What Does It Mean to Be Believed?

Ever since I became a pregnant man, I have ceased to be believed about certain basic facts.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Ever since I became a pregnant man, I have ceased to be believed about certain basic facts.

Earlier this fall, I worked with a travel agency to book tickets for an upcoming conference. I disclosed my pregnancy to them because it impacted which flights I was willing to choose. “Although I am pregnant,” I wrote, “my legal gender is male and the ticket needs to be booked as male.” This was reflected as well in the flyer information form I had sent to them. I thought it could not have been any more clear.

Weeks later, I discovered that they had booked the ticket with my sex listed as female. Like many people who transitioned years ago, I have no documents reflecting that I am female. I cannot fly with this ticket.

I felt as though I ought to be enraged as a trans person, along the lines of, how dare they not understand that men can be pregnant too? But I have to admit, I was more offended simply as a competent adult: Do I seem like I would be confused or mistaken about what is printed in my own passport?

But, lately, people do seem to think I am confused or mistaken about some very straightforward factual information. In New York State, pregnant people are permitted to change their insurance plan through a special enrollment period. When I called the New York State of Health marketplace in order to do this, I was informed that there was no mechanism for someone listed as male to report a pregnancy, and that I had been in error in listing my sex as male.

“There’s a difference between sex and gender,” the man at the call center explained to me, as though I hadn’t been leading trainings to this effect for the past fifteen years. “Your sex is assigned at birth and does not change. There is a different space for gender, and you can put whatever you want there.” I explained that legal sex was different from sex assigned at birth, and that I no longer had any legally valid documentation reflecting a female sex because this documentation had been updated. He entirely failed to understand this, insisting that I needed to go online and correct my error.

When I went online, the website clearly stated that my listed sex must match my sex on file with the Social Security Administration. My sex on file with the Social Security Administration is male. I had been correct.

It is interesting to not be believed about something so inherently factual and verifiable that it is literally printed in black and white.

There was a time when it felt like my life depended on people believing me about my gender. Early in my transition, I needed people to use my name, my pronouns, and to believe in me as I did the work to believe myself into being. Believing someone about their experiences, their pain, their lived realities—this is powerful. This can save someone’s life.

But that is not the current moment in my life. Although it’s of extremely significant practical concern that I cannot straightforwardly access basic things like air travel and healthcare coverage because random people refuse to believe factual assertions about my own legal documents, it does not touch me to my core. I know who I am and what is true.

This has led me to reflect on belief in general, and on other things I’ve been afraid that no one would believe me about. Certain spiritual experiences. Synchronicities. Perhaps other things I’m not even ready to list. Now, I ask myself: Do I need to be believed about these things for them to be true? If so, by whom? And why?

Perhaps knowing that I am right about certain factual assertions about my own documents, even in the wake of a lack of belief, can give me the space and freedom to affirm my rightness about other things in my life that are less verifiable, and to trust and claim my own experiences.

And yet, this is not to discount the very real terror of not being believed. It is most often marginalized people who aren’t believed. Survivors. Trans people. BIPOC people. I could go on.

While there are many reasons I left my last job working in healthcare, there was one incident with a patient that I will never forget. A patient made factual assertions about the safety of a decision she wished to make for herself and her child that the treatment team did not believe or agree with. Yet many physicians do agree with the patient’s interpretation of the evidence, and had she gone to a different hospital, the outcome of her experience might have been quite different. As it was, she was subjected to a psychological evaluation and threatened with removal of her child.

For months after this incident occurred, I experienced a physiologic trauma response whenever I would think about it—racing heart, panic, difficulty breathing. At first I didn’t understand. I had little in common with this patient, medically or demographically. My public health degree equips me better than most to be able to communicate with doctors. Yet my body reacted as though it could just as easily have happened to me.

But now I see that a great deal of the privilege and comfort I have experienced moving through the world over the past decade has been related to having a body and identity that is intelligible and believable to systems of power. I was a white man with a beard and a professional degree and a well-paid job. My identity documents matched this presentation. If the information came out that I was trans, this was generally (though not always) a footnote that did not impact my overall intelligibility or credibility with systems of power.

My pregnancy has changed the calculus significantly. If my factual assertions about my own identity documents are not to be believed, what else might I not be believed about in the future? As of this writing, my health insurance has not processed a single claim related to my prenatal care—they do not appear to believe that someone can be both pregnant and listed as male. I have confidence that it will work out (I am, after all, verifiably pregnant), yet the situation is frightening and deeply upsetting.

So it’s difficult for me to hold what it means to not be believed. There is a freedom in knowing that I don’t need to be believed, that my experiences have a truth deeper than whether anyone in particular believes me. But there’s also a terror in knowing that not being believed while interacting with powerful institutions can quickly escalate to some incredibly frightening outcomes, even regardless of whether one is factually correct.

This is a challenging situation. How can I lean into the freedom it offers—the ability to  confidently affirm my own knowing regardless of whether I am believed—while being strategic and self-protective around the more frightening realities of what it can mean to not be believed when interacting with powerful institutions?

It can be easy to mistake being strategic and self-protective for a level of perfectionism—“If only I plan things out five steps ahead and always say the perfect thing in the perfect tone of voice, then maybe I’ll be believed.” Yet we know that while perhaps some communication strategies might work better than others, there is no one perfect thing we can say or do to reverse systemic discrimination. To expect that of myself—or to judge my self-advocacy efforts based exclusively on their outcomes—is not an approach that serves me.

Right now, I am finding grounding by rooting into what I do believe. Many people have a creed that they recite in their spiritual or religious life. I have written my own. It begins:

I believe in myself and in my mycorrhizal network of support in the seen and unseen worlds: those known and unknown to me, those living and dead, those human and more-than-human, those smaller than I can see and those larger than I can comprehend, those whose names I know and those whose names I do not know, those whose voices I hear and those whose voices I do not yet hear.

It goes on from there, and it is deeply personal to what I believe to be true for me right now. I do not need anyone else to believe it. I do not need proof outside of my direct experience. I do not know if I will believe it or find it nurturing in the future, or if I will rewrite it when my beliefs and needs inevitably change.

I know that this is what I believe right now. And so that is where I begin.