The clipboard clearly said “male.” The birth certificate would list “father.” Yet as Kaspar-Williams lay on the operating table for his 2020 C-section, nurses kept calling him “mom”—a word that felt like a slap with each repetition.
For this transgender man (who also uses they/them pronouns), the birth of his son should have been purely celebratory. Instead, it became an exhausting exercise in self-advocacy. “I’d prepared for physical challenges,” he shared. “I never imagined I’d spend my child’s first hours defending my identity to medical professionals.”
Having transitioned years earlier while retaining his reproductive capacity, Kaspar-Williams represents a growing population of transgender parents. His story exposes how even progressive hospitals often default to binary thinking. “They saw pregnancy and assumed ‘woman,'” he said. “But biology doesn’t dictate gender—and it certainly doesn’t dictate what makes a parent.”
As healthcare systems work toward inclusivity, experiences like his highlight the human cost of outdated assumptions—and the urgent need for change.
