This is a film about me having a baby.
But what I feel like I'm going through isn't me having a baby or pregnancy,
it's like a much more fundamental, total loss of myself.
So I'm Freddy McConnell and Seahorse is a film about how I became a dad
and how as a trans man I chose pregnancy and birth in order to do that.
Male seahorses give birth and carry their babies.
Trans dads who give birth call themselves seahorse dads.
It's a word that we use for ourselves
so it felt like a sort of continuation of the idea that this film was told with my consent
and is meant to reflect the truth of my experience.
That's the baby's heart, just here.
Just a film about starting a family and I happen to be trans.
That's the order in which things should fall.
Since beginning my transition, I'd spent many years thinking
about how I would one day start a family.
Once I got used to that idea,
thinking about documenting it, I wanted to make this film because I'm a journalist
and I thought I understood the pitfalls to avoid.
I'm painfully aware of how some
people really struggle to understand and empathise with trans people
and I just thought, well maybe that can be really powerful.
So, here at the Guardian, obviously we've been reporting trans stories
in lots of different ways for quite a while
and it seemed to me that we hadn't done a really major trans story on video
in a way that we could get people really excited about.
So, right from the start of the process when Freddy came to me,
we talked a lot about just having to find the right people
to do this, people who are going to be sensitive but also collaborative.
I came up with a shortlist of directors that
we should meet up with, one of whom was Jeanie, of course.
As soon as I met him, he just raised so many questions for me
about what being pregnant meant for me when I had my child 15 years ago
and also I just had lots of questions and I wondered what the effects of pregnancy
would be on a man having a baby, on a trans man.
I sort of described my idea to her and she immediately described it
back to me better or in a more filmic way I suppose than I'd said it to her in the first place.
Grain were a really great company who treat everyone involved in their films with respect.
It seemed like that would be a great fit.
It was pretty brutal crossing out her and she, wish I didn't have to do it.
I knew from the outset that I was very different to Freddy and I just sort of
felt that I didn't need to be trans to understand Freddy's story but I needed to
understand the ways in which trans stories have been told in the past,
that were hurtful to the community, so you're never gonna hear Freddy's dead name in the film,
you're never gonna see cheesy before and after transition photos
because transition is not a magic trick.
Sometimes having that third party is the problem in trans storytelling
and it takes all the agency away from the subject
and results in manipulation and betrayal and simplification and
sensation and that sort of thing, but thinking Seahorse,
it makes it the film that it is because it is so universal and that's what
surprises people when they see it.
What are they going to put in this other details box?
My partner and I …
… both have ovaries.
It's true!
It's true.
This is like our version of having sex.
Another reason for working with other people was to avoid the situation where
when things got hard I just put the camera down.
I knew that at those moments it would be really tempting to give up.
I wanted to know that when it got hard,
it wouldn't be the end of the story.
I love knowing that I'm incubating my own baby.
I wish I could just be a pregnant man.
I think this is a film that's challenged me perhaps more than any
other film I've made, it was like an emotional marathon.
I think it was really hard for everyone.
You know, there's real moments of joy in the film but it's also
extraordinarily difficult.
Once I start, it just doesn't …
It just doesn't stop.
I don't think anyone realised the dysphoria that Freddy felt
would be quite so difficult and so you put
someone in a situation that's enormously personally challenging and then you
add a film … we add me into the mix.
That's really tough and I don't think any of us realised
it was gonna be as hard as it was
but I'm so happy now that we persevered because I feel like the film really evokes
emotion in audiences and that's been really powerful.
I think I totally underestimated the difficulty of actually being on camera and being filmed a lot.
I remember thinking to myself, well this feels really odd but I'll get used to it.
And I never got used to it.
Learning from Jeanie, as we went along, that was OK and making that part of the process,
rather than, now there's something wrong because it's uncomfortable,
that was a hard lesson to learn.
I think if all men got pregnant, then like my God
pregnancy would be taken so much more seriously and talked about.
Fuck! This is fucking awful.
If men had to go through this all the time you'd just never hear the end of it.
Well done, Freddy, well done!
Right way back years ago when I was thinking about,
wow, wouldn't it be amazing to share my own experience
of becoming a dad.
You know, I sort of stopped myself almost and was like,
yeah, but you know it would have to include the birth,
in order to be the kind of powerful film you want it to be
and also, you know, why shouldn't it?
But, you know, it still scared me and it scared me right up
until the day it happened and I knew I always had the freedom to say no
but I didn't want to say no, I really wanted that to be in there because
that would be beautiful.
I'd never seen someone give birth before,
so the experience of filming it was very intense.
I had the conflicting emotions of, am I getting the shot?
Is this in focus?
While, you know, managing my own tears.
It seemed liked a fitting end to the emotional experience of making Seahorse to end up with the
birth of this lovely baby.
So this is the first feature documentary
that we've made at the Guardian.
It's been so exciting showing the film to people
and that's what you do this for, you make films for audiences and
in particular with a film like this, because it can be such an agenda-setting film
and it can get people to think about parenthood in a slightly different way.
It's just really exciting to get people's reactions to it.
I remember very vividly watching the almost finished film for the first time.
I was anxious and despite having gone through it, it just had no idea really what to expect
and thought how could you make a film that feels whole
and then we watched it and it did.
It did, it was like magic.
I really want you to watch Seahorse because it's a film about love
and family and, just spend 90 minutes of your time
and find some empathy for Freddy and his extraordinary yet ordinary story.
I think you will take something from it, no matter what you're bringing to it.
It's a trans story told in a totally different way.
In telling the bigger story, you end up with a dad and a baby.
and that's just not something that's as enticing to the tabloids.
I felt like if we could sort of get past that like
danger zone of me being vulnerable to exploitation,
the story could be told on our terms rather than it being lost in a sort of
hysterical conversation about a pregnant man.
I'm really glad that people are going to see this.
I wanted it to have a positive impact for my community
and to build empathy and I think it's going to achieve what I wanted it to achieve
which is extraordinary.