Ryan Ramharak (31) is trans and discovered, when he was carrying his child, that birth care in the Netherlands is not set up for this in all aspects, and that information about having a child as a trans person is not easy to find. Ryan wants to contribute to a world in which all that information is easy to find, and doctors understand how best to deal with it. Ryan therefore told his story at Warriors.
Ryan was eight when he watched the movie Tarzan on TV and thought, “I’m going to be as big and tough as Tarzan.” In itself not such a strange thought for a boy, but Ryan did not grow up as a boy. The term trans wasn’t used at all at the time, but when Ryan learned what it meant to be trans at the age of eighteen, he quickly knew: ‘that’s me’.
It then took another five years before Ryan took the plunge and decided to transition. “I was on the waiting list in Amsterdam for a long time, and then I started taking hormones and had an operation,” he says.
Preservation of reproductive organs
What Ryan already knew then is that he had a strong desire to have children. “I was in transition and I was super happy with it. Every time I looked in the mirror I was happy with every beard hair. But my sister had a baby, and when I held that baby for the first time I thought ‘hey, I want this too, but what about my transition?'”
Ryan then started to find out for himself whether it is possible to have children when you are in transition. “Until 2014, you were not allowed to have children as a trans person. If you wanted to change your gender in your passport, you had to be sterilized,” he tells Striders.
“I started looking for all the information myself, via Facebook and the internet. There I found out that it is possible to have a child if you are in transition, but I really had to get that information out myself,” says Ryan .
‘I’m doing this for the first time’
In addition to the poorly accessible information about birth care for trans people, Ryan also has reservations about the way doctors handled it. “I was lucky to have a regular gynaecologist, and that’s also one of the things I recommend to trans people who want to have a child in my workshops.”
But that doesn’t mean things went smoothly everywhere. For example, Ryan tells about a visit to the GGD, where they had to get a vaccination during pregnancy. “The person sitting across from me got nervous. She immediately started saying that sometimes men get the wrong vaccinations, and I had to tell her I was trans and pregnant before she understood.”
When Ryan suddenly stopped feeling the baby move during his pregnancy, he ended up in the emergency room. The woman’s speed, as it is called. “There was a plaque on the wall stating that the benches that were there were intended for women. That caused me even more stress: I doubted whether I would be sent away from there.”
“I was very well helped for many things. But there are a few things you really shouldn’t say. For example: ‘you are the first trans person I help, so I don’t really know how it works’. That feels weird, because you feel like a guinea pig. If someone just says that they’ve already had a thousand pregnancies and that this might be a new experience, but that it will work out, you have a lot more confidence in it.”
Workshops, book and documentary
During Ryan’s pregnancy, a documentary was made about the process in which he ended up. Ryan himself also wrote a book about it: How I Became Baba. And now it gives workshops to people who work in birth care to ensure that other trans people do not run into the same problems as them.
And what kind of things is that about, for example? “Ask for pronouns, ask for someone’s name, because the name that is in the system is not always how someone feels. And have a little extra patience during ultrasounds, because for a trans person who may have trouble with their body, it can be extra difficult and a little more time can go a long way.”