This Father’s Day, Black Trans Dads Deserve To Be Seen, Celebrated
On television, the journey to fatherhood is blissfully straightforward: A few rough and tumble single years before finding ‘the one,’ welcoming a child or two, and settling down into cozy family life.
For Britt Chambliss, 33, the journey was similar up to a point. The Navy vet had restless years of self-discovery, found a wife, and even welcomed a daughter. Then he took a step toward an identity most fathers take for granted, shedding the female gender he was assigned at birth before stepping into his identity as a transgender man.
This Father’s Day, he’ll join countless other newfound trans dads in Georgia, a state with one of the nation’s highest percentages of trans-identified adults. These men are parents to stepchildren and their own biological children, with some at the beginning of their journey and others many years in. All are fighting everything from increasing anti-transgender legislation to medical discrimination for the right to hold one of society’s most sacred titles—dad.
For Chambliss, that title has meant the standard cooking and cleaning, homework, and parent-teacher meetings. But it’s also meant learning to be his best version of a father in a world that once socialized him to be a mother.
“To be a decent person and to be a decent parent, I don’t think has to come with a sex,” Chambliss tells The Reckoning.
Like too many Black youths, Chambliss’s relationship with his father was strained.
“I didn’t need an example of what I wanted to be. I just needed an example of what I didn’t want to be like. And I had that.”
“He denied me, I believe before I was born,” says Chambliss, who developed a stilted relationship with his father only after a DNA test confirmed paternity. The pair enjoyed a brief relationship until his mother moved the family from Jacksonville, Fla. to Kentucky. Whatever fragile relationship they had, Chambliss says, all but collapsed.
Decades later, Chambliss faced the collapse of yet another family, this time after a rough patch with his wife and the biological mother of his daughter.
By then, after years of frustration living as a masculine-identified woman, Chambliss transitioned. His wife promptly left him.
“After I had my surgery, she basically said she didn’t sign up for this,” he says. “I didn’t question what ‘this’ was.”
The two share custody of their daughter, now 5, with Chambliss going above and beyond to take his daughter shopping, do her hair, and take care of everything else she needs.
His father, it turned out, had taught him how to be a dad after all.
“I didn’t need an example of what I wanted to be,” he says. “I just needed an example of what I didn’t want to be like. And I had that.”
Public discourse around trans-oriented families overwhelmingly focuses on transgender youth, and with good reason: Studies have shown navigating the normal journey to adulthood, paired with questions surrounding gender identity, make transgender teens more likely to attempt suicide.
Yet, beyond children and teens is an entire group of transgender men and women struggling to navigate parenthood. That includes figuring out how to parent a partner’s children, explaining the nuances of gender identity to curious kids, and for many, figuring out how to even become parents.
The latter is an especially thorny issue for trans men who are often in the dark about their options for becoming parents, says Sybastian Smith, an organizer with the National Center for Transgender Equality.
When he’s not organizing awareness events with NCTE, Smith works with Ubuntu, an Atlanta-based group that works to increase sensitivity to transgender concerns. Reproductive health is one of the most common pain points he encounters among trans men.
For example, Smith says many trans men aren’t sure if the testosterone they’re given to support their transition makes them sterile. Such confusion was at the root of a recent case in which a Texas man who had maintained his female reproductive organs discovered he was pregnant.
“There’s a lot of things that come into play when we’re talking about trans men who want to have babies,” Smith says. “A lot of these questions are hard to even ask.”
When they do ask, Smith says many trans men are met with uncomfortable silence or referral to a website. Some doctors honestly don’t know if their trans patients are capable of reproducing. Others, Smith says, are just uncomfortable with providing OB/GYN care to someone who looks male.
“There’s a lot of things that come into play when we’re talking about trans men who want to have babies. A lot of these questions are hard to even ask.”
“I’ve had so many Black trans men say they have brought up the conversation and they’re dismissed,” says Smith, who experienced such medical discrimination firsthand as part of a cis-presenting couple exploring fertility options. “More often than not with Black folks, it gets dismissed,” he adds, leaving would-be trans dads with few resources to start families and even fewer to maintain them.
Such support is critical amidst federal legislation aimed at restricting the lives of trans-identified Americans. Those bills include efforts to regulate restroom usage and make it harder to change one’s identity on a birth certificate.
The latter hits especially close to home for Britt Chambliss, who spent years struggling with red-tape surrounding a name change.
“I had to deal with being considered female in my uniform with a full beard, but then male once I took my uniform off," he says.
Going back and forth overseas when he began his transition, Chambliss navigated most of the process alone. Nowadays, he provides advice and resources to other trans men as part of Trans Gentlemen of Excellence. The group hosts workshops and other events aimed at connecting transgender men with community resources, including each other.
Half a decade into fatherhood, Chambliss still struggles with some family dynamics: He doesn’t speak to a lot of his large extended family, because of their issues getting his gender pronouns correct.
But at home in Atlanta at least, his daughter’s smiling face and full belly let him know he’s getting this parenting thing right.
Dionne Walker-Bing is an Atlanta-based reporter with over a decade of experience. Walker offers a distinct voice and unique skill for capturing the stories of diverse communities, perfected while writing for The Associated Press, The Capital-Gazette (Annapolis), and a variety of other daily publications throughout the Southeast. When she’s not writing features, Walker is busy traveling, crafting, or perfecting her vinyasa yoga skills.