Trystan: I always underestimate how difficult something is going to be. Biff has a more realistic perspective. I was not visibly pregnant until seven months in and it was wintertime, so it was easy to put on a sweater, a scarf, and nobody could tell. Plus, no one is really looking for a man to be pregnant, so it was easy for me to hide. It wasn’t until recently it became, "Holy crap, that is a man that is pregnant!"



Your brain produces a bunch of anxiety hormones toward the end of pregnancy. It’s how you survived all the way back to Cro-Magnon man or whatever. But that really, really messed with me. I thought I would be fearless. Who cares that I’m a pregnant man? Fuck it! But I was actually really scared of being hurt or attacked. All my radical, queer, devil-may-care attitude dissipated because every part of my body was dedicated to keeping this baby safe and keeping me safe. That was super surprising.



Biff: There was a time when we decided Trystan would stop taking the train to work. This past month we’ve been pretty laid-back about going out in public, but I didn’t really worry too much about safety here. We’ve never had a negative comment in person out in public; we’ve been lucky. Online, obviously, it’s a different story. Some things you just have to ignore. You can’t look at it, can’t follow it, can’t read the comments. You have to ignore it because it’s an emotional trap — you get pulled in and it’s no good for anybody.



Trystan: The last few weeks of pregnancy are super hard anyway, so I don’t want to take the train. I’m working from home. At this point, I really just want to blend in, I don’t want to draw any attention to myself out in public. We did go out for Pride — we went to Trans March and the Pride festival. That was really wonderful because a lot of LGBT folks came up to us and mentioned they had read about our story, to thank us for being public. If I get coffee, the barista mentions they saw me on Facebook. This is Portland — a pregnant man is not the weirdest thing they’ve seen that day.