'I'm proud I gave birth as a man'

Toddler Atlas has two dads – Malachi Clarke, 27, who is a trans man, and Charlie Bennett, 31, who is gay. Now the couple are sharing the story of how they are two fathers who naturally conceived their son.
Malachi is the first female-to-male trans man in the UK to have conceived a baby naturally and gone public about his experience. Explaining why he is speaking out, he says, “We want people to see there is a positive side to being trans. We’re just a couple getting on with life. We lead healthy, happy lives and we want to be open that trans people can have families. You do have to stop your hormones, but you don’t need to freeze your eggs.
“If you’re trans and you want to have kids naturally, go ahead because you can – like we did.”
Malachi came out as trans when he was 17, started taking testosterone at 19 and had surgery to remove his breasts at the age of 20. An administrative palliative care worker, he met childcare professional Charlie three years ago. He’d stopped taking testosterone 18 months earlier because of severe acne – a side-effect of too much testosterone – making it easy for him to get pregnant naturally.
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New meets the couple in their house in Tilehurst, Berkshire, where Charlie grew up.
“We just fell in love, didn’t we?” says Malachi to Charlie, while their son, who turns two at the end of March, skips about, playing with his toys. “Atlas calls me Daddy while Charlie is Dadda.”
The couple, who both previously had male partners, felt ready to settle down when they met on Facebook Dating.
“We were honest with each other because I had got to the point in life where I wanted to have kids,” says Charlie. “And Mal did as well.”
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Instantly clicking over a coffee, Malachi says, “We fancied the pants off each other. Charlie basically came over to my house the next day and never moved out. A month later, I found out I was pregnant with Atlas. Six months later, we were engaged and we’ve been together for nearly three years.”
And they enjoy intimacy. “Sex is sex,” says Malachi. “It’s not gay sex, it’s not straight sex, it’s just sex. It’s hearts not parts to us – we make do with what we have.”
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A former adult social care manager, Charlie now works as a room leader at Atlas’s nursery, while Malachi’s at his admin job at a hospice. “I drop them both off at nursery every morning and pick them up,” says Malachi.
“Atlas has autism, which mainly means his speech has been slower to develop, but he’s met all the other milestones now,” says Charlie. “He will now be moving into the same nursery class as kids his own age.”
In the trans community, the couple – who are keen for people to see that they live like any average family – say their love story is rare. Malachi says most trans people are in same sex relationships – in terms of the sex they were born – and conceive either using a sperm donor or IVF.
“I have found in the trans community that pre-transition, trans men generally date women,” he says. “Then they transition and they still stay with women.”
So Malachi says meeting Charlie was very refreshing. “I’ve always said, ‘If you don’t like trans people that’s totally fine. Preference is preference.’ But Charlie was like, ‘...