What interests me most about this topic is trying to figure out why many trans men feel the way they do about it.
Or - conversely - why most women feel the way they do about it, since the majority of women in the world do choose to have children. Although I've never much understood the reasons I heard.
In my case I appear to have zero reproductive instincts. They're just not there, even before I might think about the process and the apparent ultimately rewarding experience of raising children by most people's accounts. In this day and age where most people in the 1st world can choose whether or not to have kids, there's still something inside of most people that agrees with the idea or finds something satisfying enough about it to go ahead and become a parent. And everyone I know of my age or younger already has kids. But me - something has always been there inside of me from day one that said "NO." Not just to the idea of pregnancy but to the idea of creating life in general.
Perhaps it's a perspective afforded by my predicament. Parents cannot know the implications of the life they are going to create, or whether or not that life can ever be happy. In my case, it will never be normal, and so perhaps I will never know what "happy" really is. That's not a responsibility I'm willing to shoulder because of the ideal I might have in mind about my own child before it was born. My child could turn out to suffer the way I do as well... the fact I could never guarantee this child's happiness outweighs the desire to create, in my case. It feels - to me - immoral to create a person on my own whim. I know this is how nature works and I have no issue with anybody else doing it. But I'm a different case.
But as for the pregnancy thing - the idea of it - it's not even the association of femininity that bothers me about it. To a lesser degree the dysphoria of menstruation comes from the fact you feel out of control of these bodily functions. It seems like a lesser form of pregnancy with pain, illness, fluids, discomfort, mental ups and downs... and you don't ask for any of that. As a kid I saw this as ridiculous. Why on earth should I be at the mercy of this sort of thing, especially given my complete disregard for wanting to reproduce. Of course we're not in control of most body functions, but few of them are as intrusive and conspicuous as that. I was so irritated by this lack of control that I took steps to eliminate the periods completely and that took away the bothered feeling and restored the sense of control. Pregnancy dials lack of control up to 11 though. There's also the fact pregnancy is a more dangerous physical state to be in. Medical science has come a long way but there's always that sense that the child inside you could actually kill you if something goes wrong near the end of term and you don't have access to modern medical facilities. I've heard all kinds of stories about births and I get the general idea that by that point the mother just wants the baby out so much she barely notices the lack of privacy and all the embarrassing things that can happen during labor.
It just sounds like an all-round ordeal, and then of course after the birth the most exhaustive phase of child rearing begins immediately.
But I've still never quite figured out why I'm literally afraid of it.
I wonder, knowing what I know now, and seeing so many women talk about it as if it's as natural as anything and certainly not being afraid of it, if it's not that the male-structured brain of some people can be repelled by that which it is not made to know. If anyone's ever read the book Dune, there's a passage in there that kind of stuck out to me when I read it as a kid - it talks about how those gifted to see into the past and the future can only do so within the bounds of their own gender. Men can't see into the long-term genetic memories of women and women cannot see into those of men. And what they can't see there terrifies them. A bit dramatic perhaps, but I found it to feel relevant to the topic when I'd been thinking of it in the past. I may - perhaps - have normal XX chromosomes (I don't know for sure because I've never seen my own), but for some reason I cannot feel or empathize with the general motivations of women at all. There's a big blank space where things like pregnancy are, and all I can do is walk around it.
