After the astonishment and outrage, after the doubts and ethical head-scratching, a baby girl was finally born to the pregnant man. Thomas Beatie (34) gave birth in a hospital in Bend, Oregon, last Sunday. He had been booked in for an elective caesarian, but the child came naturally four days before the agreed date. ”The only thing different about me is that I can’t breastfeed my baby,” Beatie said after the birth. ”But a lot of mothers don’t.”
The birth has revived the worldwide attention that first engulfed him when he told the world about his pregnancy in March. Though he is not the first transgender man to bear a child, he is the first to have gone public with it, appearing on Oprah Winfrey’s chat show.
British tabloids couldn’t get enough of the story. ”Womb man” blazed the Mirror, while the Daily Star adopted a more prosaic tone: ”Bloke: I’m having a baby!”
Then came the backlash. Beatie wasn’t a pregnant man at all. He was a woman masquerading as a man, and bearing a child as women do. The fact though is that he is legally a man, recognised under Oregon law as such. He is also legally married to his wife Nancy, and they share the full entitlements and protections that marriage affords.
When Tracy Langondino decided to change gender 10 years ago she had hormone therapy and surgery to remove her breasts, inducing a beard and a flat chest and the outward appearances of masculinity. Most of Nancy’s family had no idea of her now husband’s past as a woman and first learned of his transgender history when his pregnancy became known.
Beatie had decided to keep his female sexual organs intact, explaining that he wanted to retain ”my reproductive rights. Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire.” By the time the couple, who run a screenprinting business, wanted to have a child together, Nancy had had a hysterectomy for medical reasons. Beatie stopped his injections of testosterone for the first time in about eight years, allowing his body to regain its own hormonal balance over the following few months.
In an article in March in the gay magazine the Advocate, in which he first revealed the story, he described the hurdles he had faced. Healthcare workers refused to address him as a man, receptionists laughed at him, friends and family were unsupportive. His first doctor told him to shave, and later withdrew his services, saying he was uncomfortable working with ”someone like” him.
After a year the couple managed to obtain frozen sperm from an anonymous donor, and they opted to inseminate him at home using improvised equipment.
It took nine doctors and a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy before Beatie became successfully pregnant. He wrote that it felt ”incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man I am. In a technical sense, I see myself as my own surrogate, though my gender identity as male is constant.”
The final phase in this saga is whether or not the couple decide to remain in the public spotlight, or to withdraw for the privacy of the child. The latter seems a tad unlikely. Expect to see father and baby pictures spread across a glossy magazine on your newsstand some time soon. – guardian.co.uk