The Pregnant Not Quite Male Female
The tabloids have hit the mainstream with announcements that Thomas Beatie — a Bend, Oregon resident — is 20-something weeks pregnant, due in July 2008. This week, open-mouthed Oprah audience members stared in shock at the “Pregnant Man”.
I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy. Unlike those in same-sex marriages, domestic partnerships, or civil unions, Nancy and I are afforded the more than 1,100 federal rights of marriage. Sterilization is not a requirement for sex reassignment, so I decided to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy but kept my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire…
How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am. In a technical sense I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant. — Thomas Beatie
The truth is, Thomas isn’t really a pregnant man, despite appearances. Thomas was born 34 years ago in Hawaii as the beauty-pageant-winning Tracy Lagondino, and is simply an incomplete transgender.
Once-luscious Tracy underwent a double radical mastectomy and began hormone therapy to change her gender to that of a male, but decided to keep her female reproductive organs. She stopped taking her bimonthly testosterone injections and, after about four months without them, her body went back to normal; she didn’t have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid the pregnancy.
Common sense dictates that if you were born a woman, you don’t have a working pënìš, you have a vágìná, and you are capable of becoming pregnant, you’re still a woman. Removing your breasts and growing facial and armpit hair does not make you a man — even if you can find a judge willing to sign a piece of paper that declares otherwise in order for you to receive the “1,000 legal benefits” that come with it. And Tracy has the proverbial (but not literal) cojones to claim discrimination because health professionals refuse to refer to her by a male pronoun.
Hmmm, I wonder… if I call myself a dog and then hump unsuspecting women in public… think people will buy it?
This is an LGBT-rights publicity stunt falsely declared as an oddity of science. How irresponsible of Oprah and the rest of the “respectable” media. If Oprah were to have spent just a five-minute segment on this charlatan instead of spending a full hour on this so-called miracle, she could have moved on to something actually interesting — like this other pregnant man. Sure, he’s a hoax, too, but at least he’s actually interesting. And kinda funny.
