I read a lot of fanfiction. (Like, a lot.) I even write some. For those who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, it can seem a strange and alien landscape. Some authors and actors welcome it, others revile it, but most would rather not know what their characters get up to in their readers’ and viewers’ heads. There’s even fanfiction written about real people—even if they’re in an alternate universe where magic works and the boys in that one band are firefighters or werewolves instead.

One fanfic trope that fascinates me and is particularly relevant to this class is that of mpreg, or male pregnancy. We learned about one form of real life male pregnancy early on in the semester, that is, trans men bearing their own children. Mpreg in fanfiction, however, usually features cis men. Often with no explanation; pregnancy is just a thing men can do, without a trans footnote. Sometimes “carrier males” or “omega males” have an inferior social status analogous to women and queer people in conservative societies. Usually the impregnator is another cis man, but one without the capability of pregnancy. (Or a werewolf. Or a tentacle monster.)

Fanfiction as a medium already has a tricky relationship with women (and people of color, and queer people), given that so many fanworks focus on m/m relationships between white characters who are canonically straight (or at least only ever shown dating or having sex with women). To be more charitable to fan creators, it is a sad fact that often these are the only characters we have to work with from the original material, particularly with the most popular and mainstream fandoms. Still, does mpreg allow us to engage even less with the sexism of fandom and popular media by eliminating the need for women even for raising-a-family plots?

Mpreg with social status implications does potentially offer a metaphor to explore sexism, but as we learned in our disabilities unit, fictional metaphors that end up erasing or reinforcing the real life targets of a given oppression are less than revolutionary. Carrier males may be treated as property, confined to the kitchen and nursery, seen as weak and in need of protection; they may be portrayed as feeling nothing but sexual and emotional fulfillment under this system because biology or they may rail against it—and meanwhile, there are no women in the story at all, or women have only a token presence and are not integral to the plot. Gosh, where have I noticed that before.

Trans headcanons are rare in fandom, usually put forward by trans fans. Seeing so few of us in popular media, it can be comforting to spin theories that our favorite characters are actually trans, either because the canon hasn’t bothered to tell us they aren’t (cissexism yay) or because we said so, damn it. One would think fanfiction an ideal place to work through some of the complications that accompany trans people and pregnancy in the real world: being a trans man and wanting to birth a child despite mainstream culture invalidating your identity for it, as Dan wrote about earlier this semester; being a trans woman and hearing that you’re not a real woman because you can’t, as we read in Susan Stryker’s performance piece. Yet, trans people are scarce in these stories.

Sometimes a carrier male expresses a feminine presentation, wearing panties or dresses or using “she” pronouns. (This is most common in the alpha/beta/omega structure, where alphas are dominant inseminators, betas are regular humans and often infertile, and omegas are submissive child-bearers.) I personally think this falls somewhere on a trans spectrum, but when the only other point on that spectrum that’s commonly seen is the magical genderswap (via curse, potion, whatever), it gets tiring. I’m also uncomfortable with the unexamined implication that a person who can get pregnant must be the submissive partner and must be feminine and that biology makes it so. That it’s a male person (as typically defined otherwise) only serves to reify those tired prescriptions and assumptions rather than pull them apart.

No research has been done that I know of on the relationship between a fanfic author/reader’s feelings about mpreg and their views on actual trans people. Still, I feel a cognitive dissonance that there are apparently so many people writing and reading what are arguably transgendered fantasies (there are over ten thousand stories tagged as mpreg on the Archive of Our Own, a popular online fanfic hub) and so few people making the connection to trans lives in the real world. And then there’s the folks for whom mpreg is a squick that produces a visceral and vocal reaction of disgust and horror, reminiscent of Ann Landers’ interview with Thomas Beattie. I’ll grant there’s some inevitable body horror in fantastical biology—alphas generally have canine-like “knots”, male omegas sometimes (painfully) grow a vagina during puberty, and if they don’t it’s ass-babies all the way…it can take some getting used to if it’s not already your kink. But trans people are accustomed to hearing that we’re gross and unnatural (for trans women especially it’s often right before they’re murdered or raped), and it stings to hear the same directed at types of fiction that hold potential thematic relevance.

Male omegas in fanfic aren’t written or read as trans, as far as I can tell—as having trans identities that are legible from a real-world perspective and are explicated as such within the narrative. Nor are female alphas, in the very few instances they show up at all. I still haven’t figured out what I think that means. These archetypes don’t necessarily have to be positioned in an in-universe trans framework; they compose transgendered narratives regardless, since having between three and six standard genders already puts them outside of our cultural binary. But I, personally, want to know what trans could look like in a hexanary sex/gender system, and I don’t want to be the only one. I also don’t want trans existence to be handwaved away in the face of minimally expanding a finite number of basic configurations, any more than I want disability handwaved away in the name of utopia.

I’m a real trans person with a nonbinary gender who identifies most strongly with fictional situations where sex characteristics are indefinitely mutable and don’t imply gender or vice versa. This kind of setting ought to be a playground for me, yet I can’t help finding the implications and lack of insight troubling. I don’t understand why so many young women (as fanfic writers and readers skew) seem to find biologically stratified social structures so arousing with so little complication. Is it the frisson of transgression against everyday “postfeminist” values?

I haven’t written any mpreg stories yet myself, but all the ideas I’ve jotted down so far are variations on “what about the ladies??” and “what about the trans??” I’m looking forward to one day contributing my own explorations to the trope to hopefully offset the drawbacks I’ve presented here, and finding other curious and confused fans.