For Bennett Kaspar-Williams, the act of giving birth was not just a medical event, but a political one. As a transgender man who carried and delivered his son, Bennett’s experience placed him at the crossroads of personal identity and institutional tradition. His story exposes the often-unquestioned link between gender and childbirth, and the emotional toll that can take on individuals who exist outside the binary.
Bennett, who now identifies as non-binary, was living as a man when he and his husband, Malik, decided to have a child. After pausing his testosterone therapy, Bennett became pregnant. He was prepared for the physical journey but was confronted with a healthcare system that seemed unprepared for him. Despite clearly identifying as male on all official documents, he was consistently met with the language of “motherhood” from nursing staff. This was not an occasional mistake but a persistent pattern that framed his entire perinatal care.
He described this system as the “business of pregnancy,” critiquing how the American healthcare industry markets and structures care around a rigid, gendered concept of the “mother.” This made it “hard to escape being misgendered,” he explained. The dissonance between his internal identity as a father and the external labels forced upon him became the primary source of distress in an otherwise joyful chapter of his life.
Bennett’s advocacy goes beyond a simple request for courtesy. It is a call to dismantle the “false equivalency” that binds womanhood to motherhood. He argues that this conflation is not only inaccurate but harmful, as it erases the experiences of infertile women, trans men, and non-binary parents alike. By sharing his story, Bennett challenges society to expand its understanding of what a parent can look like. His journey is a powerful reminder that respecting a person’s gender identity is about seeing their whole humanity, especially during life’s most vulnerable moments.
