Hi friends, happy summer! This is a republication of an essay originally written in July 2025, back when only about fifteen percent of you were around to see it. For more on why I’m doing summer reruns, please read this piece. Enjoy!
“Wow, I love your ring! It’s gorgeous,” my dental hygienist says as she scrapes tartar off my teeth with her tiny scythe.
“‘Hank-oo” I reply, but I can’t really get the full “thanks” out due to said weapon on my gum line. The taste of her latex gloves fills my mouth, but honestly I’m being really brave about it.
“So, are you just engaged, or are you married?”
“Mawwied,” at least that line I can mostly get out around her fingers.
“What’s his name?”
I cringe internally at her assumption that I’m straight and married a man, even though I did marry a man. She withdraws her hands from my mouth and looks at me expectantly, eyes otherworldly large.
“Parker,” I say.
“Oh, like Peter Parker!” I hear the smile in her voice even though I can’t see any facial expression behind her surgical mask. “My youngest loves Spider Man. Do you have any kids?”
Ah, the ring-to-kids pipeline. I shake my head no, bracing myself for what’s next.
“Are you planning on having kids eventually, though?”
When she asked me this, it was mid-May. I’d been married about two months—and getting married was not something I’d even planned to do in 2025. It was so new, the word “husband” still caught in my throat. Seriously? I’m someone with a husband now? What am I, some old hag?1 This dentist appointment is actually the first time I’ve used my husband’s health insurance instead of my own, a big reason for us getting married so early.
I knew, maybe subconsciously, that as soon as I got married, people might start asking me about having kids. It’s the next step on the proverbial ladder of cishet life—Create the Nuclear Family! Live the American Dream!
But I’m not living in cis-het land. I married a man, sure, but he’s trans. That minor detail complicates the kids question quite a lot, as it turns out.
Lying there in that plastic dentist’s chair, time slows down.
I’m sufficiently annoyed enough that this dental hygienist is asking me so many personal questions right off the bat—my god, we haven’t even gotten to the flossing stage yet—that I want to stop her and say “that’s kind of a personal question.” Like, rude!
A ton of other responses run through my head:
“We’d have to do IVF or adopt if we want kids, and I lost my job so we can’t really afford that right now.” ha! bet you feel bad for asking now, dontcha!
“I don’t want kids” and then I become the villain in her afternoon. and she’s got sharp weapons in my mouth for at least the next 20 minutes.
“We haven’t decided yet,” she’ll either tell me how hard it is to be a mom or try to convince me having kids is the best thing she’s ever done, and then I’ll feel like the asshole for disagreeing.
“My husband’s trans so we can’t have kids” I’ll either get the brief satisfaction of her freezing in panicked shock at saying something sort of offensive, or she’ll scrape my gums harder than she needs to because she’s transphobic.
“Yeah, someday!” this is probably the path of least resistance, but it’s also mostly a lie.
These scenarios flash through my mind one by one and I blank out for a moment before my eyes refocus on her giant, magnified irises.
“Probably! We’re not sure yet!”
I go with the most boring answer possible, an answer that’s not really true but also not totally false, and I’m a little annoyed at myself but also hoping that she just gets on with cleaning my teeth.
“That’s okay, I’m sure you’ll get there,” she assures me as she dives back into my mouth and begins scraping around my permanent retainer.
She asks if I floss daily. I say yes. Another lie. We move on.
Or rather, she moves on (to scraping my top row of teeth) and I’m still stuck on that one too-personal-yet-probably-innocent question. My body’s still in the dentist’s chair, but my mind’s spinning out all over the place.
shit, i’m married now, I think. i guess i have to start thinking seriously about kids. ugh, this is exactly what all those essays about motherhood were talking about.
And, at risk of sounding exactly like all those other essays about motherhood and losing your interest here, let me just say this:
Getting married to a cis-passing trans man has complicated the motherhood equation in a way I never really anticipated.
I recently learned that Substack now has the option to have a ‘paywall’ for regular subscriptions, not just paid. I feel weird paywalling a repost, but this gets a little more personal & I’d rather restrict it to my close friends (HYPER/FIXATED subscribers 💕)
I don’t actually think you need to be an old hag to have a husband. However, telling people I have a husband makes me feel like an old hag. it’s fully a me problem. If you’re reading this babe, I love being married to you! It’s not you it’s me, etc!
i immediately opened this in my email and loved it ty