The Trans Baby Boom: Framing Male Pregnancy on Television

This essay argues that due to the main principle of medical reality shows, the expertise and authority of medical personnel, this television genre affirms this non-normative transgender identity for cisgender (non-transgender) viewers, as seen on Discovery Health’s Baby Week, “Transgendered and Pregnant” (Ali & Orstein, 2009) and ITV/Channel 4’s documentary series Bodyshock’s “Dad’s Having a Baby” (Keel, 2011). Both episodes rely upon the authority of medical personnel to demonstrate that pregnant transmen shift gendered notions of pregnancy and even reconfigure the dependence of gender upon anatomical differences since the medical professionals who supervise the transman’s pregnancy and childbirth do not disqualify his maleness. A third hour-long televised documentary of a pregnant transman, from the ABC news program 20/20, is integrated a contrast, since this example, “Journey of a Pregnant Man” (Goldberg & Paul, 2008), frames transmale pregnancy as antithetical to rather than an extension of traditional family structures and anathema to the commonly accepted definition of pregnancy.