TNG – The Next Generation. Ms Sugar Swan looks at her feelings towards children and motherhood.
Firstly, I need to apologise to my regular readers. I’m sorry there was no January column from me, I’ll be open and honest as to why. A lot of people look up to me and I get a lot of positive feedback from my work, other trans people are glad to see trans representation in Gscene and strangers get in touch telling me how great it is that I’m holding space for trans people and that they can often relate to what I write, whether they’re trans masculine, feminine, non binary and regardless of whether they’ve been transitioning for two months or 20 years. People think I’m brave and strong to do what I do, but it’s important that you know I’m not Wonder Woman. I’m not always strong and brave and my smile often hides sadness, just like everyone else.
These last few months I’ve been struggling, struggling hard. Last year was a huge one for me in both losses and gains and in December and January it all came to a head. December marked the first anniversary of Mouse’s death and January marked the 20th anniversary (yes, I’m that old) of my first partner Clare and our baby’s death. Whilst 2017 was the best and most productive year in my transition it was the most painful personally for me. Losing Mouse was horrific and something a year later I haven’t even begun to fully unpack. The 20th anniversary of the fatal road traffic accident is a big one, an anniversary that shouldn’t have happened would have left me with a 20-year-old child of my own and I can’t help but wonder how that would have turned out.
This brings me onto this month’s topic of children. Would I have made a good parent? Would I have made better life decisions, would I have transitioned earlier or not at all? Would they be proud of their parent and what I’ve achieved in life, or would they be estranged to me? I’d like to think that I’d have been more responsible with my young life if I had someone 100% dependant on me as their single parent. I’d like to think that I’d have taken fewer risks. However, this is just speculation and I’ve no way of predicting how things would have panned out. What I can do is look forward and look at the relationships I have with children now and possible relationships in the future.
I’m estranged from my only sibling as she turned out to be terribly transphobic so I’ve no scope for being an auntie there. I have friends with young children in our home town, but due to the distance I’ll never be anything more than a family friend, albeit one who they hold very dear. I was absolutely honoured when, in November, I was asked to be godmother to the son of a long-standing friend who I’ve known from the Brighton scene for around 15 years and now we’re busy planning a christening.
When it came to my transition I was asked twice about freezing my sperm for future use should I wish to become a mother, once before starting HRT and again before ‘The Op’. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a viable option for me being HIV positive. So I, like many other trans people, am infertile. It’s something I have to struggle with on a daily basis. I so desperately want a child of my own. I long to experience pregnancy and childbirth and bonding with my baby, something I’ve watched countless people do with a tear in my eye. I’m painfully aware that if I were to meet a male partner and he desired children I cannot give them to him. Yes, plenty of cis women are infertile too, but it still doesn’t help make me feel any less of a woman.
To make the whole thing worse I go through a period of symptoms once a month. Yes, female hormones Oestrogen and Progesterone make me not only crave a baby I can’t have, but they also put me through hell and back once a month just to remind me I can’t conceive. I go through all the standard pre menstrual symptoms that my cis counterparts do, except I don’t bleed. I start with the emotional imbalance and find myself teary-eyed for a day or two, followed by a loss of appetite and the smell of food making me feel sick, then comes the diarrhoea and vomiting, often both together at the same time while I spend a day or two in bed with a hot water bottle feeling sorry for myself that I have to go through all these symptoms but will never get to the end goal of what they are all about.
My best hope is that I meet a partner who already has young children and are in need of another parental figure in their lives. But then of course, my relationship with them is determined by my relationship with their parent and if that relationship were to not work out some years down the line, the likelihood is that I’ll stop seeing these children too at some point, so I’d lose not only a partner, but children too.
Fostering queer kids that don’t fit into mainstream foster accommodation is something that I think I’d be good at and am looking into for the future. Uterus transplants (whilst being trialled on trans women) are still some way in the future yet and I don’t have time on my side. I’ll be 40 in a few years and I don’t want to be the 60-year-old mother waiting at the school gates with the 40-year-olds. I was born to older parents myself and spent my whole life wishing they’d had me earlier in life.
Whatever the future holds for me in the way of children, I hope that I get the chance to be there for some in need and to help shape them into well-rounded adults, starting with my one-year-old god son who’ll certainly grow up to be no transphobe!
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