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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/SlenderBeach on 2023-09-20 04:19:54.

We are doing IVF, which means that we will know the sex of the embryos.

I was born female. I am substantially older than the average Redditor, which means that when I was growing up there were no words to describe non-binary or trans people. The only word that existed in my community and the only word I could find in the earliest days of the internet when looking for it was “transvestite”, which I was not, so I grew up as a girl/woman but hating every minute of it.

To this day, I present as a woman, because if I were to change now I would probably lose my career and my family.

On top of that, but separate from it, I also work in a heavily male-dominated industry. We are talking easily 90%+ male. At every step of the way, I have been discriminated against for being female. I was literally shut out from many opportunities, and I think the world is terribly unfair to quantitatively-minded females.

There are other traumatic experiences I can’t describe here, but suffice it to say, I cannot personally recommend being female to anyone. I just can’t see why it would be a good thing when you are objectively treated like shit.

However, I am nothing if not fair: I recognize people have different preferences. I am lucky enough to have some mtf trans friends. So hopefully a female child would, statistically speaking, feel differently and actually like being female, and if not, hopefully they could do something about it and not have a life of misery like I did.

Be that as it may, I do not think I am the right person to raise a female child because it would be too triggering. Sometimes when people have preferences over the sex of their child, it’s because they imagine that if they have a female child they can do X with her while if they have a male child they can do Y with him. That’s not it for me. For me, it’s simply that I have too much trauma around having been born female.

My partner vehemently disagrees and thinks we should not care about sex at all. I agree that we should live in a world where sex does not matter, but I think that there are too many situations where if we had a female child, the world would treat that child horribly, and I would not be able to cope with that let alone help the child. I recognize that the world being unfair also means working with male children to teach them to do better, but I think I would find that less triggering. I also recognize that the child could always change their own sex, but I am not concerned about that because if they felt that freedom in a way that would be living my dream so of course I wouldn’t be against that - it would be a beautiful example of how much the world has changed, even if it is still imperfect.

Given we are doing IVF, we have to make a choice either way. My partner knows about (some of) my experiences and why I feel this way but they don’t really relate to it. AITA?

Edit: For context, while this is a live issue and we disagree, my partner and I love each other very much and will stay together no matter what, even if that means not having a child because we don’t reach agreement on this. We have been discussing this for what feels like a long time now with little progress. We’re both committed to discussion and coming to a shared agreement and the default is that if we don’t agree we don’t have a child.