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 Few More Options



There’s always been something which felt very restrictive about the two boxes – Male – or – Female – on every questionnaire, survey, census, any form in fact – it’s not an obvious choice, not to me anyway – slipping around inside (and outside) our unstable and fluid identities – and yet there it is – the unchanging choice (which is not one) on our passports, birth certificates, and driving licences.



Having spent much of the last three years on planes, filling endless immigration forms, I’m frankly sick of the sight of these two boxes. Western culture – supposedly a culture of excess and unlimited consumerism – boasts unreservedly of choice…

…Except when it comes to the factor that, if real choice were offered, would demonstrate a genuine freedom within our society (instead of the false ones we buy - or buy into). But no, on the whole we must still decide upon which side of the dividing line we fall: we must still choose whether we are with or without, standing or sitting, on top or underneath.



Could it be that this is what our ‘progressive’ culture relies upon? That there must be some things kept ‘sacred’, ancient repressions preserved, some reactionary constant, from which the world can safely reel around wildly and flamboyantly, beneath a hedonistic guise it flaunts, but doesn’t really mean… not by the end of the day, when you get back on the plane, and are presented once again with two boxes.

Cynics might suggest that the multiple choices that we are offered in the west are thrust before us in hyped and exaggerated explosions of noise and colour in order to deliberately distract us from the choices that really matter – the ones which can really make a difference.

But I think these writers (and I’m not sure they merit that title!) of forms (another misnomer!), in their offices, cordoned in by their screened-off corners, and sitting behind their own anonymity – these Men and Women – are just lazy, and lacking in imagination. They have not questioned their own box. They themselves have been presented with two boxes into which they have made everything fit, and what they think – these 1D designers, these flat-lining dividers of peoples – is that the world is the same for all of us.



If you’d like more than two boxes, if you like your questionnaires to offer more than an Either/Or choice, then try this one by March 19th, and maybe it will set a precedent for the shapes bureaucracy could be taking.

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gender, transgender, transexual, bbc, bbc questionnaire, identities