Men Can’t Get Pregnant—No Matter What Yale Says
When academic theory turns pregnancy into performance art, women and science are left behind.
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About the author
Jennifer Lahl (MA, BSN, RN) is the founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture. She has produced several important documentaries that can be viewed for free on YouTube. Follow Jennifer on X: @JenniferLahl
At some of the most prestigious universities in the world, ideas once confined to fringe online communities and personal blogs are now published in academic journals and treated as legitimate scholarship. These aren’t just strange thought experiments—they’re full-blown efforts to “queer” biology, reimagine pregnancy without women, and reshape medical ethics in ways that downplay the health of unborn children. What used to sound like satire is now shaping how doctors are trained and how healthcare is delivered.
I work in reproductive technology, so I read a lot of research on fertility and pregnancy. Most of it is scientific and straightforward. But lately, I’ve been seeing more and more papers that ignore biology entirely in favor of ideology. I wrote previously about one such paper that argued we should question our desire for “normal fetal outcomes” during pregnancy—especially when the pregnant person is taking testosterone as part of a gender transition. The authors actually suggested that helping people have healthy babies might be too focused on “normative bodies,” and that staying on high doses of testosterone while pregnant is fine. It was unscientific and dangerous.
But then I came across a paper that took things even further.
It’s called “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire,” written by Carlo Sariego, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s joint program in Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Sariego, who uses they/them pronouns, does research exploring gender, sexuality, medicine, and science from a sociological point of view. Sariego’s dissertation, titled “Repro Futures: Transgender Reproductive Politics, Justice, and Time in the United States,” is about dismantling the idea of pregnancy itself.
In this particular paper, Sariego argues that pregnancy isn’t just something that happens to female bodies, and that trans women—biological males—can also “experience” pregnancy through three ideas: transition, performance, and labor. They claim that only by reimagining pregnancy through a “transfeminist” lens can we move beyond outdated ideas rooted in biology.
It may sound bizarre—and it is—but this kind of thinking is becoming more common in academic circles. And because these ideas are starting to affect real-world medicine and policy, they need to be taken seriously—and challenged.
Let’s take a closer look.
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The paper argues that “only a transfeminist re-theorisation of pregnancy can reach meaningfully beyond bodily gestation,” and laments that current research on “trans pregnancies” has focused too heavily on trans men and nonbinary individuals “to the detriment of the fertile experiences of trans women.” Sariego asserts that “pregnancy need not imply a cis body,” and proposes that “pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women.” In short, the paper claims that men can participate in pregnancy conceptually through three categories: transition, performance, and labor.
This thesis directly challenges basic biology and raises obvious questions about how these ideas could be applied in any real medical setting. The entire paper is speculative and theoretical, making it hard to pin down what exactly Sariego is proposing—or how it might help a physician provide better care to a pregnant patient. Sariego’s challenge to the biological basis of pregnancy ignores the fact that those biological realities form the foundation for how we define women in both medicine and law—and for how we care for pregnant women and their unborn children.
Even more concerning is the way Sariego misrepresents existing legal language to support their argument. For example, in the paper’s introduction, Sariego cites Texas House Bill 2690 and claims it defines a woman as “an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity.” But that’s not what the bill actually says.
Here’s the full definition from HB 2690, The Woman and Child Safety Act:
“Woman” means an individual whose biological sex is female, including an individual with XX chromosomes and an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity that the individual attempts to assert or claim.
Sariego’s misrepresentation of the bill by inappropriately truncating the definition distorts the legislative context and weakens its perceived credibility. It’s also worth noting that HB 2690, which was never passed, aimed to criminalize abortion-inducing medication. That has nothing to do with reimagining who can get pregnant. Since abortion can only be performed on pregnant women, the bill’s relevance to Sariego’s argument is questionable at best.
No matter where you stand on abortion, this bill has nothing to do with so-called “trans pregnancies.” Misrepresenting it doesn’t help the argument—it just makes the reader less likely to trust the author’s conclusions.
From there, Sariego lays out the “problem” as they/them see it: that reproductive medicine is “stuck,” in part, because “reproductive science and medicine are shaped by rigid gender roles” and that transgender pregnancies are underexplored—especially when it comes to trans women. Sariego claims that “anti-trans and gender-critical feminists use reproduction to argue for a ‘sex-based’ theory of pregnancy.”
But might that be because pregnancy is sex-based? It requires a female to produce an egg and a male to produce sperm. There’s no way around that. Yet Sariego insists we should reject the idea that “the view that pregnancy is exclusive to female bodies.”
To support this view, the paper divides pregnancy into three “sub-genres”—transition, performance, and labor—meant to help us reimagine pregnancy “beyond the cis/trans divide.” But these categories are abstract, ideological, and disconnected from biology. They don’t help us understand how to better care for patients. They simply shift focus away from evidence-based medicine and toward ideological storytelling.
