Sex Robots and Vegan Meat

by Jenny Kleeman

  Tallulah was conceived using Michael’s sperm and an egg from a donor who had fair hair and blue eyes, like Wes. Wes is the biological father of the son they are expecting, who was conceived with an egg from a donor who matched Michael’s darker colouring. In future same-sex parents might not have to engineer approximations of their family like this; scientists will be able to produce sperm and eggs from skin cells within a few decades. (Japanese scientists have already had a fair bit of success doing this with mouse cells, but human gametes are another matter.) Both men and women would be able to make both eggs and sperm, depending on what their relationship required.

  Wes and Michael always wanted their own biological children; adoption and fostering weren’t for them. They are almost apologetic when they tell me this, as if I might think they don’t love children enough if they aren’t prepared to take on the unknown quantity of a child given up for adoption. Heterosexual couples don’t have to justify themselves like this.

  Yet they have come to realize that biology isn’t as important as they thought.

  ‘I had to come to terms with Michael being the biological father of our daughter, and I didn’t know how our relationship would be. But what was very clear from the day she was born was that…’

  Michael is welling up. ‘Oh, it makes me cry…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Wes is crying too now. ‘It really doesn’t matter.’

  They both take a drink and try to compose themselves.

  ‘Driving home from the birth,’ Michael says, ‘I sat in the back of the car with Tallulah, and I cried. No one had prepared me for that feeling. I always thought it was maternal, and it’s clearly not maternal. From that moment, she imprinted on us, more that we could ever imagine, that whole parental love.’

  Maybe mothers don’t have the monopoly on fierce, animal love for their babies. We all sit with wet eyes for a moment. Then Michael says, ‘Don’t get me wrong – there are times when Tallulah is an absolute shit.’

  The Johnson-Ellises have been lucky – other gay couples they know, online and in real life, have had a much tougher time. They tell me ‘horror stories’ about ‘desperate’ men who’ve fallen out with their surrogates, who are ‘walking on eggshells’ because they didn’t build solid friendships with their carriers before jumping into fertility treatment. Some of the people who’ve used overseas surrogates have struggled with not being around during the pregnancy and feeling powerless.

  ‘There are some surrogacy arrangements in America that we’ve been told of, where they say to their surrogate, “You can’t leave the house after six p.m., you can’t go more than twenty miles from where you live, you can’t have sex for nine months, you can’t drink, you need to have an organic diet.” Because it’s commercialized, that’s what intended parents are saying in their contracts,’ Michael tells me.

  ‘And women are signing up to it because the money they are paying is huge,’ Wes adds. He still likes the idea of commercial surrogacy, though, because he says it means everyone knows where they stand.

  Michael disagrees. ‘I’m just not into the commercialization of a product in which the supply and the demand are massively out of kilter, and more and more people on a lower income will never be able to afford it.’

  ‘A product?’ I want to shout. But I don’t. After all, that is what surrogacy is, if it’s commercialized. A product, rather than a service; the product is the woman’s womb. The impotence that customers have over this product leads to absurdly controlling behaviour set out in contracts that are terrible for women, no matter how much they are being paid.

  Michael already knew about biobags before I first contacted him. There had been a buzz at Fertility Fest about the possibility of artificial wombs, Wes tells me, with one of the other speakers mentioning that men might be able to wear devices that gestated their babies one day. When I ask if there’s a place for this kind of technology, their eyes brighten.

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ Michael says.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Wes agrees.

  ‘What would it mean to you?’

  ‘If we fast forward twenty years to a time when this technology is available and ethically agreed, and works properly and has been properly tested, it would just give people so many more choices,’ Wes says.

  ‘And not just the gay community,’ Michael adds. ‘The women in the talks today – the emotion was raw, they were grieving something they never had. This would bring so much hope.’

  But then there’s the ick factor. If the clean meat industry has a steep hill to climb in terms of public acceptance, the artificial womb industry has a mountain.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be weird to watch your baby growing in a bag?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, for sure,’ Michael says. ‘You imagine a foetus in a lab, kicking away in an incubator… It’s like something out of The Terminator.’

  ‘It feels like Alien,’ Wes corrects him.

  ‘Because it’s not natural,’ Michael goes on.

  ‘But it’s also about people’s perception of natural, isn’t it?’ says Wes.

  ‘If something’s not natural we tend to turn our nose up at it until it’s explained to us. Until someone educates us that this is OK,’ Michael says.

  And, of course, the same goes for families with two dads.

  ‘I genuinely think that having two same-sex parents is going to be the norm,’ Wes says.

  ‘We live in a small village. Middle England, middle class village. In Tallulah’s nursery there are two other same-sex families,’ Michael declares with pride.

  ‘Can you imagine a Fertility Fest in the future where an artificial womb would be one of the options?’ I ask.

  Michael smiles. ‘I would love that to be the case.’

  * * *

  ‘I’m a writer – that’s all I am,’ Juno Roche tells me. ‘I say that because if you are trans people want you to be “an activist” too. I’ve never marched, I’ve never shouted, I’ve never carried a banner. And my pronouns – I quite like they/them. They/them fits me more, although I would never describe myself as non-binary. I just describe myself as trans. No need to put anything on the end of that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want me to say that you are a trans woman?’

