When Trevor MacDonald went through transition, parenthood wasn’t even on his radar. Much more urgent was the need to address his incredible unhappiness at being born with a typically female anatomy.

Given proper medical care, transgender people are usually diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines as identifying with a gender contrary to the one assigned at birth. Hormone therapy started MacDonald’s medical and social transition, along with legally changing his name.

About a year later, male chest contouring surgery to remove the breasts he hated so much allowed him, at long last, to feel at ease in his body. “I just felt like I could recognize myself. My life had become much more simple and a lot of distraction that had been constant in my life to do with gender, to do with bathrooms, they were just gone.”

But a surprising thing happened next.

“It was almost like transitioning and having chest surgery, taking testosterone — those things that made me feel so much more comfortable with myself, with how I was presenting myself, how I could interact with others — all those things made space for me to start thinking about some things that I’d never thought about before, like parenthood. It made it possible for me to consider carrying a baby even.”

A transgender man in a gay relationship living in rural Manitoba, MacDonald carried two babies to term and nursed them despite having gone through medial transition, including chest surgery. He now chronicles the experience in a memoir called Where’s the Mother: Stories from a Transgender Dad, which he hopes will “open up a conversation about gender diversity in parenting and different family structures that exist.” He’ll be doing a book reading at the Toronto Public Library’s Yorkville branch on Saturday, June 4.

MacDonald and his partner did talk about adoption but felt that as a transgender man and a gay man, the odds could be stacked against them. “We realized that between us we have the anatomy to make a baby and that in many ways, that might be our simplest path to becoming parents,” he says.

He went off hormone therapy and became pregnant.

At first, MacDonald thought that his chest surgery meant their baby would have to be formula-fed. But then a friend lent him a copy of a book called Breastfeeding After Reduction Surgery: Defining Your Own Success by Diana West. The book made the case that even if reduction surgery means one can only produce drops of breast milk, those tiny amounts would make an important impact on a baby’s health.

There was still the issue of how engaging in a traditional female activity like nursing might make him feel. “I didn’t know if I would experience a lot of distressing gender dysphoria if I tried to do it, and I was worried about it. But after the baby arrived, it became so simple. It was about taking care of the baby, and it didn’t feel like a gendered activity to me.”

Although he was initially told it would not be possible for him to attend a meeting of breastfeeding support group La Leche League, he was later welcomed and offered invaluable resources.

“The very most important experience I had before trying to nurse my own baby was when I saw somebody else using an at-breast or at-chest supplementer,” says MacDonald. It’s a long thin feeding tube where one end is threaded into a regular baby bottle and the other placed against the nipple so that baby can get all the milk the parent’s body is able to produce as well as the supplement (expressed breast milk or formula) at the same time. That tool has allowed him to nurse both his first and second child with help from milk donors.

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MacDonald’s experiences have led him to start a Facebook support group called Birthing and Breast or Chestfeeding, Transpeople and Allies, as well as a blog at MilkJunkies.net. He also helped to design and conduct a study with the University of Ottawa on the experiences of transmasculine individuals with pregnancy, birth and infant feeding. Papers stemming from his 22 in-depth interviews will begin publishing in the coming months.

Where’s the Mother comes out May 24 and is now available for preorder.