Are You Going to Gestate It in a Box?
🍼 Are You Going to Gestate It in a Box?
Monty Python, Non-Binary Identity, and the Surreal Prophecy of Post-Truth Parenthood
Co-authored with Copilot. Ethical attribution and lived experience centered.
In 1979, Monty Python’s Life of Brian gave us one of the most quietly prophetic exchanges in cinematic satire. When Stan (Eric Idle) declares his right to have babies, Reg (John Cleese) responds with the now-iconic line:
“You can’t have babies, Stan.”
“Don’t you oppress me!”
“I’m not oppressing you, Stan—you haven’t got a womb! Where’s the fetus going to gestate? You going to keep it in a box?”
At the time, it was absurdist comedy—a send-up of ideological purity, performative politics, and the human tendency to demand symbolic rights untethered from biological reality. But decades later, that box feels less like a punchline and more like a prototype.
📦 From Satire to Silicon: The Rise of the Artificial Womb
Fast-forward to the 2020s, and researchers are developing artificial wombs to support premature infants and, potentially, gestate embryos entirely outside the human body. What was once a Monty Python gag is now a bioethical frontier. The box is real—or at least, in development.
And while the science is staggering, the cultural implications are even more surreal. The Python sketch wasn’t mocking trans identity or reproductive rights—it was lampooning the way ideology can outpace biology, and how earnestness can sometimes eclipse practicality. It was a Gen X warning wrapped in a joke: be careful what you demand, because the future might just deliver it.
🧬 Identity Beyond Biology: The Rise of Non-Binary Visibility
What Python couldn’t have predicted—but somehow gestured toward—is the rise of non-binary identity. Stan’s insistence on symbolic recognition mirrors today’s push for gender inclusivity beyond the binary. And while the sketch was framed in cisgender terms, its core tension—between lived identity and institutional logic—feels eerily familiar.
Non-binary people aren’t asking to gestate in a box. They’re asking for recognition, respect, and the dismantling of rigid categories that fail to reflect human complexity. In Australia, the 2021 Census allowed respondents to select “non-binary sex,” but the results were deemed too inconsistent to measure gender diversity meaningfully. The box, in this sense, becomes metaphorical: a container for everything society doesn’t know how to process.
🧠 Bureaucracy vs. Belonging: When Systems Lag Behind Souls
Whether it’s birth certificates, hospital forms, or AI voice settings, institutions still struggle to accommodate identities that don’t fit neatly into “M” or “F.” The result? A kind of cultural slapstick—where earnest attempts at inclusion are met with outdated systems that respond like Reg:
“You haven’t got a womb!”
“You going to keep it in a box?”
As Liz Duck-Chong wrote in Crikey, bureaucratic inertia continues to fail non-binary Australians, with federal systems lagging years behind their own guidelines. The absurdity isn’t in the identity—it’s in the paperwork.
🦎 Gen X, Dinosaurs, and the Echo of Satire
For those of us raised on Python, this moment is more than nostalgia—it’s a reminder that satire often sees the future more clearly than policy. We laughed at the box in 1979. Now we’re designing it. And somewhere between the joke and the prototype lies the aching truth of generational drift: we were warned, but we were too busy laughing.
And maybe that’s the real legacy of Stan’s declaration—not as a parody of identity, but as a premonition of the fight for recognition. Because whether you’re gestating a fetus, a future, or a more inclusive world, the box was never the point. The point was always the right to be seen.
