Oh, FFS, Time Magazine...

Jasper never considered he might be pregnant.

Despite the nausea, the stomach pain, the fatigue, the possibility never crossed his mind.

He was about six months into testosterone therapy, a form of gender-affirming care.https://t.co/Cm8MEe6q1e

— TIME (@TIME) May 15, 2024

HE did not get pregnant because MEN do not get pregnant. This has never been controversial until about 5 minutes ago, and is only controversial now because some hysterical, mentally ill people and their enablers want to bully us into denying reality. 

In June 2022, Jasper caught COVID-19 while traveling with his boyfriend’s family, and between the viral symptoms and newfound back soreness, it became, through no fault of his hosts, one of the most miserable vacations he’d ever taken. When he returned to Orlando, Jasper kept waiting for the pain to get better. When it persisted a month later, he visited a doctor who still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Nobody thought to check for pregnancy.

Then the nausea began, followed by mysterious new stomach pains. After enduring an additional month of discomfort, he scheduled another doctor’s visit. Maybe, they told him, he had an autoimmune condition; perhaps it was rheumatoid arthritis, which ran in his family. But the stomach pains posed a mystery. They referred him for an ultrasound. In August, Jasper scheduled the appointment, choosing a Saturday so he wouldn’t need to take time off work. 

He was lying on the table when the clinician broke the news. “Well,” she said. “Of course, you know that you’re pregnant right?”

Jasper sat up. “You’re joking.”

There are people who insist that recording a person's biological sex in medical records serves no useful purpose, but I can think of a few. 

One is that what reproductive organs one has matters. Men have testes and produce sperm, while women have ovaries and wombs, which produce eggs and gestate infants. 

Time Magazine begs to differ, apparently. They will gleefully assure you that Joe Biden is an intelligent and effective president while also telling you that a pregnant person is a man. 

Perhaps we shouldn't trust the effectiveness of their fact-checkers. Just sayin'.

As a "male," Jasper has a uniquely interesting way of having sex with other men: vaginal sex. I don't know about you but that suggests to me that 'his' commitment to 'his' transgender identity is not quite complete. 

However, 'Jasper' is committed enough to want 'his' womb infant-free, but in medieval Florida, he can only get an abortion before 16 weeks, which is practically Handmaid's Tale territory. 

Didn't they force men to bear children in that book? I can't remember, actually. Something like that. 

From the clinician’s reading of the ultrasound, it looked like Jasper was about 12 weeks pregnant, already through his first trimester. He’d heard about Roe v. Wade being recently overturned but hadn’t yet learned what that meant in his home state—that as of July 2022, while abortion in Florida would still be legal, the state would begin enforcing a law that prohibited the procedure for anyone past 15 weeks of pregnancy. When the nurse told him, it sank in how little time he had.

If Jasper wanted an abortion, he had three weeks to make up his mind, raise the money, and schedule not one but two appointments. That spring, the state courts had upheld a law mandating that anyone seeking an abortion needed to make two visits to the clinic, the first for counseling and the second—at least 24 hours later—for the procedure itself. He had no idea how long he might have to wait to be seen by a doctor. All he knew was he had to move quickly.

Three weeks. Jasper had three weeks. Panic time!

The injustices for Jasper kept piling up. If 'he' were 'cis' this never would have happened. He would have been born with testes and never had to worry about pregnancy. 

But as a gay man who had vaginal sex he was forced to confront this horror. 

The thought flickered through his mind: if he had been born cis, he never would’ve had to worry about pregnancy or abortion. This was yet another way his body didn’t fully feel like his own, and another way it felt like Florida—which had also recently passed a law outlawing gender-affirming care for people younger than 18—was attempting to deny him basic physical autonomy. In four days, he knew, he’d be confronted with the decision about whether he wanted to end his pregnancy or if he could envision life as a parent. He hardly felt prepared.

"He hardly felt prepared." 

Apparently not. 'He' doesn't even know that men who allow other men to inseminate them in their vagina might get pregnant. 

Who could have guessed? 

All that sex ed and social and emotional learning wasn't quite explicit enough since it tends to focus only on homosexual sex acts between children and adults, not vaginal sex between men. 

Despite the horror of living in Florida, Jaspar managed to murder his child, but is now wondering if 'he' should have carried the child to term and had it adopted. But mean ol' Republicans forced him to make a choice before he could contemplate the matter. 

Jasper’s boyfriend had picked up pho from a restaurant they both loved, and the two watched TV in bed all evening. Over seven days, Jasper had learned he was pregnant, processed the news, scheduled an abortion, and after two visits to a clinic, terminated his pregnancy. He didn’t regret it. But the feeling stayed with him—a nagging voice asking, what if? What if he’d been able to give birth and put up a child for adoption? Could he have become a parent, young as he was? He’d never had the chance to consider.

He wished he’d had more time. But that was a luxury nobody could afford.

Clearly, Florida should allow abortion up until birth so that pregnant men could have the luxury of having vaginal sex, continuing to take testosterone treatments, dithering about whether to carry a child to term, and then whingeing about not being born male. 

We used to be told that Republicans are phallocentric and target women for discrimination, but their cruelty knows no bounds according to Time Magazine. Now they are even targeting men. 

At least men with vaginas. 

Bastards!