The beginning of an end to maternal essentialism? I sincerely hope so...

Thomas Beatie is a pregnant trans-gender man from Oregon. There's been a fair bit of media coverage: most of it skeptical, some of it downright prejudiced and inflammatory.



The Guardian remarks on how the "common reaction is to wonder how someone can identify themselves as male and yet embrace pregnancy" and suggests that this is in fact "like saying you can't be a woman and have a career". There has indeed always been this widespread social assumption that equality has only to do with women attaining the same opportunities and privileges as men, and never about men attaining the same opportunities as women. When it happens, society balks!

As the F-Word puts it so well:

"Of course, the reason that the story has gotten so much attention is because Beatie doubly upsets the expectations of a society that is still quite rigid about gender conformity. If transitioning from male to female, or female to male, is still hard for some to accept, then folks who fall somewhere in between, or, as seems to be the case here, are not threatened by forays across the gender divide, totally confound. The concept that Beatie doesn’t feel like being pregnant threatens his identity as a man seems to be difficult to understand for those who are still not entirely comfortable even with those who break down gender roles, such as a female boss, a stay at home dad, etc, let alone challenge the concept of gender as a simple binary divided by an impenetrable wall".



In any socially collective way, we rarely get beyond the quite scandalously over-simplified gender binary that exists between us. Due to its apparently intrinsic and unshakable hold on society, most ground covered on issues of equality works with this divide rather than making any attempt to subvert or transgress it.

Pregnant men do subvert and transgress it, and it's a rare and beautiful thing.

When pressed for reasons why such an occurrence is so offensive, even professionals were struggling for articulate, sensible reasons. Most medical concerns centre around the testosterone treatment taken by Beatie to become male. According to Lisa Masterson, a Los Angeles obstetrician, excessive testosterone "can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby." But this can happen anyway, quite naturally, in more 'regular' births.

And most social concerns centre around the bullying the child might face at school having been born to its father. Bullying is always a favourite tool utilised by conservatives against any moves towards more unconventional parenting: it's been used against everything from single parenting, to adoptive parenting, to gay/lesbian parenting, and even to home schooling and special needs. It is not an argument - it is a non-argument - because the sad fact of the matter is, children get bullied for everything and anything and nothing - from being overweight to wearing the wrong kind of footwear. There's no logic in bullying, and it cannot be preempted. It's just a convenient, authoritative-sounding tool that is always effective in turning public opinion in support of conservative values. Kerrick Lucker, a gay activist at the University of California, gets much closer to the point when he says that "the only unusual challenges these kids face come from members of the public who see gender ambiguity as a great wrong". The bullying, this suggests, is traceable to a very adult public.



Anything that ever suggests a transgression of the old, tired gender binaries inevitably sees a creaky wheeling-out of those hideously reductive and inherently prejudiced arguments about what is considered 'Natural'.



For some reason, regardless of their moral behaviour or lifestyles, any normatively male and female couple have more right to have a baby than a gay/lesbian/trans gender couple who have had to fight everything from social and legal convention to intrusive state surveillance, and often hefty financial pay-outs, to conceive a child or adopt one. Yet reason must surely suggest, as Lucker goes on to point out, that "generally speaking, a man whose desire for a child is strong enough to overcome the obstacles that transgender men must face in bearing one is likely to be an extremely caring father".

As Beatie so eloquently puts it himself: "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire". How long is it going to take us to realise that we are human before we are gendered?

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thomas beatie, trans gender, gender, gender roles, gender normativity, pregnant men, being male and female is not an automatic right to parenthood, nature is a social convention not an unquestionable fact, biology is fluid, anatomy is changeable

a sticky web

The New York Times asks why, if so few women work in the computer technology industry, do so many more teenage girls use the internet than teenage boys? They ask the question but are tentative in offering any answers. The reason for that is, as they say, because...

"Teasing out why girls are prolific Web content creators usually leads to speculation and generalization. Although girls have outperformed boys in reading and writing for years, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, this does not automatically translate into a collective yen to blog or sign up for a MySpace page".



There have always been generalisations down sex and gender lines on this topic, because girls' prevalence online has been long noted, even back in the days before the giant social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and Beebo: more girls had 'homepages' than boys, and a big deal was made about the name, 'homepage', and how girls' apparent 'nesting' inclinations have translated into digital homemaking. It is possible, I suppose, as female children are, generally-speaking, brought up on a diet of dolls-houses and Fisher Price kitchen sets, and so extending domestic idealisation into a digital home would be a natural extension of childhood practices. But if this is true, then it's quite disturbing.




Internet enthusiasts and propaganda espousing the possibilities of the internet have always emphasised its 'freeing' potential:- promising a place of escape, from 'reality', from routine daily life, and from virtually all conventional societal roles; including, of course, gender roles. But if what the 16-year-old website contributer interviewed in the article says about why girls are more active online is true, and “girls like to help with other people’s problems or questions, [in order to be] kind of, like, motherly, to everybody" then this vision is in trouble.

