The rampant transphobia in the U.K. has gotten so bad it’s now being described as a “public health crisis” by public health researchers. The last year in particular has been brutal. At the time of writing, there’s a wide-reaching ban on puberty blockers for trans youth, a push to bar trans people from sports, as well a recent Supreme Court ruling that excludes trans people from single-sex spaces.

Now, U.K. non-profit Good Law Project (GLP), which fights discriminatory court rulings, is representing a trans man who was denied legal gender recognition on the basis that he was trying to get pregnant. Exact details are scant due to anonymity requirements, but the Gender Recognition Panel deciding his case argued that “because he was trying to conceive, he had not been living as a man.” Effectively, these gatekeepers are arguing that you’re only a “man” in the eyes of the law if you sacrifice reproductive autonomy. A lawyer has been appointed, and the GLP promises more updates as they come.

The decision falls in line with long, horrific histories of trans people either being forcibly sterilized or coerced into sterilization in exchange for legal recognition of their gender. The infertility requirement has been named a clear human rights violation in dozens of countries worldwide. In one of the most well-known cases, Gen Suzuki successfully fought a years-long court battle in Japan to change his legal gender without sterilization. In 2018, Sweden agreed to pay compensation of around $22,000 each to trans people who were forcibly sterilized, leading the Netherlands to follow suit. As of July this year, sterilization will no longer be a legal obligation for gender recognition in the Czech Republic.

Kit Heyam, U.K.-based author of the wide-reaching, deeply researched book Before We Were Trans, has spent years of their professional career researching trans histories. They’re intimately familiar with the persecution of gender nonconformity, but even they were “horrified” by news of this case. “This is maybe the closest we’ve come to trans eugenics in this contemporary moral panic,” they tell me. “We’re really telling people that being trans is incompatible with reproduction.”

Already, there’s a draining, years-long ordeal required to get a GRC—a Gender Recognition Certificate—in the U.K. NGO TransActual, a trans-led advocacy and empowerment organization, breaks down this convoluted process, which involves proving that you have “lived in your acquired gender” for two years, as well as two medical reports stating a diagnosis of gender dysphoria. Heyam explains that this effectively leads to “random cis people who have never met you deciding your gender on the basis of their own preconceptions.” Strangers have the power to deem you trans or not trans, a decision they’ll inevitably make based on their own stereotypes and biases—in this case, that transmasculine people trying to get pregnant means they’re not “living as men.”

Heyam, like many trans people in the U.K., feared this was coming. “I deliberately got my GRC before giving birth,” he explains. “I did that really consciously and on purpose, because I fully expected this.”

Of course, trans people giving birth is nothing new. Heyam notes that, increasingly, stories of transmasculine people giving birth are moving past clichés to offer rich, fleshed-out insights guided by their lived experiences—pointing to books like Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s What Gender Is Motherhood?, Jen Manion’s Female Husbands: A Trans History and Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child. Heyam sees these stories as vital in this moment: “If we just leave this idea of ‘biological family’ as something that’s unchallenged and very cishet, we’re never really going to understand transness as compatible with the family,” they say.

These decades of erasure have led to outdated scientific understandings of trans bodies. Even a few years ago, many doctors believed that taking testosterone rendered trans men permanently infertile. Testosterone was viewed as de facto birth control, a myth that almost definitely led to some unexpected pregnancies. This misinformation ruins lives, especially as governments worldwide continue to criminalize abortion. Some trans men went through the expensive and extremely painful process of freezing their eggs, only for research to later show that people can become pregnant after stopping testosterone. Heyam points to the work of researcher Dr. Michael Toze, whose 2018 journal article “The risky womb and the unthinkability of the pregnant man” argued, as Heyam summarizes, that “all of the research starts with the assumption that a trans man wouldn’t want to be pregnant.” Toze pointed out that U.K. trans healthcare strongly encourages hysterectomies, and that transmasculine fertility is seen as “risky, undesirable and unrecognized.”

