Particularly at the moment, with the rise in transphobia. ![]() Is there much convincing that needs to be done? “Yes, definitely. ‘I needed to figure out exactly who I was before I had a kid.’ Photograph: Manuel Vázquez/The Guardian I think empathy is key in convincing people that trans people are actually quite normal, and live lives that are not sensational or scary.”įreddy McConnell with his son. “It sounds wishy-washy, but I thought it could be a good opportunity to spread empathy. McConnell orders pancakes and bacon with maple syrup, and tells me the thing he most wants the film to do is normalise trans people. It’s a ferociously windy day, and we head towards the cafe on the pier overlooking the North Sea and the Channel. It’s such a brave and amazing thing to do. “But, actually, it’s not as simple as that. Occasionally, when he’s feeling sorry for himself, she loses patience: “Why are you making such a fuss? It’s what you wanted.” Then she relents. On screen, his mother supports him with a mixture of tender loving care and the odd no-nonsense kick up the arse. Everybody should experience it – especially men.” McConnell tells me she used to say this to him when he was a child, long before she had any idea that her son was trans. Throughout, he is encouraged by his mother, Esme, who tells him: “I loved being pregnant. At one point, a tearful McConnell sobs into the camera in the middle of the night: “I feel like a fucking alien.” “Every time I think about it, I think, ‘What the fuck am I doing?’” he says. He starts having periods again (“I don’t like the idea that I’ve got tampons in my bag,” he winces) his facial hair gets wispier, his hips broaden, his tummy softens and he starts to speak less from his chest and more from his throat. In the film, we see how discombobulated McConnell becomes when he stops taking testosterone as he tries to conceive, using a sperm donor, and his body, in effect, goes into reverse. He considered a hysterectomy, but never went through with it – partly because he had not ruled out the possibility of having children. McConnell, 32, started taking testosterone at 25 and had “top surgery” to remove breast tissue a year later. Nor is the process he goes through to make it happen. What makes the film so human is that McConnell struggles himself with what he is doing, and asks himself the same question, about why he wants to carry his baby. Of course things are different now, McConnell says: his father is no longer struggling with a philosophical concept – he simply has a grandson to love. His father asks how Jack is, they hug and make babysitting plans. The exchange between the two is warm and loving. Initially, he couldn’t comprehend why Freddy had fought so hard to become a man, and was now doing the very thing that appeared to define womanhood – having a baby. His father doesn’t appear in the film their relationship was one of the fallouts from the pregnancy. Like his son, he is well-spoken with a military bearing. Within two minutes of walking into the centre we chance upon McConnell’s father, a local shop owner. I’d never have felt comfortable being pregnant at work.” He says he felt safer here when he was pregnant than he would have in London. McConnell lives in a seaside town in the south of England, close to where he grew up. The result is Seahorse (so called because the male carries the young), a tender – and rather wonderful – documentary about love, family, breakups, fallouts, raging hormones and the complexities of identity. “Production companies will say, ‘It’s going to be called something sensitive’ and it ends up being called something like Trapped Bodies Get Sliced Up!” So McConnell decided to assemble his own team, and then hand over creative control to the director Jeanie Finlay. He talks about how sensationalised film and TV documentaries about trans people have tended to be, and how the subjects have invariably felt betrayed. But, he says, he also felt a responsibility to tell his story. McConnell admits the whole thing is counterintuitive – that he, too, cannot think of a person less likely to put his private life on screen.
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