THANK YOU!!! the tags i’ve been seeing like this have been bothering the hell out of me, especially because of just how many there are.
pregnancy isn’t body horror. it’s simply not. the point of body horror is to horrify you by showing you things happening to bodies that should not happen — gore and violence, limbs in impossible configurations or body parts mixed with distinctly inhuman features, natural bodily processes being imitated by something monstrous or alien. it’s not just “hey, aren’t natural human bodies so gross and awful and scary?” so no, pregnancy actually isn’t body horror for the same reason disabled bodies aren’t body horror — you might personally be horrified by them, but that just says a whole lot about how you perceive real life marginalized bodies and absolutely nothing about the bodies themselves.
yes, bodies are weird and pregnancy can do things to a person’s body that we don’t typically see outside of that context. but it’s still a natural bodily process, and the bodies you’re apparently so comfortable calling horrifying are real people’s bodies, not special effects in a horror movie. if you have that strong of an aversion to actual real life bodies of any kind, that doesn’t mean those kinds of bodies “are body horror”, it simply means you need to work on how you view other people and project your feelings on their bodies because that isn’t healthy at all.
like, to be clear, viewing male pregnancy as body horror is anti-transmasculinity, and also, viewing female pregnancy as body horror is misogyny. the fact that you’re dehumanizing cis women and trans men in that way doesn’t make it better than if you were just dehumanizing trans men. i would argue it’s actually worse, simply because that’s even more people whose bodies you see as less worthy of respect!
not to mention, you can say you see all pregnancy as equally horrifying all you want, but i know you don’t actually treat them the same way. no matter how you may feel internally about the bodies of pregnant women, you’re at least desensitized to seeing them in real life. we’ve all interacted with pregnant women in our daily lives, we probably all know women in our personal lives who we’ve seen pregnant at some point. so even if you do think all pregnancy is body horror, unless you’re especially shitty, you’re going to know how to interact with a pregnant woman without treating them like some sort of monster because you’ve probably had to learn how to do that at some point. you might still be weird to them, but you at least know how to reign it in to some extent.
but pregnant men? i’d bet real money that you’ve never seen one in real life. your exposure to male pregnancy is probably limited to horror movies and hypersexualized mpreg art and maybe news stories or social media posts about pregnant trans men. even if you say you feel the same about all pregnancy, we’re the ones you’re going to end up treating with the least respect and dignity, simply because you’re not used to us yet. so don’t fool yourself into thinking your disgust toward pregnancy doesn’t uniquely affect trans men, because even if you don’t only feel it toward us, i guarantee you’ll show it to us in a way you wouldn’t show it to pregnant women because you haven’t been forced to learn how to pretend you respect us yet.
(and even if you are just openly and unabashedly horrible toward pregnant women, i guarantee you’d be even more awful toward a pregnant man for that reason.)
so please, stop telling on yourselves for being misogynistic and anti-transmasculine in my notes and start doing some real introspective digging into why you’re so comfortable labeling people’s actual real life bodies as “body horror”.
