2024 has been a good year for the publication of articles I’ve been working on with colleagues for a long time. Hot on the heels of recent pieces on microaggressions and domestic violence comes the latest peer-reviewed work from the Trans Pregnancy Project, published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. It’s open access, which means you can read it for free or download a copy to share here:

‘Why Is the Chubby Guy Running?’: Trans Pregnancy, Fatness, and Cultural Intelligibility
by Francis Ray White, Ruth Pearce, Damien W. Riggs, Carla A. Pfeffer, Sally Hines

The article opens with the titular question, “why is the chubby guy running?” – drawn from a story shared by a research participant who ran a 5k race while thirty-nine weeks pregnant. We use this as the starting point for exploring the topic of fatness in respect to trans men and non-binary people who experience pregnancy, addressing the gendering of both pregnancy and fatness, stereotypes associated with fat men, and how certain bodies become legible or intelligible.

A lot of research participants in the project described complex relationships to fatness during their pregnancy, especially where their bump was inaccurately read as a “beer belly”. The writing of this article was led by fat studies expert Francis Ray White; I really appreciated the opportunity to work with them on making sense of these stories, and thinking through what they might mean both for trans birth parents and for our understanding of gender and pregnancy more widely.

This is likely to be one of the last published works from the Trans Pregnancy Project (although we do have at least one more article on the way!)

The project originally wrapped in 2020, but we had such an enormous amount of data that we’ve been writing it up ever since since, addressing topics including media representation, midwifery, conception, pregnancy loss, sperm donors, testosterone use and cessation, racialisation and whiteness, partner abuse, and young people’s views about possible pregnancy. I’m grateful as ever for the trust offered to us by the research participants, and hope we can continue to expand and evidence society’s understanding of their experiences.