CNN commemorated Father’s Day weekend with an inside look at a transgender woman’s hardship of being a “father” with breasts.
Sabastion Sparks, a transgender “man” who breast fed her son, recently had surgery to remove her breasts so that her toddler son can “see him as a man” before Father’s Day, the left-leaning news outlet reported Saturday.
Sparks, who “would sit on the school bus and think how much he hated having breasts” as a child, conceived her now 20 month-old son Jaxen with her wife, Angel, who is biologically male.
The couple conceived Jaxen the conventional way, “even though their biological roles at the time were not compatible with how they saw themselves,” CNN reports.
“Like many transgender men and women, they had been taking medication to increase the testosterone or estrogen in their bodies. So to make a baby, they briefly stopped taking their hormone pills,” CNN explains. “After Jaxen was born, Sabastion sometimes had to breastfeed when he, Angel and their son were out in public. The three of them drew stares as they navigated the aisles of their neighborhood stores. Sabastion, feeling self conscious, wore a chest binder — a compression shirt used to flatten her breasts.”
The Sparks make an effort to disassociate Jaxen from traditional gender roles, by assuring he has male and female toys, “from little trucks to dolls to a play kitchen.”
While the couple “try not to put too much stock into gender roles,” CNN notes, Sparks take pride in teaching Sabastion how to use the bathroom.
“When it comes to lessons learned as a toddler, there are some things Sabastion wants to teach Jaxen, father to son,” CNN writes. “One of them is how to pee standing up — something Sabastion does with the help of a detachable prosthetic.”