  ‘No, just say I’m trans. I realize now, at the age of fifty-five, that gender was always the issue.’

  Juno is wearing light make up – a bit of mascara that offsets their turquoise eyes – with light blonde highlights in their shoulder-length hair and gold hoop earrings. We are sitting in a quiet corner of the Quaker Friends House in Euston, and they lean on the side of the chair, friendly and conspiratorial, with their legs crossed in ripped denim jeans and spotless white trainers.

  Juno has been a primary school teacher, a sex worker and a heroin addict, but they have found their calling as a writer of raw and uniquely personal pieces about the trans experience. In a moving article, published in 2016, entitled ‘My Longing To Be A Mother, As A Trans Woman’, Juno describes how, ‘My one absolute sadness, my one absolute pain, is not being a mother.’

  Back then, they were happy to be described as a trans woman. Juno had gender reassignment surgery nearly a decade ago, but rejects the idea that it has made them a woman. ‘After the operation I was on this ward, and there were four of us altogether, trans people. And the others on the ward said things like, “Oh! My skin! Does your skin feel softer?” – two days after surgery.’ Juno shoots me a sideways look. ‘“No. I think you need to be locked up.”’

  There is a gentleness to Juno that manages to coexist with this frank directness. ‘When people ask me about my genitals, I always say I’ve got upcycled genitals, or recycled genitals, or remade. To me it’s like a work of art, and a political statement, but it’s not a vagina,’ they continue. ‘That notion of being “real”… People say, “No, trans women are women.” It’s always people that aren’t trans that say that.’

  ‘You wouldn’t say trans women are women?’

  ‘No. Some people see
themselves like that; I’m not going to mark anyone else’s territory. But for me? No.’

  Juno knows this is a minefield. The debate on whether trans women are women has been at the centre of controversy over the Gender Recognition Act in the UK, which would allow trans people to have their gender identity legally recognized without any medical evidence of transition: trans women would be women because they identify as women. It’s caused uproar among some feminists who fear it would give male bodies access to private spaces intended to protect female bodies. Some trans activists have begun referring to those born female as ‘womb-bearers’, as if it is only the lack of a womb that makes trans women any different. Ectogenesis, of course, would mean trans women had equal access to gestation, and make this point moot.

  But a female body, with the reproductive capacity that goes with it, is something Juno has yearned for their entire life.

  ‘The earliest memory I have of anything at all is my mum being pregnant and me thinking that it looked like the most fantastic thing in the world. It was a kind of guttural, raw feeling. I told my teacher that’s what I wanted to be when I grew up: I wanted to have a swollen belly full of babies.’

  They were four when their mother was pregnant with their little brother, and used to press their head against her belly and listen to the baby burbling about inside. It was a home birth, and Juno got to meet their brother only moments after he was born. ‘My mum looked ridiculously happy.’

  Being a mother is about so much more than this, of course. ‘Was it pregnancy and the joy of giving birth that drew you to it?’ I ask.

  ‘I think it was the thing of having the relationship. The relationship that I had with my mother was very good, very close, very loving, very nurturing and very protective. It just felt like the most wonderful, safe, secure space. It was the only thing that ever seemed to make sense in my head: that tender relationship. That kind of bond that a mother has, it roots you in the world. It definitely rooted my mum in purposefulness and in all the good stuff in the world.’

  This moves me in a way that catches me off guard; it expresses so much of what I feel about being a mother. Here is someone who wouldn’t call themselves a woman, or even use she and her, but is able to describe something so intimately female in such a deeply sincere, heartfelt way. Perhaps it says more about me than Juno, but I wasn’t expecting to hear a childless trans person articulating it so well.

  ‘I’ve had at least fifty years of mulling this over, and became a drug addict to try and deal with the pain of it,’ Juno says, softly.

  ‘To dull the pain of not being able to be a mother?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Because nothing made sense. Relationships didn’t really make sense – we weren’t going to make a baby. My body didn’t make sense because I couldn’t make a baby.’

  Of course, Juno could have made a baby, but being a father was ‘never an option’.

  ‘It never crossed my mind that I could have been a father. It was bizarre to even think that I was male. I just used to think, I’m not sure why I’ve got this body. It always felt really detached. I couldn’t interact with any kind of maleness. In a way, if I had been able to, it could have been easier.’ Using a surrogate mother was also never on the cards. ‘I wouldn’t know how to relate to her. I wouldn’t know where I would fit in, because I’m denied motherhood at source, as a trans person. I’m denied that kind of immediacy. There would have been a level of resentment that I wouldn’t have wanted to have, and a detachment from the process, because this magical thing is taking place inside someone else.’ Adoption and fostering were equally impossible; Juno was diagnosed with HIV in 1992 which they say rules them out. At fifty-five, they are reconciled to never having children.

