Save the World, Abort the Future: ‘Terminator’ and Trans Bodies After Roe v. Wade

The doctor at the clinic where I go to ask for testosterone wants to know my future—that I don’t ever want to be pregnant before I start on T. There is so little research on bodies like mine, she can’t say what will happen for sure.

I guess I need to talk to my partner, I say to the doctor, surprising myself. I already know I have no desire to be pregnant. My wife and I have been going back and forth about a baby since we first fell in love, and that was twenty years ago. On top of that, it’s the summer of 2022. Roe v. Wade has just been overturned and the internet is reminding me daily that trans and nonbinary people with wombs can get pregnant too. It’s a fact I usually forget, but when I do remember it I think, immediately, of getting my uterus cut out. I am certain I don’t want to carry a child.

And yet, when I say to the doctor I’m not sure, I’m not lying.

Here’s the thing: It’s possible to be so disconnected from your body that its signals pulse like distant stars. I could have read them, but I would have had to want to know where I was going, that I was trans. Instead, for years, I practiced not knowing. I got very good at it. And even now I can only sometimes navigate by my own body. This makes “choice,” the thing we fight for in my overlapping communities of trans people and people assigned female at birth, sometimes feel complicated, even as the need to have a choice is as obvious as the sky.

So I take my time. When I leave, the doctor hands me a form. It reads, “I understand that even though my periods will stop, I could still become pregnant. I understand that masculinizing hormone therapy causes birth defects in a fetus.” In the colonized geography of medicine, my womb is the unknown country, the place off the map where the monsters come from.

*

Maybe it’s because I’m an old millenial, but when I think about queer masculine pregnancy and parenting, I think about Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Don’t laugh; there was nothing else like Sarah Connor. She was butch, all muscles and decisiveness, and she was a mother, and she was a hero, and she had lots of guns. To me, a queer child who introduced myself to everyone as John, she was both an object of desire and a consolation. She was something I could imagine myself growing up into, since I’d learned by then that I could not grow up into myself.

In the colonized geography of medicine, my womb is the unknown country, the place off the map where the monsters come from.

In the most famous scene from the movie, Sarah is asleep at a picnic table in the desert. She is weary after a long night of evading a killer cyborg from the future hell-bent on murdering her estranged son, who will grow up to lead the human survivors of a machine-made nuclear apocalypse against their robot overlords.

She dreams that the Sarah Connor we know stands by a fence outside a playground, her ripped muscles exposed by a tight black tank top, jackboots crushing the parched California grass. Through the chain-link she sees another version of herself. This woman is femme: ’80s perm and waitress uniform, a toddler in her arms. She’s happy, absorbed in her child. She doesn’t know what’s coming, and our Sarah screams warnings at her in soundless anguish. The other Sarah looks up, momentarily disturbed, but her attention is soon drawn back to the baby, so that she’s looking at him when the bomb drops on LA and everything, our black-clad butch heroine included, burns up, turns to dust, and blows away.

This scene is also an image of gestation, about trying to see a future at once transparent and as-yet unshaped, about abortion, about having to choose life, but whose? As an artifact of the post-Roe America of the ’80s and ’90s, the Terminator movies cut both ways—they’ve got evil machines who travel back in time to try and terminate potential pregnancies, but the films’ thrills come from Sarah’s certainty about the future and her agency in her own body, what she knows and how she survives. She makes pipe bombs; she crushes one Terminator inside a hydraulic press, drops another into a vat of molten steel. She’s so desperate to evade the future she sees in her playground dream that she goes after the inventor of the machines with a sniper rifle, like a Terminator taking time into her own hands. The films’ mixed messages weren’t lost on feminists at the time. As film critic Kathy Miao put it in 1992, “Sarah is about as tough as they come. But she is, in the final analysis, only the holy vessel in guerrilla garb.”

*

There is a narrative about trans people that goes like this: There is a person inside us who is the opposite sex from the one we were assigned at birth. The man inside me, like Michelangelo’s David, is waiting to be released from the dead marble of my human flesh. He is trapped in the body of a woman. My top-surgery letter, which is a letter written by my therapist to get my insurance to pay, draws on this narrative, stating that “Dr. McQuown . . . at age five introduced themselves as a ‘boy’.” This is true, but it is also just expedient. If the insurers and the doctors had to believe I’ve always been a man to believe I needed top surgery, let them see a man inside me. Let them think they need to help him out.