As for Heyam, his experiences of reproductive healthcare were generally positive—“I’m a middle-class, white trans person who can do lots of self-advocacy,” he clarifies—but this changed during the early stages of labour. Heyam went to the hospital to be induced, but was made to wait for five hours because his medical records were listed as male, which glitched the system. By the time this technical difficulty had been resolved, there were no beds left at the hospital. Heyam was sent home to wait.

The Good Law Project’s team know that they aren’t just fighting a British legal battle; the case’s outcome will have implications for trans people around the world. “We’ve already seen how decisions about trans rights in the U.K. have been weaponized against trans people globally,” says Jess O’Thomson, Good Law Project’s community outreach lead, in a statement to Xtra. “For example, the Cass Review has been used to oppose access to trans healthcare in other countries.” The contentious, widely critiqued report, which led to the effective banning of puberty blockers in the U.K., has been parroted by U.S. government officials in a copycat 400-page report; it also sparked a similar crackdown on trans youth healthcare in Argentina. “If action isn’t taken against these attacks on trans rights, they become normalized internationally,” continues O’Thomson, “and much harder to fight.”

Similar wars are being waged on abortion rights. These parallels aren’t accidental. Trans and reproductive rights have always been linked; fundamentally, they’re both about bodily autonomy.

@xtramagazine What is the Cass Review and how will it impact transgender healthcare? The long-awaited report commissioned by the NHS from U.K. doctor Hilary Cass is here. And it’s already facing tough scrutiny from trans people and allies for some of its questionable conclusions. The NHS has said it will start implementing some of Cass’s recommendations right away, but the report could also have huge impacts across the pond in Canada and the U.S. 🏳️‍⚧️🇬🇧 #fyp #foryoupage #lgbtqnews #unitedkingdom #transgender ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

As I found while researching my latest book, Shoulder to Shoulder, a history of queer solidarity movements, restricting who can and cannot give birth is a beloved tactic of eugenicists, who co-opt genetics research and argue it should be used to wipe out “undesirables” for good. In a Good Law Project write-up of this current case, O’Thomson explains that the Nazi regime sterilized around 400,000 people deemed “hereditarily ill.” Although the word “eugenics” conjures images of right-wing extremists, even progressive thinkers like Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, and Magnus Hirschfeld, who established the world’s first trans clinic in pre-Nazi Germany, believed in the sterilization of the “feeble-minded.” These weren’t unpopular fringe beliefs; in a 2022 Guardian article, Dr. Adam Rutherford underlined how mainstream they became in the early 20th century.

We’re warned that fascist propaganda is dangerous, but we’re rarely shown what it looks like in practice. It actually looks a lot like the rhetoric used against marginalized people today. Hitler’s wildly successful propaganda campaign was rooted in so-called family values, and selective reproduction was key to this vision; at one point, Nazis handed out gold medals to “pure”— white, German, able-bodied—mothers willing to churn out more than eight babies for the good of the “German people.” Castrating trans people was seen as a means to an end, collateral damage accrued in the quest for overall social hygiene. This “protect the children” mentality is written all over today’s book bans and anti-trans laws, and the message is the same: transness is incompatible with biological family.

Heyam is tentatively hopeful that the GLP will win the case, but they explain that their view of pregnancy and parenthood has been shaped by histories of trans families. “I do think we have a lot to give to wider society in that regard,” they explain. “The equation of womanhood with gestation is so harmful to cis women in our culture, to cis women who don’t want to or can’t have children, or who just want to be someone else as well as a mother.” There’s a long history of cis women being viewed as walking wombs, of mothers who unfairly shoulder the burden of domestic labour.

The Good Law Project’s legal battle isn’t just about one trans man and his right to self-identification without a hysterectomy. It’s about histories of eugenics and forced sterilization, as well as a wider feminist question of who deserves bodily autonomy. Fascist states have built entire regimes by controlling who can and can’t give birth. Sterilizing trans people has been a gateway to some of history’s worst human rights violations. Given the rapid, current global surge of the far-right, this fight for reproductive freedom has implications for all of us.