A transgender man received a Father’s Day spotlight on NPR for giving birth to two daughters in a piece on Saturday according to Fox News.
Alongside the story of a military father and an immigrant refugee parent, the publicly-funded news site described 37-year-old Kayden Coleman, who experienced a surprise pregnancy after temporarily stopping hormones for a top surgery.
“In 2013, he had just had top surgery — a double mastectomy — and had temporarily stopped taking hormones for the procedure. Coleman, who is transgender, said doctors had told him he couldn’t get pregnant.
A few years later, assuming that he’d been taking hormones long enough to avoid another pregnancy, he found he was expecting again,” the article read. “Today, he is raising two young daughters.” NPR’s piece also focused on issues Coleman faced as a pregnant man along with the “perceptions and expectations” of having children.
“I experienced a lot of pushback and discrimination within the medical system based on preconceived ideas of what a pregnant person is supposed to look like,” Coleman told NPR.
“I had to convince a lot of people that I was pregnant and that I wasn’t just a strange man trying to infiltrate the OB-GYN’s office,” Coleman added. “I got offered abortions an astronomical amount of times.
I think that comes from the idea that people think that trans people either don’t want to have kids or shouldn’t have kids.” The article also allowed Coleman to push back against alleged misconceptions about transgender parents.
“One of the biggest things that people get wrong is that we hate our bodies, and thus, anything remotely feminine would be something that we will reject — including pregnancy. For those of us who identify more on the masculine spectrum, just because we identify as such does not take away our desire to have kids. If we have the body parts to do so, why not?” Coleman said.
