Straight couple announce pregnancy - media announce ‘India’s first pregnant transman’
Days after a heterosexual couple posted on Instagram about their soon to be born child, Indian media hasn’t had a moment’s respite from covering it. While India has exceeded China in its population explosion (currently at a whopping 1.4 billion), another baby is probably the most mundane and obvious news. So what’s so uniquely celebratory about this newborn? While the couple smile joyously in their “baby announcement photo shoot,” it is momentarily confusing for a layperson to grasp what the interest is. Of course it is the female who is pregnant, but what you see is a stereotypically male presenting woman with a body subjected to three years of testosterone. The father of the unborn child presents himself in a hackneyed female outlook replete with makeup and traditional clothes usually worn by brides. Considering India’s total hijack by the gender identity industry, no wonder the media outlets are falling over each other to cover this news.
For clarity, the couple will be correctly sexed in this piece; the female to constructed male is called Zahad, while the male to constructed female goes by the name Ziya. Written in Malayalam, an excerpt of Ziya’s post read, “Though I was not a woman by birth or by my body, I had the feminine dream inside me to hear a baby calling me ‘mother’….It has been three years since we are together. Like my dream of becoming a mother, he (Zahad) has a dream of becoming a father and today a life of eight months is moving in his belly with his full consent,” and went on to thank his team of doctors and family. This post has since gone viral; sanctimoniously titled “first pregnant trans man of India” by several media outlets.
What is their story?
With just their social media and latest articles to go by, Zahad, the woman is a 23 year old accountant. She has had a double mastectomy and some of their social media posts with scars and grafted nipples confirm this. 21 year old Zia, the man who has been the only one the media is interested in interviewing (no prize for guessing why) is apparently an actress and a classical dancer. It is incredible how he is not just masquerading as a ‘woman’, but turned to an industry that actively hypersexualises and objectifies women. Perhaps, to his mind, being a hypersexualised object satiates his desire to pass; but he isn’t alone in such pursuits, given a large majority of TiMs also follow this path. While his social media is an assortment of his dance performances, achievements etc, the only posts with Zahad is when they are talking about the baby. Yet, the bio of his Instagram account has the word ‘MOTHER’ in bold to ease any ambiguity around what the core of their relationship is about. While Zia endlessly rambles on to the media about his experience of being a “mother,” his meek partner with an eight month pregnant belly smiles along. As I watched the video, the irony of Zahad’s silence was deafening to me, as was the absolute lack of media interest in her health and wellbeing.
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