The task of the cervix is to stay closed, to make an impenetrable wall protecting the fetus, for approximately forty weeks of a pregnancy. After that, by means of labor, the wall must somehow become an opening. This happens through dilation, which is not a shattering, but an extreme thinning.

This sounded good — I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about experiences that demand surrender — that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.

You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.

all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated

Is the something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's normal state and occasions a radical intimacy with, and radical alienation from, one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate confromity? Or is this just another disqualification of anyhting tied to closely to the female animal from the privileged term, in this case nonconformity or radicality?

Never in my life have I felt more prochoice than when I was pregnant. And never in my life have I understood more thoroughly, and been more excited about, a life that began at conception.