Solo womb dysphoria
Being trans is embarrassing. That's part of why we're so often read socially as big teenagers1. I don't know how to explain to people that I'm fine not having a pussy, but get sad knowing that I don't have a womb — but not because I want to be pregnant or have a child, I just want the capacity for it. It's just sort of weird, isn't it? Especially when you square it with my internal sense that I wasn't always a girl, it's a little goofy. I dream that one day, in a more just future world, without the specter of transphobia looming over us, we can all (cis and trans and otherwise) have a more loving and authentic relationship to our collective strangeness, and we can all share a laugh.
At my worst I get the nagging thought that solo womb dysphoria is a very het-male-brained way to go about being a girl. After all, I want the symbolic capacity to reproduce the Family and thus the heterosexual matrix, but not the iconic symbol of femininity. This is, of course, ridiculous (Occam's razor states that it's actually quite feminine to want a womb), but for a while I didn't have a positive alternative.
Eventaully I found one: the titular teenage girl from the obscure 1999 rhythm game Um Jammer Lammy. Lammy is on a sort of Odyssey, a quest to perform at her concert that's constantly interrupted by strange characters making demands of her in exchange for passage. In one vignette, she becomes a firefighter; in another, she slips on a banana peel, dies, and must perform for the demons to escape hell.2 These scenes are diegetic, but they all have the properties of fantasy — they don't entirely make sense, they all involve Lammy "growing up" in some subtle way, they're solved by Lammy's performance, and they take place in a dilated timespace (theoretically, the whole game takes place over fifteen minutes). Most damningly, after they're over, they dissipate.
In one scene which I can only describe as Pink Floyd's "The Trial" for girls, Lammy has a "food baby" and encounters a parade celebrating parenthood, along with a looming nurse that insists on delivering her baby right this instant. When Lammy inevitably can't, she must care for the other babies as a sort of punishment. This she does happily, in a gameplay section.3
In short, Lammy's body changes, which thrusts her into a fantasy of being thrust into pregnancy, kicking and screaming.
Since Lammy is a teenage girl on a journey that culminates in her self-actualization, it's hard not to read this scene as her actually imagining pregnancy and its consequences, engaging with the sorts of terrifying questions teenage girls ask in real life. And in that engagement, there's a nested forcing: Lammy is forced into a fantasy, and that fantasy is of being forced. This allows her to remain morally virginal, to indulge in the potential joys of nurturing a child without actually committing to it, without violating whatever mental roadblocks she has. It's the same structure that underpins noncon stories from rape fantasies to "my mother sold me as a slave to One Direction" fics — something dubiously enjoyable happens to the protagonist, and they don't even have to admit to wanting it.4
Lammy wants the promises of the heterosexual norm, wants to believe the mindless rabbits telling her "with a baby we should live so happily". But she can't. We're welcome, of course, to read in any number of real hangups we have about pregnancy or the heterosexual family. But structurally, it's because she's the protagonist of a game about something else; in that characterological sense, she's a woman who can't use her womb, or who doesn't have one. That's why her fantasy is of being forced into a fantasy, why she can't just pick it up and engage like a book. It must be thrust upon her.
One thing about womb dysphoria is that there's not a pill or a surgery for it. Thus, I can only wonder about whether such an operation would even assuage my specific issues. The answer, for me, hinges on the distinction we made earlier with Lammy, the one between "force fantasy" and "fantasy of force fantasy". In other words: Do I want to have a womb, or do I want to have had a womb?
The distinction matters. When I was a wee lad I fantasized about having a big mom van with enough room for any number of friends and strangers. It would have snacks and care bags in the back and a big CD collection5, and I'd use it to help everyone and anyone get where they needed to go, in good comfort and in good company. Now, as a 26-year-old who's paradoxically still a teenage girl, I can't drive. I gave it a college try, but much to my parents' chagrin my brain just is not wired for safely handling on-the-road quick-time events. This is fine, of course6, but it does mean my naive van dream is dead.
I could, of course, buy my dream Honda, granola bars and all, and put it in my front yard. A bumper sticker here, a vanity plate there, and it would even read as an tasteful yet unmistakable symbol of momhood. I could have the sign of my nurturing femininity, my mom-gender. But that would come with the guilt that comes with having something you don't feel you deserve. After all, I was separated at birth from the network of symbols and relationships that makes young girls grow up to want mom vans. I thrust this symbol upon myself, however subtle and internal, as a sort of conscious performance. And, most damningly, I wouldn't want to drive it! The concept of authenticity is a bit of a trick of the light, of course, but how am I supposed to argue with it here?
That's what's odd about my solo womb dysphoria. I'm perfectly happy taking medication to get bigger breasts, and have no complicated feelings whatsoever about growing my own. But when it comes to womb dysphoria, it's not enough that I could have it. I want to have to have it.
That, and the fact that we don't fit into the gendered age categories, on account of not fitting into the gendered categories. As Britney Spears once said, I'm "not a girl, not yet a woman".↩
The American release chickened out, and she's transported to a suspiciously hell-shaped island instead.↩
It's hard to pick the most interesting part of the parade song itself. Is the line "our newborn treasure should bring lots of love / and peace to all" messianism, the death-drive assuaging itself, or the reproduction of the heterosexual matrix? Vote now on your phones.↩
Here's a tamer example. Imagine for a moment that Belle from Beauty and the Beast started the film not by abstractly wanting more, but by specifically saying she wants to live in the nice castle with the fancy talking antiques and the brooding-yet-sexy prince. That would be weird, right? Instead, she's whisked away, and because it happened by circumstance she gets to retain the innocence of being a weird bookish lady while also getting to bang furry Mr. Rochester.↩
To be clear, this was because we had CDs back then, not because physical media was countercultural in itself yet.↩
I take comfort in the fact that this is actually just labor specialization. Someone who can look for pedestrians and identify the speed limit at the same time can drive the bus to the university, and in exchange I'll do enough gender studies for the both of us. It's basic economics, people!↩