On March 25th of 2014, a woman named Jamie Anderson posted an article titled As the lights wink out on her homemaking blog. In it, she discussed the death of her childhood dog, the loss of her mother, and the ways our loved ones slip away from us. Halfway through the article, she writes:
Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.
It’s beautiful, it’s touching, and captures much of my own experience of grief. After reading it for the first time, I laid in my bed, crying, and repeated the last line to myself like a prayer. Once, I told someone that I exist in a constant state of grief. Given my trauma history, my gender identity, the state of the world, and my revolving door of failing relationships, this shouldn’t be surprising. I’ve experienced a lot of loss; I have a lot of love inside me and I struggle to find places for it to go.
In 2021, I switched from sublingual estradiol pills to weekly injections of estradiol valerate. I was prescribed 0.4ml at a 40mg/mL concentration, and in addition to some of the physical effects started having extreme mood swings, panic attacks, crying fits, and a deep desire to have a child of my own. Many nights were spent curled up in my bed, sad, angry, and wishing there was a god that would give me the ability to be a mother. After three months, A routine check of my levels revealed estradiol consistent with someone in their second trimester of pregnancy.
After I lowered the dosage, after everything else stopped, I still wanted something I could never have. Trying to discuss this grief, with cis people or other trans people, left me feeling misunderstood and dismissed. I was often told that I could always adopt, foster, or detransition enough to produce a sperm sample that could be frozen for future use. That last one, while a viable option for many women in my position, wouldn’t work for me. I know my own self loathing enough to know that I would resent any child created with my sperm. That I would not be able to deconstruct our genetic relationship enough to consider myself anything other than their father. Moreover, I would forever resent the person (surrogate or partner) that carried them to term. To put either of those people in that position would be, simply put, fucked.
What about adoption? I am a single transgender woman living in a southern state with several mental illnesses and a negative debt to income ratio. Anyone suggesting adoption clearly has understanding of what that requires. While fostering would still be possible, I’m a long, long way away from any aspect of my life feeling stable enough for such a thing. Instead, I’m childless, and might remain so for the rest of my life.
Five days ago, I underwent a bilateral orchiectomy that rendered me sterile. The possibility that I might overcome my own disgust enough to provide my sperm to someone is no longer relevant. I am grieving my fertility again. Being unable to carry a child always made me feel like less than a woman, but now, somehow, I feel like less than a person. While I am stricken with grief over a possibility I would never pursue, I don’t regret it in the slightest.
Prior to this surgery, I was faced with an internal conflict where I wanted a child and my only route to having one felt painful and dangerous. Where any discussion regarding the topic would require me to put my own self loathing on grand display; to defend it until my last breath; to try to communicate a primal urge that cis women refuse to believe I experience, and trans women think can be satisfied by simply allowing someone else to birth my child. I want to be a mother, and I’m tried of having to explain why reducing my role to sperm donor could never satisfy that. No longer do I have to. Now, I am sterile, and I am grieving that in its totality. I will never have a child, I am heartbroken, I am free.