While on a family vacation with her husband and two young sons, Ute Heggen of Brooklyn, N.Y., discovered that her husband was leading a double life. Unbeknownst to her, he had been secretly cross-dressing and visiting gay bars in Greenwich Village for months. She later learned that his cross-dressing had started sometime during her second pregnancy. Over the next few years — during which her husband socially and medically “transitioned,” abandoning their family in the process — Heggen came to believe that her husband’s “transition” was inextricably linked to a fierce jealousy of her pregnancy.
Today, Heggen calls herself a “trans widow” because the man she married has vanished forever, even though he’s still alive. Now divorced, she has dedicated her life to interviewing and platforming other trans widows and has compiled an impressive amount of research on the subject. Over the course of 52 interviews, Heggen heard her experience with “womb envy” validated again and again.
“This is a pattern for men who ‘transition’ between 35 and 50, when their wife is pregnant,” Heggen told Independent Women’s Forum in an interview. “They have this uncontrolled jealousy of the pregnancy.”
Heggen’s personal testimony comes in the wake of news that, before long, men may be able to co-opt not only women’s clothes, sports, and private spaces, but their uniquely female organs as well.
In April of this year, the Guardian announced that the United Kingdom’s first womb transplant had resulted in a healthy birth for the mother and child. At first glance, this news seems overwhelmingly positive. Women suffering from Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, a rare condition where a baby girl is born without a uterus, now potentially have an alternative to surrogacy if they wish to have their own biological children.
Predictably, however, activists are already attempting to hijack womb-transplant surgeries to allow men who identify as women a chance to feel more “feminine.” While these breakthrough surgeries are just starting to be performed in the U.K., the first-ever successful birth from a womb transplant took place in Sweden in 2014. Mats Brännström, a professor and chief physician at the University of Gothenburg who assisted at that birth, reported that after the surgery, he received a barrage of emails from men who identify as transgender women hoping to get pregnant.
Instead of reminding them of the biological reality that only women have the physical and hormonal makeup to gestate a child, Brännström told them, “We haven’t done enough research, but I think it will be possible in the future. It may take five or ten years.”
Even more shockingly, he asserted that “if it’s an efficient method with no risk, I don’t think there are any ethical boundaries.”
There is nothing ethical about appropriating women’s body parts to validate men’s delusions of femininity.
Consider the costs alone. The medical procedures currently available to men who seek to alter their sexual anatomy are extremely expensive and can affect their family’s well-being in addition to their own. According to Heggen’s research, one-third of the women she interviewed said that their male partner had secretly run up credit-card debt to finance his efforts to appear as a woman. One woman revealed that her husband took $55,000 out of their shared retirement account to pay for facial feminization surgery. These expenses pale in comparison to the $300,000 price tag on uterine-transplant surgeries, which are usually not covered by insurance.
As devastating as the financial burdens can be, attempting to co-opt the uniquely feminine experience of pregnancy is where Heggen reports the real betrayal lies.
One of the most disturbing discoveries she made was that some “transitioning” husbands will take credit for their wives’ birth experiences. According to Heggen, they do this to try to convince people of falsehoods: that they are really women, and that they actually gave birth themselves. Their wives are left blindsided, expected not only to indulge this impossible notion but also to share Mother’s Day and even the title of “mother” with their husbands.
That men who identify as women seek to attain female organs in order to access the uniquely feminine experience of giving birth betrays an almost incomprehensible level of narcissism. Seduced by the cult of gender ideology, they show a complete disregard for the women whose lives are ripped apart.
According to the National Library of Medicine, these disordered desires are often linked to autogynephilia, a condition in which a man is “sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female.” The disorder is a common precursor to males undergoing procedures to alter their appearance or sex characteristics. In other words, for these men, claiming the rights to female organs and the birth experience is a sexual fetish. Under these circumstances, imitation is not flattery — it’s mockery.
The news that men identifying as women are clamoring for uterine transplants, at the expense of women who really need them, is one more example of the chokehold that gender ideology has on the United States. In the last year, American women have been pressured to applaud while TikToker Dylan Mulvaney ridiculed the experience of girlhood and womanhood, suggesting that being a woman means crying, overspending, and wearing fluffy dresses.
American women were forced to take a back seat while transgender-identifying male Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, won USA Today’s Woman of the Year award. And despite left-leaning voices trying to assure us otherwise, women are being deprived of athletic opportunities and scholarships, as transgender-identifying athletes such as Lia Thomas rack up win after win and title after title. Thankfully, this trend is receiving pushback because of the unflagging efforts of women such as former competitive swimmer Riley Gaines and their allies in several state governments, including the governors of Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, and Florida. The growing resistance to men participating in women’s sports points to a future where men will no longer be able to access women’s spaces — and, hopefully, their body parts.
Performing a uterine transplant on a biological man is not only a crime against natural law, it’s a crime against the women who have had lifesaving hysterectomies or are suffering from MRKH syndrome and finally might have the chance to carry their own child. Women have lost their awards, their scholarships, and even the exclusive right to be called mothers. Women shouldn’t have to compete with men for access to reproductive care, too.
This op-ed was published by National Review.