Who is that man? Does he have a homemade Mohawk and multiples of the exact same flannel shirt like I do? Does he also like to wear crushed-velvet tails and spandex to weddings? Does he own unnecessary knives? Can he sing? Can he cook? Is he me? I am afraid to take testosterone because my voice will change and my hair will thin and my womb will make monsters. Anything might stop me, anything future me might regret.

“A thing that may happen if you decide to take T,” says my doctor, “is that you may find yourself sure that you are right, even when you are not. This is an effect of testosterone. So if you find yourself getting in fights with your boss, with your lover, it may be the T.”

This blows my mind, explaining every terrible thing about human history. I tell my wife what the doctor told me and she says, “Sometimes I think you might already have more testosterone in your system than other people.”

“I know,” I say, “that’s exactly what I thought too.”

Broad shoulders, chin hair, drenched in sweat, and always right. But also hips, also breasts that were here until I made them go. Also almost everything I need to make a baby. Blood and depression every month like clockwork. Me and my womb in our little sadomasochistic dance.

*

In the first Terminator film, there is a soldier from the future who comes to ’80s LA and his job is to tell Sarah Connor that there is a man inside her who is trying to get out.

That soldier is Reese. He wants to protect Sarah Connor from the time-traveling cyborg that is trying to give her “a kind of retroactive abortion” by killing her before she can conceive her child. The child she’s going to have, Reese tells Sarah, is the savior of the human species. “One man who brought us back from the brink . . . John Connor. Your son, Sarah . . . your unborn son.”

Outside the theater in America, it is 1984 and the idea of fetal personhood is forming. This is part of the historical context for the Terminator films, which were conceived in the first ten years after Roe, as the antiabortion movement took their fight from the courts, where they’d lost, to the battleground of hearts and minds that is American pop culture. They needed American voters to see the fetus as a subject, a person separate from the woman carrying it, with its own separate and equal rights, but this was hard to achieve when the fetus was invisible inside the cage of its mother’s flesh. As one obstetrician put it in 1981, “The fetus could not be taken seriously as long as he remained a medical recluse in an opaque womb.”

To fight this uterine opacity, antiabortionists enlisted the relatively new technology of the ultrasound machine. They even created their own horror movie, 1984’s Silent Scream, which came out the same year as Terminator, and paired ultrasound images with organ music and overdubs to show an abortion in real time “from the victim’s vantage point.” By the early 2000s, many states had passed laws that require an ultrasound prior to abortion. A pregnant woman who wants to end a pregnancy in America often has to look at the machine-generated image of her fetus; she often has to hear its heartbeat so she knows that it’s real.

In Terminator, Reese is the ultrasound machine. There is a moment where he asks Sarah to look away from her own life, toward a son that, for him, already exists and has a name. “Oh, come on. Do I look like the mother of the future?” she asks. “I didn’t ask for this honor and I don’t want it!” In response, Reese speaks to her in John’s voice: “Your son gave me a message to give to you,” he tells her, and suddenly he’s someone she needs to save. Viewed through this lens, T1 appears as a surprisingly conservative film, one where the mother must radically alter her life and her body in order to save the child who may then save the world. In his message from the future, John Connor instructs his soon-to-be mother that “the future is not set.” It might sound like freedom, but what the man inside her really means is, “You must survive, or I will never exist.”

Excepting of course their own mistresses, this is the imperative Republicans set for anyone who is pregnant in 2022. Not that it’s a new argument—it’s been around quite literally since Jesus, but Republicans love to suggest that aborted babies might have saved us. This is what Ohio Republican Jean Schmidt meant when she recently defended the idea of refusing an abortion to a thirteen-year-old kid who had been raped on the grounds that “that child can grow up and be something magnificent, a wonderful family person, cure cancer, etc.” The child in question is not the thirteen-year-old—it is the one with the future, the one we only imagine we see.

