Danny Wakefield gave birth to Wilder in April 2020.
Photo: MARTIN BUREAU/AFP/Getty Images
A A 36-year-old transgender father, a Seattle native who identifies as non-binary, has documented how he “harnessed the organs in the body he was born with” to give birth after a one-night stand during his medical sex-change transition.
Danny Wakefield came out as transmasculine, a person assigned female at birth but who identifies with masculinity, when he was 25 years old, received testosterone treatment for nine years and underwent a double mastectomy in Florida during his transition.
“Although I identify as transmasculine rather than male, people often read me as a cisgender gay man. So I am aware that living in my identity as a transmasculine person makes me more visible,” Wakefield wrote in a 2020 article for Newsweek.
In April of that year, Wakefield found out she was pregnant, during a COVID-19 infection, after a one-night stand with an unidentified man.
As a result of that adventure, Wilder was born in 2020, whose gender was not identified by Wakefield.
“I have known my entire life that I wanted children and I knew before I transitioned that I would like to have at least one child,” she wrote.
“Often when people are transitioning, they can freeze their eggs. I also thought about how I would feed my baby when I had the double mastectomy, those little decisions had to be made and I don’t regret it one bit,” she said.
“I don’t think I would be here with Wilder if he hadn’t taken care of me and honored my identity back then,” she added.
Wakefield detailed what it was like to be pregnant during the pandemic, which kept him at home rather than going out in public regularly, which “would have been quite different.”
“Despite the illness, it was the most beautiful experience I have ever had. I have fallen in love with my body in ways I have never experienced before,” she added.
Wakefield, who is also a recovering addict, has amassed more than a million social media followers while documenting his journey as a father on the website “Danny the Trans Dad” and on the Instagram and TikTok accounts of the same name. .
“Just because I don’t feel like a woman doesn’t mean I can’t take advantage of the body organs I was born with,” the father said in a TikTok clip.
In another, he is seen rubbing his big belly.
“I was born with a womb and the world said I was a girl, but I am not a girl,” she wrote.
“I’m not a boy either. I’m nonbinary! I have the reproductive system that allows me to carry and deliver a child, so that’s what I did. Trans men and non-binary people also give birth.”
Wakefield told Yahoo Life they were met with “sniffing” from nurses, as well as “doubt, disbelief and lack of knowledge” from doctors ill-equipped to care for their needs.
“In one case, it took an hour and a half to get me treated because they didn’t think I was pregnant,” Wakefield told the outlet.
“The doctors and nurses were talking quietly to each other, asking questions about me, rather than directly asking me, the patient sitting right in front of them,” he added.
Dr. Juno Obedin-Maliver, an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine, said stories like Wakefield’s are common.
Obedin-Maliver told Yahoo Life that the medical establishment, and society in general, has little knowledge about pregnancy in the trans male population.
“We grow up in a world with books, from preschool on up, that until very recently didn’t really imagine or represent the diversity of communities as they are,” she told Yahoo Life.
“None of our systems have been designed to delineate the difference between someone’s gender and someone’s ability to get pregnant.”
But Obedin-Maliver said that’s slowly changing amid growing demand from trans patients.
