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

96% Chimp! How different can the sexes of humans really be?

It might seem a bit irrational that reports such as this should get on my nerves so much, considering how, on the surface, they appear to support gender equality (from the angle of equality through acknowledged 'differences' between the sexes) by espousing the worth of 'women's skills' and 'special talents' and their value in all aspects of society.

There seems to be a lot of this kind of so-called research and surveys about at the moment - ranging from retrograde and damaging to more encouraging and at least well-meaning. This one published yesterday does, admittedly, fall into the latter category. But I have problems with this kind of approach to gender 'difference'. First of all, the sheer amount of current material on this particular angle - especially found, it would seem, in analysis of gender in a business or corporate context - that seems to be doing the rounds of all levels of press at the moment makes me instantly suspicious! What is the agenda? Because when one angle is promoted and presented with such zeal, and to the exclusion of other arguments, there is always an agenda!

It could be that, in fact, gender equality is the agenda, but if it is, I think it's frequently misdirected, misinformed, seriously over-generalising the genders and, at times, potentially reactionary and damaging. All of these reports which divide human skills and attributes into male and female categories perpetuate the confines of these categories, refuse mobilisation between them, and continue the value systems that favour the supposedly special skills of men over the supposedly special skills of women, however well intentioned these reports and surveys are at attempting to balance those values:- intending to convince society of the equal value these attributes and skills hold in it - and how vital they all are to it.

I appreciate the intention because socialisation has meant that sensitivity/long-term planning/multi-tasking etc. have been the apparently specific skills of women, while focus/short-term goal achieving/aggression have been the specific skills of men. So, in so much as society is currently divided in this way, there is definitely a place for the raised profile and praise of 'feminine' skills. However, I absolutely do not support or feel gratitude towards 'research' and reports that bang on about how these attributes and skills are biologically pre-determined from conception.

Women and feminists have long tried to promote the value of 'feminine' traits and any progress in this direction has been painfully slow throughout history. There is nothing 'new' about trying to promote the supposedly special skills of women. Jane Austen had a go, Virginia Woolf had a go, among many many others. While we insist upon separating out human attributes between men and women, in a society where dominance (whoever embodies it) is always eventually bowed to and adhered to, the so-called traits of men will be valued over the so-called traits of women. And so both sexes will aspire to one, suppress the other, and men who show sensitivity and vulnerability will be considered weak and women who show aggression and self-confidence will be considered suspicious and 'unwomanly' (see article on Hillary Clinton 2 posts down...). This is not remotely helpful for gender equality.

When you consider that we're only 4% away from being chimpanzees you can start to understand just how grossly exaggerated studies of human biological differences really are. Humans, genetically, are 99.9% the same! So why on earth are we so obsessed with that 0.1% difference? Whatever differences there are biologically between the sexes they only become markedly different through the process of socialisation from infancy to adulthood that takes that 0.1% and inflates it beyond all reason. It is the world we live in - not the hormones we receive in the womb - that determine what characteristics, skills and traits we will display in human society. It is challenging society's understanding of what it is to be a gendered human, and not perpetuating constructed and socially manufactured models for each sex, that can bring about real gender equality.



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gender, gender equality, 96% chimp, the slippery banana skin of biological essentialism