‘Why Is the Chubby Guy Running?’: Trans Pregnancy, Fatness, and Cultural Intelligibility

Abstract

Since the late 2000s trans pregnancy has received increasing public and academic attention, and stories of the ‘pregnant man’ have become a media staple. Existing research has critiqued such spectacularization and the supposed tension between maleness, masculinity, and pregnancy that underpins it. Extending that work, this article draws on interview data from an international study of trans reproductive practices and analyzes participants' experiences of being, and expecting themselves to be, perceived in public space not as spectacularly ‘pregnant men’, but as fat men. As a starting point we take the experience of one participant whose heavily pregnant participation in a five-kilometer race prompted the question: ‘Why is the chubby guy running?’ Using Judith Butler's concept of the cultural intelligibility of gender, we ask why the question asked was not: ‘Why is the pregnant guy running?’ We further consider the degree to which pregnant trans people manage their unintelligibility within the matrix of pregnancy, fatness, and trans/gender and how this reveals the limits of gender intelligibility itself.