Maybe I was embarrassed to be pregnant. I didn’t want to look like a butch who was trying to be a girl again, didn’t want to be in the in-between place where I didn’t know how to defend myself, where I felt part monster, part joke.

A pregnant woman’s body is hardly the model of conventional femininity. Bigger breasts aside, there is a massive hard ball of a stomach, more like my dad’s beer belly than a soft, rounded lady’s tummy. It’s true that some people find it attractive, but at least as many, if not more, are turned off by it. If the shape is not particularly feminine, if the work of pregnancy is often sweaty and sore and gruelling, then what is it exactly that makes it, in that butch’s opinion (and she’s not alone), the ultimate in femininity?

I think it’s because pregnancy is the physical manifestation of having been fucked. And specifically, fucked by a man. I think people reduce femininity to the one simple act. By the same token. the ultimate in masculinity is to be the one who does the fucking. Such conflation renders my butch pregnancy invisible, as it simultaneously devalues every femme in the world who does not have a baby. Their rich, complicated femininity is considered inferior to the more significant act of giving birth. This version of femininity is violent, tearing away at the legitimacy of our lives.

If femininity is taboo for butches, being fucked is even worse. As far as I can tell, a lot of us are, in fact, getting fucked by our girlfriends, but very few of us are willing to admit this openly.