'If you can understand that then it starts to make more sense that it would not seem totally bizarre for me to want to create and carry a baby, because I don't wish that my body was not a trans body,' he said. and I've never wanted my body to be different.' 'I've never wished or wanted to be assigned male at birth or to have my body match up exactly with that of my partner, who was assigned male at birth,' Reese said. Sitting on his couch with a melon-sized bump under his shirt, he explained how the testosterone he took caused him to grow facial hair and made his voice drop but left him with a functioning uterus and ovaries. When Reese was six months along, he addressed people's curiosities and misconceptions about his pregnancy in a video he shared on social media. Could I do this? Pregnancy is hard, labor is hard, and I hoped that I'd be able to handle it all.' 'I was so excited to be on this journey with the person that I love, and then also really scared. 'When I found out, it was equal parts elation and fear,' he said. They chose not to discuss the method of conception they used. About five months after he stopped taking testosterone, Reese became pregnant. Doctors told them that because Reese had only undergone hormone therapy in his transition, preparing to conceive wouldn't be very different than for a woman who had been on hormonal birth control. When they decided to have a biological child, they sought out medical advice.

He met Chaplow, who was born male, about eight years ago and said it was 'love at first sight.' They took custody of Chaplow's sister's children in 2011. After counseling, he began taking hormones around age 20 and started identifying as a man.

Reese, 34, was assigned female sex at birth and lived as a woman until his late teens. Other pregnancies among transgender men have been documented in media reports more recently. In one well-known example, the Village Voice published a narrative about Matt Rice, a transgender man who conceived in 1999 through artificial insemination and gave birth to a baby boy. We're loath to be put in that pioneer category.'ДЄ number of transgender men have gone through successful pregnancies in recent years - and throughout history, for that matter - some of them long after beginning hormone replacement therapy. This is something that has been done in a very safe and healthy way.

'People get the idea that this was some experiment that we embarked on,' Reese said, adding that he watched friends go through the same process after transitioning. Reese and Chaplow, perhaps more than anything else, want to make one thing clear: they are not the first. Their family's story - and their willingness to go public with it - reflects a shift in public attitudes about pregnancy and parenting in transgender men as social stigmas have started to chip away and advocacy groups have campaigned for greater acceptance. Reese and Chaplow documented the pregnancy in blog posts and on social media, hoping to demystify what it means for a transgender man to give birth and create a new sense of normalcy for people in similar situations. And just weeks ago, he gave birth to a healthy baby boy. After trying for several months, Reese, a transgender man, got pregnant.

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