The Longing

Hannah is a trans woman. She was two years into hormone replacement therapy when suddenly it hit her: what if she wanted biological kids? 

Check out Hannah's art and work here. Her zine, Waiting for You, explores her longing for parenthood as a trans woman.

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Follow Choosing on instagram: @choosingpod

Choosing is podcast about the choices we make and the routes we take to become parents. Are you grappling with the decision to become a parent, or have you become a parent via a non-traditional way? I'd love to hear your story. Get in touch: juliecensullo@gmail.com or via @choosingpod on Instagram. 

Choosing is written, produced, and sound designed by Julie Censullo. Editorial support for this episode by Rob McGinley Myers. 

Music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions, with additional audio from freesound.org. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Thursday, August 6th, 2015, 3 02 p.m. So I've been super upset about the ability to have biological kids and whatnot. Like today, my friend mentioned it, and I actually started tearing up.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

Hannah Patellus was 21 years old when she was first struck by a powerful longing.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

I don't know if it's too late to use a cryobank, and if it isn't, I can't afford it anyways.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

It was a hot summer day in Savannah, Georgia. Hannah was sitting at her desk in her bedroom, the fan on her floor, fighting hard against the sticky southern summer heat. Her laptop was open in front of her, her fingers typing as fast as they could. She was chronicling her longing on where else but the Yearning Girls Digital Forum of Choice in the year 2015, Tumblr.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

So I talked to my dad about it, and he said he and my mom might be able to help me or loan me money or something. And I'm super excited. I just hope I don't have to go off hormones for too long because that would suck. But I think it's worth it for the possibility of having kids one day.

SPEAKER_01 1:19

Hannah is a trans woman. And at 21 years old, she was already two years into hormone replacement therapy, or HRT, which was lowering her body's testosterone and increasing her estrogen. She was also considering gender affirmation surgery in the next year. So far, she was really happy with her transition. She liked how the hormones were impacting her body. But suddenly, here was this longing, and it was making everything more complicated. If gender affirmation surgery would effectively end her ability to have biological kids, shouldn't she try to free some of her genetic material before it was too late? As a college student, there was no way Hannah could afford genetic storage on her own. So what should she do? She mused to the roughly 1,000 people who followed her tumbler.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Posted to Queer Factor on Thursday, August 6th, 2015, at 9.54 p.m. Update to the earlier post. So my dad emailed me and said that if I could find a place that billed for genetic storage yearly versus a lump sum for a set number of years, which would be around $3,000 at one local place that they would pay. Which makes me feel guilty because even though I know they have the money, I still feel really bad. I don't know. I always feel so guilty when they give me money, even though I know they have it, it's not gonna put them in a huge trouble financially or anything. But like now what? I need to find a doctor to test to see if I'm infertile.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Even if her parents were able to help her with the cost, pursuing fertility testing meant pausing HRT.

SPEAKER_00 3:05

What if it impacts all the progress I've made? And what if it impacts the future progress? I'm scared and freaked out, and none of my doctors are knowledgeable about HRT alone, let alone this.

SPEAKER_01 3:19

By the end of the night, Hannah found herself back at a question that honestly sounds like the question a lot of women, regardless of their sex assigned at birth, ask themselves when considering children.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

Is the possibility of having kids who are biologically mine one day in the distant future worth the money, psychological pain I'll endure for who knows how many months, and the possible impact it might make on any future progress? Fuck, man. I'm gonna go finish this bottle of wine I got in the kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

I'm Julie Censulo, and this is choosing. What are your earliest experiences of thinking about parenthood?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

The earliest thoughts of parenthood felt more like this is just kind of what would be expected of me. I had imaginary friends as a kid, as many kids do, and I had imaginary children in my like little imagination world. And so it was always something that felt very I don't know, matter-of-fact.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Like many of us, Hannah grew up with the passive assumption that she would one day become a parent. It wasn't a choice or a desire as much as it was an expectation. But as Hannah got older, her expectations for herself started to change. Hannah grew up in Central Florida.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

On an island where they used to launch the space shuttle. Two, one, mission, the whole house would shake every time the shuttle went up or came back, which I didn't think of as weird because it's where I had always lived until I went to college, and would be like, oh yeah, and then they grew up on an island where they launched the space shuttle. And people would be like, Island, space shuttle.

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Despite growing up in the literal shadow of 20th century progress, as a young trans kid, Hannah didn't see much of a future for herself.

