Jewish transgender man gives birth and embraces life as a single ‘abba’

When Rafi Daugherty went to the hospital for the birth of his first child, he posted a sign on the delivery room door.
“I am a single transgender man having my first baby,” it read. “I use he/him/his pronouns and will be called ‘Abba’ (Hebrew for father) by the baby. Papa, Dad, Daddy, Father … are also ok.”
Rafi, 33, wanted hospital staff to be prepared for what they were about to see: a man laboring in bed.
“I didn’t want them to assume that I identified as female because I was having a baby,” he said.
After eight hours of labor, Rafi was holding his 7-pound, 10-ounce daughter: Ettie Rose, named, in the Jewish tradition, for Rafi’s maternal grandmother and great-grandmother.
Since bringing Ettie home from the hospital, Rafi’s days have been filled with frequent feedings — unable to nurse, he gives his daughter donor breast milk  — and diaper changes and stroller walks around his Denver neighborhood.
Nearly five months on, Ettie is a thriving infant with an impressive collection of plush seahorses.
“We got a lot of seahorse toys, for obvious reasons,” Rafi told JTA.
Obvious, that is, if you happen to know that male seahorses carry and birth their offspring.

Male pregnancy first made headlines in 2007, when Thomas Beatie, a transgender man, became pregnant — and went public with his story, posing for magazines and appearing on “Oprah.” Back then, there were virtually no resources for pregnant transmen. (“I had nothing to go by; the organizations I reached out to had nothing,” Beatie told JTA.)
That’s slowly changing thanks to nascent research, as well as the emergence of closed social media groups devoted to transmasculine birthing and infant-feeding.
Furthermore, transgender rights and inclusion are increasingly a part of public — and Jewish — discourse. That’s due in part to the recent transition of the Olympic gold medalist and reality TV star now known as Caitlyn Jenner, and the prominence of transgender characters on hit series such as “Transparent,” where the protagonist is a Jewish transwoman, and “Orange Is the New Black.”

Source: http://www.jta.org and credit to Gabrielle Birkner is JTA's managing editor. Follow her on Twitter @gabibirkner.

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