If her view is shared, then not only are all female babies born instant mothers (in other words, destined always, inevitably, without question, for motherhood, and never allowed to be anything other, even in childhood), but all online social networking does, or is for, is to perpetuate gender roles and stereotypes. We are all still men and women online - men and mothers - men and sex objects - and we have not deviated from any of the normalised models of gender. The web is a trap... its net is tightening...



I would like to believe this isn't the case. I have never believed it before. Perhaps I have what is now an old fashioned 90s view of what forms of liberation the internet could offer society: I believed identities could shift and merge and transform in cyberspace. But when I was looking for images for this post and, inspired by the title the New York Times had given its article's subjects, I googled 'cyber girl', all I was presented with was page upon page of porn. According to the majority of web content creators, 'cyber girls' are not girls who blog, or network, or write content, or create web pages, 'cyber girls' are sexualised images of women you can access digitally. And that's all. So much for gender liberation in cyberspace!


(I picked a tame one!)

Apart from the small image taken from the New York Times article itself, these are the only non-pornographic 'cyber girl' images I found:





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the Time Lord and His timeless maid

I recently finished reading The Time Traveller’s Wife and although I thought it was beautifully written it did occur to me that this was yet another version of the Time Lord archetype: the classic tale of one Man’s handling of time and space – the burdens and the thrills that come with the responsibility of this skill – either actively sought or involuntarily encumbered with – as he fixes broken connections and sometimes saves Humanity, or individual humans, from certain disaster, into the bargain. This is Henry of The Time Traveller’s Wife, and this is Sam Beckett of Quantum Leap, and this is George from HG Wells’ The Time Machine and, perhaps most significantly for text and film of our current era, this is Dr Who!

Why do ideas about time travel – the real final frontier that leaves space travel in its star dust – seem so incompatible with the female body? I mean, I’m not a Dr Who fanatic (although I watched most of it ((from behind the sofa)) through the 80s and catch it now when I think about it), but as I understand it, the Doctor is a kind of alien – a different ‘species’ as Martha put it in last week’s episode – who resembles human form. So why does that human form have to be male all the time? Why exactly have we never had a female Dr Who? As far as I was aware it is in fact the tardis, not the Doctor’s penis, which enables time travel!!



And I suspect that this is the crux (or crotch!) of the matter: time travel is associated with a thrust of dynamism, an aggressive linearity of slicing through, thrusting forward, and bursting out of, the indescribable, the incomprehensible, the abstract void of time itself. There is an aggression about it – the fireball of a tardis tunnelling through time and space, shuddering as it rockets through – and there is also a mastery about it – of mastering and understanding the intricacies of time travel – hence the hierarchical human-given-to-alien (!!) title of ‘doctor’.



These phallic attributes are not associated with the female body. It is time which is being associated with the feminine. In other words, dynamic linearity is required to penetrate, control, explore the internal intricacies of, and do its best to conquer, the apparently cyclical and potentially circular – or in fact entirely shapeless and erratic – events of the entity of time as it is presented. A woman cannot time travel because she is time.



And this is essentially why, in almost every Time Lord representation, there is also a hetero relationship in order to give the time traveller a context and stable identity: He cannot be fully Male until an Other is present against which he is contrasted, and with whom there can be the suggestion of a sexual being who can, in turn, define the Time Lord’s sexuality. Who, at the very least, assures us of the time traveller’s heterosexuality.







This is essentially why Henry needs his wife, Clare, who’s time it is that Henry seems to spend his time (sometimes violently) travelling in and out of. His life is Clare, and Clare and her life-line, her time, are the inseparable, uncontrollable, inevitable moments that Henry spends his life intruding into, imposing himself upon, governing, shaping and trying to control – while Clare must herself wait, passively and helplessly, for him to reappear and direct her life towards its inevitable, tragic conclusion.

But this is why Dr Who’s ‘apprentices’ are often required to be more like servants, or lovelorn ‘groupies’, hanging on the Doctor’s every last word, awaiting instructions, and attempting to carry them out even if it means serious personal risk, or instantly dropping her own pursuits: such as Martha’s ambitions to become a doctor herself being abandoned in order to willingly don servant’s attire and commit herself to an unspecified period of servitude, attending to the (currently-insomniac-suffering) Doctor’s beck and call, while he happily canoodles with another woman.







Well why wouldn’t she, when this is, in fact, what she always does – what they all do? Martha as maid is just an extreme representation of the usual relationship that exists between the besotted companions of the Time Lord, and His Lordship, in all His phallic, time-slicing, heroic glory.



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dr who, time travel, time lord, quantum leap, rose, martha, gender roles, is the tardis supposed to be a pun on the word tardy??, the doctor