yesterday we went to a sort of baby gathering thing, where there were a total of six babies, i think, from the ages of about five to fourteen months, and their parents. we didn't know most of the people there very well.
one lady introduced herself to my wife, who was playing with our baby. i was sitting behind my wife. the lady asked if i was here with a baby. she immediately realized she had fumbled when i said that i was being escorted by [our baby's name] and put my hand on my wife's shoulder. she was really nice to me for the rest of the gathering. i was really nice to her. i don't hold it against her. i'm not calling her out. i'm just using this as contrast for the next part.
a little bit later, i was talking to a different lady about our dogs, and how her dog was handling their baby. i wanted to talk about how when my wife was pregnant, our pit bull mix got really, really protective of my wife, and this lady had a pit bull too, so i was wondering, did her pit bull do that? but i didn't want to assume that just because she was a woman (as far as i knew) with a baby that she had been pregnant.
the phrase i loaded, briefly, was: "how did your dog react when you were pregnant?" because i have been raised in this society, after all. but then i tossed that aside as so often must be done, and instead said, clearly leading up to talking about dogs being protective during pregnancy, "were you pregnant?"
for just a second, she had this look. then she said, "no, actually, we used a surrogate."
so i said, "oh, how did you handle that with the dogs?"
and we talked about that for a while. then i told about how our pit bull was protective of my wife while she was pregnant, and she wondered if hers would be protective of someone who was pregnant, and we continued to delight in the joy that is owning a pit bull, and kept talking.
i don't know if she's queer. maybe! she mentioned a male partner, which is—i must state, just to be sure that you know where i stand and where the right place to stand is—completely irrelevant to being female-appearing and queer. maybe she's trans. maybe she's disabled. maybe she didn't want to be pregnant. maybe she couldn't get pregnant. who knows. it didn't matter to that conversation. i didn't ask.
but i am pretty sure that i may have been the first person she had ever talked to who had not immediately assumed that she had been pregnant with her baby. that microexpression said a lot. it told me that since i was queer, and looked like a woman, and was allowing usage of she/her for me by others, and had a baby that i hadn't been pregnant with, that i had maybe experienced this too, and that even if i hadn't, that i was aware of what it was like to be female-appearing and to have not been pregnant with one's child.
i think that little interaction did a lot of work. several other people witnessed it. my wife asked me later, "did you know she hadn't been pregnant?" because i hadn't actually ever done that before. when i've talked to people about their pregnancies, i've known for sure that they were pregnant. if i didn't know for sure that they were pregnant, i wouldn't talk to them about a hypothetical pregnancy of theirs, even if they had a baby and ~looked like a woman. i just hadn't had a chance to put that in action yet. and the first time i did, look what happened.
i'm not making this post to say, "inclusive language is for everyone!" or some bullshit (although it is; that's just not the point). i'm saying that any assumptions you make about people reflect on your own experience, and that a wide variety of people share or do not share different types of experiences, and that there is something very, very warm and affirming in both seeing and being seen.
