Kenny Ethan Jones has always seen his sister Kizzy as a mother figure. Growing up, he says it felt like he and his mom were the siblings and Kizzy was the mom.
“She was just so responsible. She always took care of me. She took care of her,” Jones told BuzzFeed.
Kizzy always wanted to have children, but she put that off for a while so she could focus on her career. When she was ready to start trying to get pregnant with her partner, they ran into fertility issues. For four years, she kept repeating the same phrase to herself: “It will happen when it happens.”
“Then weeks turned into months, months turned into years, and it’s difficult to hear those conversations as her brother, and someone who adores her,” Jones told BuzzFeed.
Jones says that Kizzy managed to get pregnant twice, but both times ended in miscarriage.
“After that, we kind of had a conversation about, ‘What are you going to do now?’ She had accepted at that point that she needed to look into alternative routes,” Jones told BuzzFeed. “She had gone to the doctors, and they had basically said, ‘It’s just the age of your eggs, because you can get pregnant. Your body is telling you that you can; it’s just the eggs.’”
Kizzy began researching IVF, considering the use of an egg donor, and emailing companies that could be of use on her fertility journey.
Jones came up with his own solution, which he said to her offhandedly: “You can have my eggs, if you want them.” At the time, both Kizzy and Jones brushed off the comment. Privately, they both got to work researching.
Jones, who is trans, has been taking testosterone for about a decade. He still has eggs, but had no clue if his years of hormone therapy had impacted his fertility. While researching, though, Jones came across a couple of stories about trans men who had become pregnant with their own eggs.
“One of the first things you’re told when you transition is, ‘Say goodbye to your fertility,’” Jones told BuzzFeed. “But I ended up getting checked, and they said I was basically a baby-making machine. I had like, loads of eggs.”
Once the doctors signed off on the viability of Jones’s eggs, only one question remained for the siblings: Are we going to do this?
There were a lot of things for Jones to consider, he shared. Namely, donating his eggs to his sister basically meant medically detransitioning for a few weeks. Kizzy feared that allowing Jones to go through this process for her would put him at risk of feeling gender dysphoria, which is when someone experiences distress from a discrepancy between their gender identity and sex assigned at birth.
But Jones’s mind was already made up.
“I just said, ‘Kiz, I’m doing it. I’ve already decided, stop trying to talk me out of it. I’m fully aware of what I may have to incur in this situation. I can survive being in dysphoria for like a month for over a lifetime worth of joy,’” he told BuzzFeed. “That was it. The decision was made.”
Once the process started in earnest, Kizzy and Jones were required to attend a counseling session with a therapist. He says this entailed exploring every potential worst case scenario, and deciding if going through the egg donation would still be worth it.
“I wrote a list of every single thing that I thought could go wrong,” Jones told BuzzFeed. “I thought, if Kizzy and I stopped talking tomorrow, would I still be happy if I did this? If she suddenly turned out to be transphobic — which I knew she wouldn’t — but how would I feel about that worst-case scenario? Every question I landed on, I was like, ‘I don’t care. I’m doing it because I want to do it.’”
There was a lot of planning on Jones’s end. To prepare for the actual egg retrieval process, he had to take various medications and do hormone injections. For those two weeks, his plan was to keep himself busy, have his therapist on standby, and be mentally prepared to work through feelings of dysphoria, if it came to that point.
“It’s been a long time since estrogen has been my driving hormone. My North Star was the fact that I’m a completely different person. My identity as a man is not hinged on testosterone, so to speak,” Jones told BuzzFeed.
Still, Jones said there were difficult moments. One was the night before the egg retrieval. He says he felt aware of his swollen ovaries, and hormone levels were at an all time high.
“I was crying at shit that I don’t normally cry at,” he told BuzzFeed.
Another was when he got his period after restarting his testosterone. Doctors told him that the chances of him getting a period again from the medications and injections were low, but not unheard of.
He was at the gym when he felt what he describes as a gushing sensation. Jones says he remembers feeling isolated as he sat in his grey sweatpants and tried to figure out how to handle his first period in 10 years.
“I’m just isolated, and really concerned, and my hormones are all over the place,” he told BuzzFeed. “I said, ‘Kenny, you just need to breathe. Just breathe. If there’s blood, people are more likely to think you’ve cut your bum cheek or something than they are to think you’re trans and having a period.’”
When he got home from the gym, he decided to record what he was feeling. This felt natural to him, since he’s been a content creator for seven years.
He had been recording the entire egg donation process, but the plan was not initially to show everything, or even share it with the world. At first, he just wanted this video as a memory. Something for the baby to watch when they are old enough. But when Jones shared this video on his TikTok account, @KennyEthanJones, it became clear that this video’s reach would far exceed their family.
Jones’s video about donating his eggs to Kizzy went viral. As of right now, it’s garnered three million views, almost 580k likes, and a BUNCH of comments. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and Jones said this is the first time he hasn’t had to delete any negative comments, which is saying a lot, since Jones has had a long career online as an activist, then as the author of Dear Cisgender People, then as a business owner of an inclusive underwear brand, Lost Fame.
“Comment sections like this don’t come often,” Jones told BuzzFeed. “I was just extremely grateful, and it wasn’t even about me so much in this particular context. It was more about Kizzy, and seeing that so many people wanted the same thing she wanted. You’ve got thousands of people being like, ‘good luck,’ or ‘baby dust,’ which was really encouraging for her, especially coming out of two miscarriages.”
The comments are mostly dedicated towards sending positive vibes and “baby dust” to Kizzy who, at the time the video was initially posted, was waiting for results about the embryo transfer. Many people also were applauding Jones for putting himself through this process for his sister.
“It felt right,” he told BuzzFeed. “There were so many ways she’s shown up for me. That’s kind of the relationship you have with a big sibling, right? They tend to be the ones who take the burden. I was like, ‘Well, I can counteract all of the years of work by doing this one thing.’”
Jones and his sister will continue to document her pregnancy, and how they plan to navigate future conversations with the child about how their family came to be. But, for now, Jones says he looks forward to being a great uncle, and fulfilling one request.
“I want a mug,” Jones told BuzzFeed.
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