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As trans masculine author Krys Malcolm Belc describes the images from his own pregnancy, “Ultrasound does not capture an image so much as it uses sound waves to imagine the fetus. The machine does not see a baby, but rather detects where a baby begins and ends.” Among the things that the machine does not capture, of course, is the gestating parent. The baby appears to be floating in space. As Rosalind Pollack Petchesky put it back in 1985, “The technology which makes the baby/fetus more ‘visible’ renders the woman invisible.” In Belc’s case, it renders him doubly invisible, since the womb in question belongs to a man. The baby he is carrying is determined to be a boy, its sex unambiguous within Belc’s misgendered, transparent frame. “I felt jealousy everywhere,” Belc admits, “deep in the pit he called home.”

The ultrasound erases the person surrounding the baby, but it also erases the baby itself. The ultrasound images on my friends’ fridges are comical. There is an unironic little arrow pointing right at the fetal crotch that says “boy” or “girl.”

*

On paper, the Sarah of Terminator 2 is an ideal mother. She’s the holy vessel after all, and now that her savior son is born, she devotes her life to creating the god among men he is foretold to become. The movie doesn’t make this out to be easy, or safe. “For a while there, she was with this crazy ex–Green Beret guy, running guns,” John tells us. “She’d shack up with anybody she could learn from so she could teach me how to be this ‘great military leader.’” The result is a kid who’s ready to survive when the Terminators come, who can reload his mother’s handgun clips and hack an ATM.

Watching the movie now though, it’s easy to see that the future is devouring them both. “You are all already dead,” Sarah says to the psych-ward workers tasked with imprisoning her for ranting about robots. Like parents and politicians clinging to the boys and girls their ultrasounds promised them, she is stuck in the future, a woman already on fire in her burning world. This also means that for Sarah, the son in front of her isn’t the ethical, loving, teenage boy we see but an inadequate version of the great military leader he’s supposed to become. In the film, he knows this. He has too many feelings; he tries and fails to care for her, to get her to say she loves him, but she can’t. It’s not possible to love someone you are trying to erase.

*

When I was a little boy, I thought I’d grow up into a man, but when I was a thirty-six-year-old nonbinary queer, I hesitated for a long time before getting my breasts removed. I thought it was a nonretractable step, as if any minute I have ever lived on earth has been retractable. I said to S., a friend of a friend who was four weeks out from their own surgery, “What if I regret getting rid of my breasts?”

It was my first very thorough introduction to the idea that to have a female-assigned body is to have a responsibility to the future.

“Maybe you will. It’s okay to regret things,” they said.

This is what freed me. I am not only responsible to my future self. I am also responsible to this self, right now.

*

In that famous scene from T2, there is the Sarah inside the playground and the Sarah outside. One is the good mother, who does not care about the whole abstract human species, only her son. She wears a skirt; she goes to work; she believes in a future that is just like the present; she knows nothing and so she smiles. The other Sarah knows the end of the world is coming. Her small, hard body glistens in the sweat, blood, and machine oil of end time after end time as waves of cops and doctors and killer cyborgs from the future chase her through the sequels. She is so much more complicated in her motivations and alliances than the Stallones and Schwarzeneggers of the straight action flicks that ran alongside her. Those men’s estranged children weren’t disappointed in their traumatized love; they didn’t have to sleep with ex-Marines to learn how to fight. At best, they had a girl to save, but Sarah Connor had the whole world. It was my first very thorough introduction to the idea that to have a female-assigned body is to have a responsibility to the future, to everything and everyone on the planet. Sarah Connor isn’t supposed to even want to save herself, and yet she does. She wants to save everyone: the Sarah in the playground, the son who isn’t yet a hero, the other moms and dads and kids. And herself. She wants both, the jackboots, the gun, the good mother, the one who lives and the one who dies. She cannot leave the fence. It is the kind of dream where you scream and scream and make no sound.

It seems at first to be a scene about knowledge, but in the end everyone burns.

*

Everyone burns. But I don’t mean that in the bad way, with the bombs. I mean every cell of my body is changing, all the time. I mean we are all already dead and I cannot save this self, no matter what I do. The man I thought I would grow up to be when I was a little boy isn’t the man I became. I aborted him, as I did the mother of seven who I imagined was my only other possible future. I aborted a trans man with breasts, and when I woke up in the hospital, with only healing ahead of me, the sweet nurse said, “There now, that wasn’t so hard.” I aborted the version of myself that had a child at twenty and the one who started on T last year. In this body, there is no tiny man, growing until he fills my skin. There is only this trans body, big as it is, already in sharp contact with the world.

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