SPEAKER_00 5:29

My life was such chaos and my mental health was so terrible that I didn't really think about thoughts of parenthood because I wasn't convinced I was going to live for that. You know, I I was busy with trying to battle my own demons.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

Hannah first came out to her parents when she was in seventh grade. She told them she was gay because that's the only way she knew how to describe how she felt.

SPEAKER_00 5:57

I told my dad first, I was in my bedroom, and he had come in and I told him that I was gay, and I I remember him laughing, not in a bad or taunting way, just in a maybe even a duh kind of way. Like of course you were. You were Mrs. Potato Head earrings throughout your childhood.

SPEAKER_01 6:18

Hannah being gay wasn't that big of a deal to her parents. But something about that identity still didn't feel right either.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

I remember this one night pretty vividly. Uh, and I I'm almost positive it was the night that it clicked in my head. I was sitting at my desk in my bedroom on my computer. My bedroom looked like an IKEA catalog, um, and it just clicked.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Were you looking at something on the computer? What like what was it that made it click for you?

SPEAKER_00 6:56

As I remember it, I was on Facebook and I saw a friend of mine, we were in the same grade, I saw her little sister had posted something on Facebook. And when I looked at this picture of my friend's little sister and was like, holy shit, like that, that's what I'm missing is girlhood. Then it clicked that, like, oh no, this isn't just like a show or god forbid, like a a kink or a fetish. Like, no, I'm I'm a girl. And I had been weighing this concept of like trans, drag queen, cross dresser. Like, I I was just I was so confused, I didn't have any information. And in my head, being trans was the worst case scenario.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Remember, this was Central Florida in the mid-2000s. There was one other gay kid at Hannah's high school, but she didn't know anyone who was trans.

SPEAKER_00 8:09

I mean, this was still in the time of the Maury Povich show where they would bring trans people up and just mock them endlessly.

SPEAKER_01 8:16

Hannah didn't have anyone she could turn to. And as a result, her mental health plummeted.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

One day in high school, I had self-harmed in the bathroom of a school building, and I had also taken too many antidepressants that morning in kind of like a half-assed suicide attempt. You know, they brought me to the counselor, and that protocol started, and my mom came down and was very upset with me when we got in the car to drive home. And um through sobs, that is when I came out to her, and she did not take it well.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Was she like negating it or angry? Like what was it?

SPEAKER_00 9:08

I think it was likely fear, but it felt to me as a teenager like anger. And she was like, you know, I don't understand this, I won't ever see you that way.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Next, Hannah came out to her dad.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

And my dad was just completely silent. My dad has a lot to say. He's a chatty guy, he has opinions on everything, and so nothing to say was the scariest possible outcome.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

The silence lasted. For the rest of high school, Hannah and her parents just didn't talk much about her being trans. In fact, the next time they talked about it was when Hannah called them from college in Savannah to tell them she was going to start transitioning.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

And I didn't really understand how health insurance worked. So I was like, so I'm going to use our health insurance to do this. Like, do I have your permission to do this? And they were just kind of stunned at that phone call. Um, they were just like, uh yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Hannah found a gender therapist and a doctor who would prescribe her the hormone she needed to medically transition.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

I loved my doctor in Savannah, Georgia during this time. She was great, but I was also patient zero.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

Like the first trans person she'd ever worked with? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

I was the first trans person she had ever worked with. And and again, like she was a great doctor and she was so willing to learn. Every time I came in, she would talk to me about like something new that she had done research on in regards to trans care. But regardless, I was still patient zero.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Even though she knew her doctor was still learning, every day on hormones felt like a step in the right direction to Hannah. And as her body started to change, as she started to physically see herself as the woman she knew she was.

SPEAKER_00 11:17

All of those puzzle pieces started to like come together. And I was like, oh yeah. Not only am I feeling like myself, like I am somebody, and I am somebody for the long haul. And I want to live, I see a future for myself. Oh, and that future needs to have kids. As I found myself, you know, started illuminating areas in the dark and was like, oh yeah, motherhood's here and it's big.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

It wasn't just that Hannah wanted to be a mom.