Still, Sariego structures the paper around these three categories. So let’s take a closer look at each of them—transition, performance, and labor—to understand what they’re really arguing, and why these claims fall apart under scrutiny.
Transition
Sariego frames gender transition as analogous to pregnancy, suggesting that both involve bodily change, transformation, and the emergence of new possibilities. In this view, pregnancy and gender transition create solidarity between cis women and trans women because both undergo what Sariego calls a “process of becoming.”
Pregnancy, Sariego argues, involves a “subversion of hormones” that alters the body and opens up new potential—just as cross-sex hormone therapy alters the bodies of those undergoing gender transition. But while high doses of testosterone or estrogen can certainly produce changes—like facial hair growth in women or breast development and skin softening in men—these changes are not comparable to the complex, naturally occurring hormonal shifts of pregnancy, which are essential to supporting healthy fetal development. Nor do they lead to equivalent outcomes. Pregnancy is not simply a personal transformation; it is a biological process that produces a new human life.
Nevertheless, Sariego describes this mutual transformation—whether a woman becoming a mother or a man transitioning to resemble a woman—as a kind of “speculation,” a reimagining of the self and the future. Sariego write of transition as both birth and rebirth, echoing themes found in Susan Stryker’s essay “Performing Transgender Rage” and the bio-art project Pregnancy by micha cárdenas.
Stryker, a man who identifies as a lesbian woman, reflects on the emotional impact of his partner Kim’s pregnancy. He describes a moment of despair, realizing that Kim was able to give birth, but he could not. “My body left me hanging,” Stryker writes. “I had gone on a journey to the point at which my companion had to go alone, and I needed to finish my trip for myself. To complete the birth ritual I had participated in, I needed to move something in me as profound as a whole human life.” Grappling with the limits of his male body, Stryker laments: “I can’t even bleed without a wound, and yet I claim to be a woman... I can never be a woman like other women, but I could never be a man.”
This painful realization led Stryker to imagine a kind of symbolic rebirth. Unable to gestate life, he seeks instead to re-enter the “embryonic sac” and go back into the “same anarchic womb” through writing, metaphor, and rage. Through this process, he claims to experience a transformation parallel to Kim’s—one that culminates in acceptance.
In a similar vein, cárdenas—a man who identifies as a trans woman—documents a personal experiment in reproductive “bio-art.” In the project Pregnancy, cárdenas describes stopping estrogen in order to generate sperm, reorienting what he calls “DIY home reproductive sciences” into a poetic “science of the oppressed.” He buys a microscope to tracks his sperm production, adjusts his wardrobe to loose-fitting clothing to lower scrotal temperature, and changes his vitamin regimen—all in an effort to stimulate sperm growth. These steps are chronicled not as part of a fertility treatment, but as a kind of performance art aimed at redefining what it means to be pregnant.
For cárdenas, creating sperm is equated with gestation. “I’m a trans woman / and I’m pregnant,” he declares, redefining pregnancy not as the act of carrying a fetus, but as the creation of potential life through sperm. In this reframing, even gamete production becomes a form of pregnancy—flipping, as he puts it, “the conservative on its head” by appropriating the logic that embryos—and now, sperm—“contain people.”
Performance
Sariego’s second “sub-genre” of pregnancy is performance. Sariego argue that “trans” people, often “forced into sterility or seen as unreproductive,” may feel compelled to “perform normative reproductive roles to gain legitimacy and assimilate” into a supposedly heteronormative world.
To illustrate this idea, Sariego draws on the life of Dawn Pepita Hall—also known as Dawn Langley Hall Simmons—a white man who identified as a trans woman and in 1969 announced that he was pregnant. The story attracted national attention not only because of Hall’s claim of pregnancy following a “sex change operation,” but also because he had recently married a Black man, making theirs one of the first publicized interracial marriages in South Carolina.
Photographs of Hall’s visibly pregnant belly circulated in the media, but the pregnancy turned out (of course) to be fabricated. In reality, another woman had carried the child. The biological parentage remains unclear—Hall’s husband claimed the baby was the “product of an affair” with an undisclosed woman, while Hall insisted on publicly presenting the pregnancy as his own. In one version of the story, Hall and the anonymous woman “collaborated on the shared labour of pregnancy and motherhood.” Though Hall clearly did not gestate the child—a biological impossibility—Sariego emphasizes that he “rehearsed the motions of pregnancy,” using performance to symbolically claim the experience of motherhood.
Sariego presents another example of performance-as-pregnancy through the work of performance artist Vaginal Crème Davis. In 1986, Davis starred in a short film called The Fertile Feeling, which tells the story of Davis and fellow performer Fertile La Toya Jackson and their “wild reproductive adventure.” In the film, Jackson gives birth to eleven babies in Davis’ apartment. The performance plays with ideas of exaggerated fertility and reproductive chaos.
