Jake and Hannah Graf have two children together, Millie and Teddy (Picture: Paul Grace)

Jake and Hannah Graf are ready and rearing to celebrate LGBTQ+ Pride Month. Their daughter, two-year-old Millie, however, won’t be.

‘Lesbian visibility week!’ shouts Millie, clenching a half-eaten apple in her parent’s bedroom as the Grafs speak to Metro.co.uk over Zoom.

Millie is a lot of words to her parents: ‘Eccentric’, ‘funny’, ‘anxious’, ‘loving’, ‘sweet’ and the type who ‘talks utter nonsense the whole time’.

‘She wants to go to the doctor pretty much every day,’ Jake says, before asking Millie how many daughters she has.

‘Four,’ Millie replied. She has four in her tummy, too.

The Grafs are easily among the most famous trans parents in the UK. Or, as the press know them, ‘Britain’s first trans parents’ (Hint: They’re neither the first nor the last trans people to have children, they stress).

Jake, an artist and actor from London, first met Hannah, once the highest-ranking trans officer in the British Army, through a friend in 2015.

In three years, they were married. In two, they welcomed their first child, Millie, via surrogate. Last year, they welcomed their second daughter, Teddy.

‘We’ve got jobs. We’ve got kids,’ Hannah says. ‘It’s kind of everything that we’ve always worked towards in so many ways, it’s beautiful.

‘It’s complete normality. It’s just two lovely, beautiful, challenging kids and life with them.’

For Jake, it’s a life he thought he would never have as a trans man.

‘My whole life I wanted to be a parent,’ he says, ‘but never thought as a trans man I was going to be allowed to be able to find anyone I could fall in life with and have that happen.

The couple is, to the press, known as ‘Britain’s first trans parents’. They insist they’re anything but the ‘first’ (Picture: Paul Grace)

‘Every day, I look around at the kids, where we are. We’ve got a little garden out there with all the flowers and the babies sit on the grass playing together,’ he adds.

‘It feels like a dream come true.’

About six years into his transition, a then-single Jake gave himself the option to have children down the line by freezing his eggs at a clinic.

From the get-go, Jake made his intentions clear: he wants a wedding ring on his hand as he holds his ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug.

Hannah wasn’t so sure at first, but she had her reasons.

‘I never thought I would ever be loved, go on a date, have a relationship, let alone have kids,’ she says.

Hannah says that Jake being so ‘driven’ to be married and have kids is what opened her eyes to the ‘possibility’ she can have the same (Picture: Paul Grace)

‘So it was outside of my field of reference until I was well into my transition. I was happy with who I was and where my destiny was in the world.’

But Hannah did find love in Jake, whose ‘drive’ to become a father ‘opened my eyes to the possibility’ of being a parent.

‘Ten years ago, I thought I’d be single for the rest of my life,’ she adds, ‘and here I am with two children.’

The couple’s surrogate is Laura, who was keen to help the Grafs again when it came to having Teddy.

Telling Millie about this was a tall order. ‘We prepped Millie for months and months,’ Jake says, adding: ‘Obviously, there’s no bump growing on mummy’s tummy.

‘It’s hard for her to grasp. We bought her all the books – she wasn’t interested in any. All she wanted to do was read the Gruffalo.

‘We kept sort of foisting these books on her, “how to be a great big sister”, and she was all, “whatever, Gruffalo, please”.’

Jake says the press calling him one-half of ‘Britain’s first trans parents’ can be ‘frustrating’ (Picture: Paul Grace)

Life, Jake says, has been ‘hectic’, to say the least, since Teddy came home.

‘All of a sudden, a newborn arrives and you realise it’s sleepless nights and worry: Is she still breathing? Is she okay? And trying to protect her from her big sister who’s just trying to put her fingers in her eyes,’ he says.

Jake admits that not all trans people have the cash to afford surrogacy, which can run upwards of £20,000.

They don’t also have their journey to parenthood inked in newspapers or pushed out as mobile phone notifications.