SPEAKER_00 11:51

But like, I'd really like to have biological children.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

Hannah asked her doctor if it was too late to try to free some of her genetic material before she had gender affirmation surgery. Her doctor told her it might be possible. But Hannah would need to go off hormone replacement therapy for at least a month in order for her doctor to test her fertility. Hannah was nervous about going off of HRT, but she knew she had to try. She vented a lot on Tumblr and then she asked her parents for money. Hannah says it was an awkward conversation for sure, but they agreed to help her if she was still fertile. So Hannah stopped taking hormones. And a month later, she went to the doctor for fertility testing.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

Posted to Queer Factor on Thursday, January 28th, 2016, at 6 47 p.m. The bad news is I'm pretty much infertile. The worst news is that I've been on hormones for a month or so and I'm still pretty much infertile, so therefore I either fucked up my body already, or I have never been able to have kids and never will be able to have kids. Or that I didn't pause hormones long enough before testing. I had stopped estrogen and testosterone suppressant for about a month, I think. Which, looking back on that, based on the knowledge I know now, might not have been long enough that maybe there was a chance if I had maybe stopped it for like three months, that I would have had a better chance. But at the time, I didn't have that information. And I just kind of dropped it. But it it really messed me up. That was unbelievably devastating. I went ahead with gender affirmation surgery anyway, though, so at this point it's all moot.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

What is it about being a parent that felt so important to you at that time?

SPEAKER_00 14:32

I just had so much love in my heart, and I wanted to be able to provide a child so much love and so much safety that I didn't feel like I always got as a kid, and saw that a lot of children don't get.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Hannah doesn't know if HRT impacted her fertility. And she never will. In a strange way though, her infertility didn't dissuade her from wanting kids. It almost made her want them more.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

There was at that point just this like maternal drive inside of me that was getting really strong.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

If you were to plot this maternal drive on a line graph, you would see a steady slope as Hannah moved through her transition.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

Like it was just kind of a slow incline.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

But after her infertility diagnosis in 2016, it then spiked. And continued going up at a much steeper rate. Hannah graduated from college and moved to Atlanta. She started making friends with people who had kids. Initially, she was nervous about interacting with her friends' kids, especially in public.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

Because so many people look at trans women and see a predator for some reason. And so I was so afraid that interacting with kids in any setting as a trans woman would get me killed.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

But the more she hung out with kids, Hannah realized she was really good with them. Like really, really good.

SPEAKER_00 16:17

I I have, you know, this playfulness and the silliness and the heart of a toddler. I feel like it added on not just the desire to provide the love and safety, but now also was like, oh, and we can have fun, and we're gonna have fun.

SPEAKER_01 16:38

If you think back to that graph of Hannah's desire for motherhood, the little line on it started to tick up and up and up until Hannah met Sam. Which is not their real name. Hannah met Sam when she was teaching a coding boot camp class. Sam was a student. After the class ended, Hannah and Sam reconnected at a party.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

And so our little situationship kind of started from there.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Sam was an artist just like Hannah.

SPEAKER_00 17:17

And we would go to art museums together, and art museums are like one of my favorite things in the entire world. Like I love going to an art museum.

SPEAKER_01 17:33

Sam was also trans, and they were the birth parent to two daughters. Through Sam, Hannah felt like she could vicariously experience biological parenthood.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

The conversations that we had about parenthood were the most real detailed, vulnerable, intimate look into parenthood that I had ever seen.

SPEAKER_01 18:01

Can you give me an example of like what that means that they were the most detailed, vulnerable conversation?

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Yeah, we talked a lot about like pregnancy and what that does to somebody's body. We talked about chest feeding and the feeling of connection, but the cons also of you know pain and aches. And we talked about wanting to raise good children and happy children and children who are encouraged to explore and play while also balancing how do you communicate with a little kid to know what is good and what hurts others to talk to somebody who was a parent but who also had carried their children, um just really lit a fire in me of like, oh my gosh, like not only do I so badly want to be a parent for the the fun and the giggles and the love and the safety, but like I want to be able to perform that miracle of bringing somebody into the world that is a part of me. And I think that that's when the aspects of not just parenthood, but also like pregnancy and bringing a child into the world and having them be, you know, a piece of me and my partner really hit me hard.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Hannah's relationship with Sam was like a powder keg of desire. She found herself constantly wanting, wanting, wanting. She wanted to be with Sam. And she also wanted the physical connection with her children that Sam had. Hannah would often go several days without hearing from Sam. When they would hang out, Hannah never felt like Sam could reciprocate the depth or complexity of emotion that Hannah felt for them. Like most situationships, it was always more of a situation than it ever was a relationship. And it ended, as many situationships do, over text at an inopportune time.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

I was actually in the middle of teaching a class when this text message conversation was going down that was ending our situationship. And I went over an activity that we had just done. I closed my laptop and I said to the class, I'm really sorry, I'm having a personal emergency, I need to leave. I will see you all on Wednesday. And I packed my bag and just left. Which was the only time as a teacher that I have ever left in the middle of class. I went to my friend's house and just sobbed in her bed all night long. And then the next morning I got up, I bought a plane ticket to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I flew to Albuquerque for like a week and just sobbed in the desert.