Sariego interprets this as a symbolic subversion of expectations. Although Davis and Jackson are individuals “bodies that may not be able to give birth,” they are portrayed as “hyper-fertile.” As black “trans” women, their hyper-fertility becomes a commentary on how society views black women’s reproduction—demonizing it while also perpetuating racist stereotypes of over-reproduction and uncontrolled fertility. In this interpretation, both Hall and Davis use performance to challenge and critique traditional, heteronormative “conventions of pregnancy.”
Labor
Finally, Sariego presents labor as the third sub-genre of pregnancy, drawing on Octavia Butler’s short story Bloodchild and Torrey Peters’ novel Detransition, Baby to reframe pregnancy in terms of labor and shared responsibility.
Bloodchild tells the story of a young boy named Gan who lives on an alien colony run by a species called the Tlic. Having fled a dying Earth, humans now live under Tlic rule, where their survival depends on serving as hosts for the aliens’ reproductive cycle. Human bodies are used to gestate Tlic larvae, which, once developed, eat their way out of the host’s abdomen—a horrifying metaphor for the violence of reproduction. The story also explores themes of power and exploitation: Gan’s brother sees the relationship between Gan and the Tlic as deeply unequal, even enslaving.
Sariego interprets Bloodchild as a way of reimagining pregnancy through the lens of fictional labor dynamics—where male bodies are made into reproductive vessels, and reproduction becomes a form of shared or imposed labor. For Butler, Sariego claims, pregnancy is “a material reality shaped by societal structures, often excluding other forms of pregnancy.”
In a more grounded example, Sariego turns to Detransition, Baby, a novel that centers on the emotional and relational complexity of a “trans” pregnancy. The story follows Reese, a “trans” woman who desires a child but does not have a womb; Ames, Reese’s ex and a detransitioned man; and Katrina, Ames’s current partner. When Katrina becomes pregnant—accidentally, by Ames—she proposes that Reese join them in raising the child.
This arrangement quickly becomes fraught. Reese, who cannot get pregnant, grows envious and resentful. He admits that if he wants a baby, he will “have to take it from some other woman.” The book explores Reese’s longing to participate in motherhood and the emotional cost of being excluded from pregnancy by biology. Reese asks Katrina to share every detail of the pregnancy so he can feel involved, an effort to make the experience communal.
The situation unravels when Katrina learns that Reese has been having sexual intercourse with an HIV-positive man. Even though Reese and Katrina are not sexually involved, Katrina feels “contaminated” by the revelation—because the emotional intimacy of the shared pregnancy had begun to feel real, almost familial.
Despite the clear emotional complications and biological realities driving the story’s tension, Sariego doesn’t focus on the deeply human need for connection between the biological mother and father, or the best interests of the child. Instead, Sariego concludes that the novel illustrates “the inertia of normative reproduction that is tethered to structural inequalities that privilege biology, heterosexual relationships, and cisness.”
In Sariego’s view, pregnancy, when seen as “a speculative sub-genre of reproduction,” can be “divorced from biological capability and can extend gestational solidarity across trans women, cis women, and trans men alike.”
In the end, Sariego’s willingness to minimize—and at times ignore—the biological and medical realities of sexed bodies in human reproduction reveals a deeper commitment to advancing a “trans” ideology that ultimately undermines the value of women and children. If we truly want to reimagine pregnancy in ways that matter, we should focus on addressing maternal morbidity and mortality, strengthening the mother–baby bond, and expanding access to comprehensive prenatal and postnatal care. Sariego’s speculative framework is disconnected from these realities and irrelevant to both medicine and women’s reproductive health.
Framing pregnancy through abstract categories like transition, performance, and labor may sound provocative in a gender studies seminar, but in the context of healthcare, it’s meaningless. Cloaked in academic jargon and feminist theory, the paper is not grounded in science, medicine, or the experiences of actual women. By disregarding basic facts about human reproduction, misrepresenting legislative definitions, and appropriating pregnancy as a metaphor, Sariego’s argument not only erodes the concept of womanhood—it disrespects the reality of pregnancy itself.
This isn’t scholarship. It’s fiction masquerading as progress. And its publication is a sobering reminder of how far academic discourse can drift when ideology replaces evidence, clarity, and truth.
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Keep sharing the truth - women are the only ones capable of creating life in their wombs. Never fall for the new pushed false narratives, their lies and propaganda. 🌎🙏🕊️
This is an attack on women and children, make no mistake. Rooted in deep psychological issues, attachment disorder and complex trauma for starters. Academia seems to be a huge part of the problem. A war between good and evil. Spoiler alert: evil devours itself every time.