@ItsAllGoingToBeFine
Why? Just why? Is it some kind of sexual fetish? Please tell me they won't actually be able to donate their "milk"?!
I see I was being unfair to this individual who it would seem deserves great sympathy for the degree of dysphoria they are suffering. I have summarise this individuals plight from their blog post
archive.li/3o4r4
My very specific dysphoria is so powerful, I am putting my health in serious jeopardy trying to address it. No hormone or current surgery can fix it, and very few understand why. Time for a very personal story that is still in progress.
Not all transgender people suffer from dysphoria, but I do. While hormones and surgeries have gone a long way to address my outward appearance and align my body with my mind, my pain runs much deeper. I feel incomplete
Motherhood is central to my identity. I have two beautiful, biological children. I love them with all of my heart. I fought hard for the right to be called Mom.
While I am a mother, I did not carry, birth, or breastfeed my children, and I have difficulty expressing how deep and dividing that pain feels
These needs—and they really are needs—manifest into actual physical discomfort
I have been known to reach for my belly while watching a TV show or a movie as I feel for where I believe a baby should be inside my body. Sometimes, writers take the story in a darker direction and include topics such as miscarriage or stillbirth, which are doubly damaging to me. In these situations, not only do I feel the loss of not being pregnant but the additional loss of feeling what it might feel like to lose a baby
Uterine transplants were once something of science fiction, but clinical trials have begun in different places around the world, including at least one in the United States. I looked into them, and unfortunately, I am not a candidate. As always seems to be the case, transgender people are the last to get nice things. The studies generally require the participant to be a natal woman. Even if that was not the case, I have yet to find one that determines me to be “of childbearing age.” Basically, I am too old to be a viable candidate
Unfortunately, many people do not understand or fully grasp the full emotions of what I experience. I recently case across a term called disenfranchised grief that truly sums up this concept, which is defined as, “grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned” (Ken Doka, 2002)
I came across the Empathy Belly and the RealCare Pregnancy Profile Simulator
The more I thought about the possibilities, the more excited I got to purchase one. The problem? These devices cost about $900
My dysphoria cried out: you need this. I told myself that I had been working a lot of overtime recently, and that I could justify the cost
A week later, that support [from wife] was gone. Apparently, $900 was too much of an expense for a situation that ultimately made her uncomfortable. She threw out every excuse in the book as to why spending this money was a bad idea, and finalized the conversation with, “If it is between this and a dead Gabrielle, then buy the belly.” The extremity of that statement still stings.
A few days later, I ordered the Empathy Belly
I look forward to the arrival of my Empathy Belly. If it can provide more of the experience I seek in terms of simulating the physicality of pregnancy (especially fetal kicks), then it will be worth the awkward position I will be putting myself in society. Explaining my changed body profile at work, for example, will require some courage, as well as overcoming my wife’s trepidation and discomfort