SPEAKER_01 22:31

One month after Hannah's situationship with Sam ended, the pandemic began. Which meant Hannah spent the next year locked inside watching TikTok moms talk about raising kids.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

I'm so scared it won't happen, and I want it now. My mom was 25 when she had me, and her mom was 25 when she had her. And I feel like I should have a baby now, but I can't, and it sucks in ways I can't explain. Today I cried all day long and didn't get any work done. Hell, I even cried during a meeting silently, of course, like a good boy. I'm starting to learn about investments to save for children. The word investments grosses me out. I turn into a white boy in an ill-fitting suit and a supercut's haircut carrying a briefcase. I hate myself. I hate this body for not letting me have children no matter how much money I throw at it. This body never truly felt like mine. I try so hard to love it, but it's missing parts, parts I need desperately. Sometimes the hatred and sorrow that fills me up leaves me on the floor clutching at my belly where a baby should be able to grow, sobbing and knowing that nothing in the world can make me sis. Or at least give me a uterus, and I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:25

And I I don't know if I will be able to have to be pregnant, but I, you know, it's something that biologically could happen.

SPEAKER_00 25:31

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

So I I like I really get this like really deep longing. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about like how you reconcile that with that idea that like that won't be something that you'll be able to do. What what does that feel like?

SPEAKER_00 25:47

I I've examined this so much over the last like six years in particular. It's like how much of that is expectations of womanhood and as a trans woman and as like a binary trans woman, I I don't identify as trans femme, I don't identify as non-binary. Like there has never been a doubt in my mind that I am a woman. And there are just there are no questions about that, there's no hesitation about that. And so, you know, how much of that is just my brain and my heart like yearning for the traditional, in air quotes, expectations of womanhood. And what of that is like what I as Hannah deeply want. And I think that you know, those are tied together in some ways and in knots that I am not capable of undoing, at least not now, not yet, whatever. And so there definitely is that component of like this this is what my body should be able to do, but it can't. But my mom did it, but my grandmother did it, you know, my best friends did it, but I just can't do it.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

I just like I mean, I I know again, my experiences are different, but I like I really just connect with that feeling of like I just want this so badly, and I might be able to do it. I don't know if I'll be able to do it. And I still feel very far away from it. And that feeling of like feeling locked out from motherhood is really very painful. It's it is painful, it's very painful, and it is this feeling of like how come everyone gets to do this, but I don't get to do it. And so, like, I I know it's like very different, like our circumstances are very different, but I think that emotion at the core is still the same, yeah, is just this I want it so bad.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

And then there are these barriers that I just can't do anything about, and that's terrible. That hurts so much.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

On the day I interviewed Hannah, I was one month and two days post-eg retrieval surgery, which I had undergone to freeze my eggs. As I sat listening to Hannah, I could feel my genes digging into my stomach, still bloated from the procedure. I had just put aside genetic material to hopefully conceive a biological child someday. Something that 21-year-old Hannah had not been able to do. I felt a little ashamed when I told Hannah about my egg retrieval. I so I I froze my eggs recently. Um not because she expressed any sort of envy.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Congratulations. That's super exciting.

SPEAKER_01 29:12

But because I know how often I slip into jealousy when I hear stories of people's dreams for parenthood fulfilled. Another friend sends me her wedding invitation in the mail, and my first thought is: it's only a matter of time till this is an invitation to their baby shower. I'm not proud of the envy that I feel. I work hard to make sure it doesn't overtake me. But I know it's there. And I wonder if it's there for Hannah, too. I feel like lately I've been in this space of really longing for parenthood. Uh and sometimes that feels very hopeful. Like I feel like I'm daydreaming about it, and it's very exciting to imagine it. But there's also a side to that longing that can feel very I don't know, the word that comes to mind is needy. And I don't know if that's the right word, but it makes I I feel kind of obsessed with it to the point where it starts to impact how I feel about my future. And I've just been thinking a lot like, is longing a hopeful thing, or is it a toxic thing? And I'm I'm wondering if if you ever think about it in those terms.