‘We’re not the “first trans parents”, it’s so frustrating when the press calls us that time and time again,’ Jake says, adding: ‘I know it’s a great headline and it sells newspaper and people think, “oh, how fascinating, trans people are able to be parents”.

‘Trans people have been quietly raising kids for decades.’

Jake and Hannah are real sticklers for visibility, but it can take its toll.

Trans lives have increasingly been ‘debated’ in Britain (Picture: PA)

Both Jake and Hannah stress that they know the ‘privilege’ they carry, having nearly 30,000 Twitter followers between them, and are trying their best to show that trans people can ‘live happy, fulfilling lives with families and we are worthy of love and respect, the same as anybody else’, says Hannah.

‘There are times when you get all nastiness online and it gets particularly horrible when that nastiness is aimed at your family,’ she adds, however.

‘Our children have had death threats online, and we have had death threats online, horrible things.’

‘This is why Hannah and I choose to share our stories because we know it’s stories that unite us,’ Jake says. ‘It’s stories that make people realise we’re all just human, it’s stories that will hopefully in the future end all this bigotry and hatred because, at the moment, it’s at a fever pitch.’

The couple feels it can be hard to keep track of all the transphobia these days. From trans people being briefly excluded from a long-sought conversion therapy ban to trans athletes being banned from playing sports and having their healthcare options increasingly limited.

These woes come on top of how trans people were twice as likely to be a victim of crime in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. They also face dizzying years-long waits for gender-affirming care and are more likely to suffer domestic violence and homelessness.

This all for a community of just 262,000, about 0.5% of Brits, according to the census.

Trans people, Jake and Hannah add, don’t exactly have the best rap in the press. Research by Press Gazette in 2020 found that, at the start of the decade, coverage was ‘respectful’ before becoming more ‘heated’ at the end.

While trans people make up 0.5% of Britain, more than 6,000 articles on the community’s rights were written about by the press in 2018-19 (Picture: PA)

It was especially so in the later years, a 2019 study by linguist Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, found.

The press wrote more than 6,000 articles about trans people between 2018-19, the report said, with the bulk ‘in order to be critical of trans people’ that it sees as ‘unreasonable and aggressive’.

The Grafs worry how their children will feel seeing newspapers and politicians ask if a trans woman is a woman.

‘We don’t for a second want them to feel their parents are being attacked, or that their parents are going to bring bullying upon them,’ Jake says.

The screenwriter adds that he and Hannah hope to sit down with Millie in a few years to talk about it all.

‘It’s important she knows there’s nothing wrong with the fact we’re trans, there’s nothing wrong with how she came into the world,’ he says.

Jake and Hannah Graf have had two children via surrogacy (Picture: Getty Images Europe)

He adds: ‘It’s an amazing story of two little girls who will hopefully support each other if there is ever any adversity but hopefully we’ll manage to swerve all that and just grow up in a really happy, loving world.’

Outside of their own family, Jake and Hannah worry for today’s trans youth ‘walking past the newsstands and seeing the hatred and bigotry’.

‘There will come a time soon when the media grows bored of putting out that rhetoric,’ says Jake, ‘and until then, parents and guardians will have to look after those kids.’

What about after? Hannah is hopeful. ‘There’s a lot of people trying to damage our community but ultimately the future is really bright,’ she says.

Just Like Us, an LGBTQ+ young people’s charity, found that simply knowing a trans person means someone is twice as likely to be an ally than someone who doesn’t.

‘No child grows up hating and hopefully, we’ll get to a point where parents stop teaching their children to hate,’ Jake says, holding Millie in his arms, ‘and when parents teach children that they should love, accept.’

Until the world gets there, Hannah is simply making the most of being a mum.

‘Those moments when everyone’s happy – Teddy’s crawling around, Millie’s running around – and it’s all easy-going,’ she says.

‘Those kinds of moments of just stress-free life with your children, very, very precious and you just think, this is what it was all for.’

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‘It feels like a dream come true.’