Pregnant ‘Man’: Glamorizing Mental Illness

Introducing Logan Brown: author, father and now, GLAMOUR’s June coverstar.

Logan Brown is a transgender man who unexpectedly became pregnant with his partner Bailey J Mills, a non-binary drag performer in the UK.

Despite the interviewer’s formulaic flattery, moments of radical honesty—and of deep maternal sentiment—shine through. Answering the question of how she overcame her anxieties about pregnancy, Brown answers, “I realized I didn’t want the thought of having to get rid of the baby when it was happening inside my body; it was a really, really weird feeling.” For the courage it took to lean into that really, really weird feeling, the deep, exclusively female, embodied knowledge that life blooms in your womb, Brown should only be applauded.

However, Brown reflexively shrinks from the aspects of motherhood that required real bravery, verbally stumbling and redirecting to some prefabricated claim about “queerness” whenever issues related to her inescapably female biology emerge. Rather than elaborating on the harrowing experience of laboring for days, then giving birth via emergency cesarean, then remaining in the hospital for a week with an infection, Brown responds to questions about her birthing experience by recalling being misgendered by one of the very physicians who saved her life: “I remember being in the C-section and one of the doctors referred to me as ‘she’, and someone else corrected them and said ‘he’. I did get called ‘she’ a few times though.” 

To skirt the profound suffering of childbirth in favor of a gripe about language, as if misgendering is the true cross to bear while your uterus is being sliced open, illustrates the constant state of denial at the heart of transgender ideology.  Transgender “healthcare” is a process of consistently treating emotional symptoms of trauma as wellsprings of identitarian insight (and profit potential). In puberty, when she had her breasts removed, and now, after having her body disassembled as only a mother’s can be, Brown’s fixation on perfect ideological purity is meant to distract from the bloody reality. In all cases, it amounts to just another form of escapism. 
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Tragic irony and self-contradiction run throughout the feature essay. But most tragic, ironic, and self-contradictory of all is the letter Brown wrote to her newborn daughter, Nova, the text of which Glamour published in full. In the interview, Brown repeatedly insists on the distinction between sex and gender, emphasizing that they “are completely different things.” She also explicitly states that being a woman is “horrible.” Yet Brown doesn’t hesitate to “assign” her child a “female gender identity.” In other words, she does to her daughter exactly what she claims caused her own debilitating mental health disorders. 

Source: Fairer Disputations