  ‘I wouldn’t be the writer that I am if I’d had kids. I wouldn’t be able to do the stuff that I do. You have to be realistic about it.’ But this is clearly something Juno actively mourns. ‘Even in our conversation today, there’s been a feeling of, I can’t go there.’ They pull themselves back in the chair, their hands across their chest, their eyes glossy. ‘It’s a real, physical sadness. Not being a mother means I have to make sense of this life that doesn’t make sense. That’s work. Because the sadness would be overwhelming.’

  Even in the face of biological reality, Juno held on to the hope that they would one day bear their own children. They tell me about five days after their reassignment surgery, when the surgeon came to inspect his work. The gauze used to pack out the new space inside Juno’s ‘upcycled’ genitals had been removed so he could do ‘the depth test’.

  ‘He took out this single-use speculum and pushed it deep inside – my stitches had come undone, so it was painful.’ We both flinch. ‘Then said to me, “Oh that’s the back,” and then told me what depth I had. And I literally turned my head away and just cried. There’s a back wall. I can’t have a baby. It doesn’t go anywhere.’

  ‘But you knew that would happen,’ I say, gently.

  ‘I completely knew. But that’s what I wanted. The space between knowing and feeling, sometimes it’s just like this –’ they hold up their finger and thumb, a few millimetres apart – ‘but you fall into that crevice. The flood of emotion was… It’s a cave. I don’t have a cervix, I don’t have fallopian tubes, I don’t have ovaries, I don’t have a womb.’

  Juno has heard every rumour and urban myth about the possibility of those assigned male at birth being able to one day carry a child inside them, perhaps by ectopically implanting a baby somewhere between the digestive organs, and has dismissed them all as fantastical or dangerous. ‘I don’t want to get hung up on the idea that they might ever be able to change this body into becoming that other body. I don’t think they will.’

  They had never considered ectogenesis before I got in touch. ‘When you told me about it, I instantly said, “I’m not going to look it up, because it’s not going to happen in my lifetime.” Ever since you told me about it, my mind has drifted back to it and fantasized about it. You’ve made me think about something that might happen in thirty years, and I won’t be here for it.’

  ‘If it existed now, what would it mean to you?’

  They pause, their eyes brimming again. ‘For other people that are like me, it would mean the world. It would mean they could have the complete life experience. At the moment, being trans is about having maybe 60, 70 per cent of it, and accepting the big loss, the things that you can’t have. I think that if it were possible, it would be so life-affirming, for me.’

  ‘Wouldn’t an artificial uterus be a bit weird? Do you think people would get over it?’

  ‘Of course people would get over it,’ they reply immediately. ‘I went to the 2012 Paralympics and saw the athletes on the track. If you can get used to seeing people with prostheses brilliantly running, and not only running, but becoming heroic and sexy and desirable, and becoming the coolest people there are, then absolutely.’

  If a womb that exists outside the body becomes a prosthesis for people who can’t be biologically pregnant, it will offer new opportunities for different kinds of bonding, Juno says.

  ‘Being able to go and look at something growing here, in this artificial thing, the connection is still my connection. I will go and look after it. I will go and sit next to it. I will go and look at it. I will go and take photographs of it growing. I will talk to it.’ Juno is running away with the idea. ‘You could create the intimacy that surrounds it. You could create the room around it. It would be in a physical space, and you could therefore kind of take ownership of that physical space. I can’t own another woman’s womb, or another woman’s body. And there would be an immediacy there. That’s what intimacy is: immediacy, a lack of barriers. The magic of being able to look in and see this thing, and know that it’s yours.’

  * * *

  Before I leave Anna Smajdor, I ask her about the benefits of ectogenesis for people like Juno, Wes and Michael, which she’s never written about.

  ‘From my perspective, I am not very support
ive of the right to have babies at all,’ she says plainly. ‘I think that to create another human being is the height of hubris.’ Her eyes say she knows this is outrageous, but she says it sincerely. ‘From a purely moral point of view, I think the relationship between parents and children is deeply, deeply problematic. The love children have for their parents is a kind of Stockholm syndrome: they are so dependent and they have to love their captor. There’s something quite horrific about it, to my mind.’

  By this point, I’m well aware of how much Anna isn’t into having babies, but this is getting weird.

  ‘I’m not saying it isn’t love, I’m saying I don’t think love is always as incredibly nice as people tend to assume,’ she goes on. ‘Because of all that, I don’t support anyone’s right to have a child. I support people’s right not to have their body interfered with. Any further than that, I would not like to say that ectogenesis would be a good thing because it allows trans women to reproduce. My arguments in favour of it are not really about the right to reproduce.’

  Perhaps sensing that she is losing me a little here, Anna leaves the world of philosophical logic for a moment.

  ‘“The Moral Imperative for Ectogenesis” was a kind of thought experiment. I was trying to push the reasoning as far as I could, to look for the ways in which such an imperative might be argued. Assuming that we could get perfect ectogenesis, it does seem to me like a thing we should do, in a fully just society. The problem is that our societies are not fully just. And our societies are so heavily imbued with this idea that natural reproduction is beautiful and wonderful and the most amazing part of a woman’s life. In a society that believes that, whether implicitly or explicitly, ectogenesis is going to be very problematic, and I think it’s more likely to be used in ways that are detrimental to women generally.’

  ‘What kind of ways?’