you be sure? They had no answers. One was tight lipped and shrugged. It would be very unlikely. 

In the book Still Born by Guadelupe Nattel, Alina has a baby who is born with a severe brain injury. She is told throughout her pregnancy that the baby will be still-born, that she is brain dead & will not survive. The baby is born, and she lives. She is then told her baby is deaf and blind, but notices that her baby responds to her environment. Starting when an object is fallen to the floor. ‘Seeing’ her mother look over her in the cot and gurgling in recognition. When the couple excitedly mentioned this to the neurologist, he peered at them suspiciously and changed the subject. In the doctors eyes, none of this was possible. When the doctor said it would be unlikely, I think what he meant to say was it would make me uncomfortable.

It would be easier for everyone if I was not transsexual. But I am, and it is a knee-jerk impulse of lazy eugenics to state that simply because of that, I am not allowed to conceive of a future with children. It is easier to put a halt to an incomprehensible body than to understand it. 

When my health settled, I briefly hated myself. Specifically, the child who sought testosterone and put me in this position as an adult. For a second I cursed him for not thinking ahead, for stubbornly shutting down conversations about fertility with doctors as a teenager. Giving voice to the part of me that was always morbidly curious as to why I had that dream over and over again. Did I secretly desire to detransition? Was I lashing out at myself, forcing myself to realise a visceral destruction of my own reproductive potential by watching my baby die over and over again? A tiny, vicious voice, fuelled by self hatred, that resents how transsexuality has rendered my body a permanent outsider in a world that doesn’t want us to exist. A voice that has gotten louder over as I’ve been forced to consider what a life post-medical detransition looks like as England hurtles head-first into fascism. But that imperfect, irrational and incoherent teen stubbornness means I get to exist, alive, in my mid-twenties, and able to untangle myself and what I really want. To be able to grieve without self hatred. 

I had never considered that I would ever want children, let alone carry them myself. I still have not unpacked what I actually want. I don’t think I will for a very long time. But the baby that doesn’t exist, the baby that I am grieving, I can still see it even though it may never be real. But what a joy it is to be alive and to be able to regret.

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I am a radical trans writer drawn to the spaces in which trans experience is often silenced, self-censored or feared. In a climate of assimilation and survival, it is risky to write about certain issues because our words can (and are) twisted by hostile actors. I go to the heart of these issues because they must be heard.

I am an emerging writer, published in small magazines and featured in literary readings - inspired by Jules Gill-Peterson, Sven Lindqvist and Guadalupe Nettel. I am currently developing a long-form experimental project on transmasculine fertility and the politics of ‘regret’ which I hope to expand into a book; my ‘ambition’, currently, is simply to one day sustain myself fully through writing.

Instagram: @el.iott