Bennett Kaspar-Williams: Trans man who gave birth slams nurses for calling him 'mom'
A transgender man, Bennett Kaspar-Williams, 37, has condemned nurses in a hospital for referring to him as 'mom' after he gave birth via cesarean. Kaspar-Williams and husband Malik are now parents to a baby boy, Hudson. What troubled Kaspar-Williams was how the hospital staff constantly misgendered him by calling him 'mom'.
“No one can ever really know whether having children is possible until you try — being born with a uterus doesn’t make conceiving or carrying a certainty,” the father said. “That’s why it’s so important that we stop defining ‘womanhood’ in terms of ‘motherhood,’ because it’s a false equivalency that all women can become mothers, that all mothers carry their children, or that all people who carry children are mothers.”
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Kaspar-Williams began transitioning in 2014 after realizing he was trans in 2011, the Daily Mail reported. His transitioning process included getting a $5,000-surgery on the top of his body, but not the bottom half. “It was really liberating,” he said while speaking about the surgery to remove his breasts. “I never could have anticipated what a relief it would be to find them gone. It was a huge weight off my shoulders.”
Kaspar-Williams said trying to conceive, being successful, and being pregnant were not challenging to his gender identity. The real challenge he had to face, he said, was dealing with the medical professionals constantly misgendering him.
“The only thing that made me dysphoric about my pregnancy was the misgendering that happened to me when I was getting medical care for my pregnancy,” he said. “The business of pregnancy — and yes, I say business, because the entire institution of pregnancy care in America is centered around selling this concept of ‘motherhood’ — is so intertwined with gender that it was hard to escape being misgendered.” He said that despite his full beard, flat chest and the “male” gender marker on his paperwork, “people could not help but default to calling me ‘mom,’ ‘mother,’ or ‘ma’am”.
“Nothing feels stronger than being able to say I’m a dad who created my own child,” he said, adding, "To my son, there’s nothing more natural and normal than having a Dada and a Papa. And when he’s old enough, he will also come to know that his Dada was the one who carried him and took care of him so he could come into this world.”