SPEAKER_00 30:58

Yeah. I think that like longing or yearning to me is a combination emotion. I don't like to prescribe good or bad to emotions because emotions are just here to tell us things and no more, no less. Um but I feel like this longing is all consuming. And when I I know somebody who is pregnant, or just even seeing parenting occur, I do feel this, of course, the longing, the deep sadness. And anger is definitely in there. Not angry at, you know, parents and their children, but anger at the reality. But there is like a little tiny part of me that is like I am thankful that this is my situation because it's making me do a lot of thinking about this. And that's one thing that I've always felt about being trans or being queer or being gay is like queer people are often forced to look at the world, society, cultural norms, sex and gender in a different way. There really isn't any blueprint for doing, and we're forced to like evaluate these concepts that other people just don't even think to acknowledge or evaluate. And so I feel like there is a little part of me that feels like this is part of that trans experience of like I am having to really evaluate this situation and really think about it, and it's gonna make a better me, and it's gonna make me a better parent, even though what brought me here sucks.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Hannah is now in her 30s, and she's still trying to figure out what parenthood is going to look like for her. For a long time, she fixated on the idea of finding a surrogate to carry her children. This wouldn't give her the biological connection to her kids that she wants so badly, but it would give her the opportunity to be involved with the pregnancy from the moment of conception. She could go to doctor's appointments with her surrogate, see the first ultrasound, and be in the room with the surrogate when they give birth. But lately she's been reconsidering that.

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Surrogacy would, I think, provide me something that would be really special and affirming. But I also have to ask myself, like, is that for me or is that for that child? And when I become a mother, it needs to be about that child. And I need to make sure that I'm doing the work to separate what do I want? What is gonna make me feel good and affirmed, and what is really going to be for the benefit of a child.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

It is so hard when I think our desires for parenthood are selfish in a lot of ways.

SPEAKER_00 34:30

100%.

SPEAKER_01 34:31

And also it's like it's creating or at least taking responsibility for a life that ultimately like has to kind of come before yours. Like not in all instances, but in some instances. Um it is hard when like you want it for yourself in some ways, and maybe part of being a parent is like letting go of some of that. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

I the more that I think on it and the more that I like sit with all of these feelings and emotions and beliefs, the more I'm like, I think that maybe maybe for me, what I believe motherhood is actually best played out in adoption or fostering to adopt or something along those lines where there is a child and and you know, if I want to give this love and safety and support and all of that, like who who needs it? Who needs it right now? If that's what I personally believe that motherhood is, then maybe I need to not be selfish and walk the walk if I'm gonna talk the talk, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 36:02

There has always been a physicality to Hannah's longing for parenthood. She feels it deep within her body. The idea of adopting a child doesn't quite fulfill that physical longing, but it does let Hannah focus on something else. It lets her focus on the emotional connection that she'll have with her children once she finally meets them. Longing for children is selfish. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Longing tells us a lot about ourselves. We long for children because we want to perform some expectation of gender, or we want to fulfill some dream of the future that we have for ourselves, or we want to give more meaning to our lives. But the inherent contradiction in choosing to have kids is that while the longing may be selfish, the actual act of becoming a parent, of parenting, requires sacrifice. It's selfless. And maybe the work of longing for parenthood is figuring out how to transform that longing into something else. Something that looks a lot more, like letting go. Rob McKinley Myers provided editorial support for this episode. You can check out Hannah's work and her art at her website, hannap.com. I particularly recommend her scene called Waiting for You, which explores her longing for motherhood as a trans woman through blog posts, writing, art, photography, and more. It's available for purchase on her website. If you like this show, please consider rating it five stars and leaving a review in Apple Podcasts. It really helps more people find this show. You can also follow Choosing on Instagram at Choosing Pod. On my Instagram, I've posted some of Hannah's digital art from her series on MotherHodd. If you are considering parenthood or if you've become a parent in a non-traditional way, please send me a message. I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Um, my tum my main Tumblr was Queer Factor, like Fear Factor, um, which is a Will and Grace reference. Queer Factor is. I did run a Will and Grace fan blog. I ran two Will and Grace fan blogs. I ran Fuck Ya Will and Grace, which then changed to its name to Will and Grace Forever. And then I also ran Calcium Pushers Anonymous, which is a real niche Will and Grace reference.