I feel compelled to spread this awesome news before, to paraphrase my friend Robyn, the mainstream press makes it something awful and/or ridiculous. Thomas Beatie’s narrative Labor of Love: Is society ready for this pregnant husband? expresses the complexity, fluidity and ultimate irrelevance of gender in the cyborg age (if you’ll allow me to lay a little Donna Haraway down).
I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy… 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.
Although I love the way normative assumptions about sex and gender melt away in the wake of a pregnant man, Beatie’s brave story lays bare the quotidian hypocrisy of a medical system that demands the space to intervene endlessly into the body while using its technological advances to safeguard the normative. In a world where doctors will surgically alter the genitals of infants to make them “more normal” without the consent of parents or where other parents dream of a way to eradicate their potentially gay offspring, this pregnant man demonstrates the greatness that the biological sciences can achieve, perhaps in spite of themselves.
