NPR Honors Expectant ‘Dad’ on Father’s Day, Funded by You

Sure, we may have had Mother’s Day last month, but “birthing parents” apparently can be celebrated for two straight months — at least, so long as your tax dollars make it happen.

Just in case you’re not a holiday-centric person, Sunday was Father’s Day — or, as fathers like me prefer to put it, the one Sunday when we’re left the heck alone to do what we want for once (in my case, catching up on Formula 1 on the couch) and then get treated to the dinner of our choice. (Full disclosure: I went with Korean BBQ followed by Baskin-Robbins, mostly because the little lady who entitled me to celebrate the day was feeling some chocolate-chip cookie dough. Seriously, all her.)

For the non-woke, this is how Father’s Day has been celebrated for ages; my daughter isn’t old enough for the hand-drawn card yet, but this is pretty much de rigueur when it comes to these sorts of things.

Over at NPR, however, Father’s Day doesn’t even need to involve fathers — and we’re not just talking about single-parent families. That’s so 1970s.

To commemorate the holiday, the public broadcaster profiled three people: Jorge Mata, a 58-year-old immigrant father from Salinas, California; Duane Jolly, a 47-year-old retired sergeant major in the Army; and Kayden Coleman, who we will get to in a moment.

Mata moved to the United States when his children were just toddlers. Not much is made of his immigration status, although both he and his wife are doctors so I don’t think we’re talking about individuals smuggled over the Rio Grande by a cartel.

Both are from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and decided to move north after pharmacy robberies close to doctors’ offices began claiming the lives of his friends. “After that, we said, ‘You know what? It’s not safe,’” Mata said.

Neither he nor his wife spoke English when they arrived, and he had to work in low-level jobs, starting at Outback Steakhouse — but he completed a physician assistant program at Stanford and is back in medicine.

Jolly, meanwhile, served two deployments in Afghanistan and Qatar, respectively, missing out on five years in his children’s lives. He noticed how the deployments would affect his children — and how he missed major milestones by serving his country.

“I’d say my two oldest kids really caught the worst of it as far as missing out on things. One of the worst parts was my oldest daughter at the time when I left — I think she was 9,” he said.

“And so still a little girl, pigtails and such. And then the third time I came back, she had hit puberty. And that was a bit rough, you know, to leave your little girl and come back and she’s becoming a young woman,” Jolly said. “I feel like I missed that transition period.”

This … is NPR? A doctor who left Mexico to work his way up from a job at Outback Steakhouse to a physician’s assistant? A vet contemplating the sacrifices he’s made for his country? Was whoever was on duty this weekend suddenly possessed by the ghost of Rush Limbaugh?

Alas, no. Because, sandwiched in between those two inspiring stories was Kayden Coleman, a “dad” who’s not actually a dad.

The lede to his segment: “Kayden Coleman, 37, was surprised to learn he was pregnant.”

“Kayden Coleman, 37, was surprised to learn he was pregnant.” – NPR https://t.co/hzNB0wvsET pic.twitter.com/TFlCV5t2BS

— TimOnPoint (@TimOnPoint) June 19, 2023

Well, like 100 percent of dads, he should join the club. This is one of those febrile nightmares you have when you have the flu and take a second Ambien on top of the NyQuil. Then you find out that Lyndon LaRouche is the U.S. president and the country is involved in a nuclear conflict with Biafra, and then hopefully you wake up. Not speaking from personal experience here. Not at all.

But that’s the point: Coleman isn’t a dad. He’s a woman who claims to be a man but didn’t surgically adjust the plumbing so that such an event would be precluded.

“In 2013, he had just had top surgery — a double mastectomy — and had temporarily stopped taking hormones for the procedure,” NPR wrote, referring to Coleman with male pronouns.

“Coleman, who is transgender, said doctors had told him he couldn’t get pregnant. A few years later, assuming that he’d been taking hormones long enough to avoid another pregnancy, he found he was expecting again.”

She is now the mother of “two young daughters” — and while NPR referred to her throughout as the father, the actual father was nowhere to be mentioned in the piece.

Instead, our national public broadcaster said she “shares [her] experiences with fatherhood and pregnancy as a transmasculine person on social media, hoping to change perceptions and expectations.”

“I had to convince a lot of people that I was pregnant and that I wasn’t just a strange man trying to infiltrate the OB-GYN’s office,” she said. “I got offered abortions an astronomical amount of times. I think that comes from the idea that people think that trans people either don’t want to have kids or shouldn’t have kids.”

“I experienced a lot of pushback and discrimination within the medical system based on preconceived ideas of what a pregnant person is supposed to look like,” she told NPR.

You don’t say.

Coleman added that she “spent more time fighting for autonomy over myself to just get an equitable space comfortable enough for me to give birth” instead of getting to “actually enjoy the process of being pregnant.”

As for the actual dad involved in these pregnancies? Again, as Wikipedia might phrase it, [citation needed].

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