About a year later, he had chest surgery.Īs his body fell in line with his gender identity, the stress that had dogged him for much of his life melted away. MacDonald, who lives in rural Manitoba, began transitioning in his early 20s, legally changing his name and taking testosterone.
If it’s the wrong body, why are you doing this with your body? But it’s so much more nuanced than that.”
“When someone who has only seen that narrative hears about a trans person becoming pregnant, they think, well that doesn’t make any sense. “Our stories are so much more diverse than that one phrase,” the 31-year-old says over coffee during a recent trip to Toronto for book readings. MacDonald points to the often trotted out narrative of a transgender person as someone who was born in the wrong body. His recently published memoir, Where’s the Mother: Stories of a Transgender Dad, aims to shed light on gender diversity in parents through his story of being both male and pregnant. While south of the border the controversial “bathroom bill” stirs up a political firestorm, in Canada MacDonald is seeking to broaden the conversation, sharing his own experience as a transgender man who carried two babies to term and breastfed both of them. Carrying a baby never felt gendered to MacDonald.
