All We Need Is Love...

here is the March 26, 2008 Advocate story.

My thoughts = I think this is amazing in the most positive way. Unfortunately, the response to this story has been overwhelmingly negative with people saying that "these people are mentally ill" and replying to online message boards with other words of hate and judgement. To date, Gender Identity Disorder has not been classified as a mental illness within the scientific community.

Instead of reacting with judgement and hate to thing that are unknown to us or different from us I truely wish that people would respond with compassion and an open mind. Here again I lean towards the idealist however, I am so bothered by the growing examples of hatred and hypocrisy. If more people were driven by love and this type of determination I wonder what kind of world we would live in. I applaud the Beaties.

Below is a NYTimes story from yesterday.

June 22, 2008
He’s Pregnant. You’re Speechless.
By GUY TREBAY
WHEN Thomas Beatie gives birth in the next few weeks to a baby girl, the blessed event will mark both a personal milestone and a strange and wondrous crossroads in the evolution of American pop culture.

Mr. Beatie — as anyone who has turned on a television, linked to a blog or picked up a tabloid in the last few months is aware — is a married 34-year-old man, born a woman, who managed to impregnate himself last year using frozen sperm and who went public this spring as the nation’s first “pregnant father.”

That this story attracted attention around the world was hardly surprising. Who, after all, could resist the image of a shirtless Madonna, with a ripe belly on a body lacking breasts and with a square jaw unmistakably fringed by a beard? For a time, clips of Mr. Beatie’s appearance on “Oprah,” where he was filmed undergoing ultrasound, as well as shirtless images of him from an autobiographical feature in the Advocate magazine, were everywhere, and they were impossible to look away from.

Partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics, his image and story powered past traditional definitions of gender and exposed a realm that seemed more than passing strange to some observers — and altogether natural to those who inhabit it.

“This is just a neat human-interest story about a particular couple using the reproductive capabilities they have,” said Mara Kiesling, director of the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington. “There’s really nothing remarkable” about the Beatie pregnancy, she said.

Yet as the first pregnant transman to go public, Mr. Beatie has exposed a mass audience to alterations in the outlines of gender that may be outpacing our comprehension. In the discussions that followed his announcement, what became poignantly clear is that there is no good language yet to discuss his situation, words like an all-purpose pronoun to describe an idea as complex as a pregnant man.

“When there’s a lot of fascination around a figure like Thomas Beatie,” said Judith Halberstam, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Southern California, “it points to other changes already happening elsewhere in the culture.”

Among the changes Ms. Halberstam noted are medical innovations that have expanded the possibilities for body modification. There are also studies that indicate, as Ms. Halberstam noted, that women respond sexually to the individual, before differentiating by sex. And the broadening legal scope of marriage has also had its effects on people like Mr. Beatie, who says of himself, “I am transgender, legally male, and legally married to Nancy,” but who might have trouble holding on to some of those assertions if he did something as simple as moving from Oregon.

Americans, Ms. Halberstam said, have long been fascinated by narratives of sexual transformation, at least since the era of Christine Jorgensen, an early male-to-female transsexual (born George Jorgensen Jr. in the Bronx) whose sex change, performed by doctors in Sweden, prompted The Daily News to run a front page story under the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty” and made Miss Jorgensen as tabloid-notorious then as Mr. Beatie is, the man who “went abroad and came back a broad.”

The Jorgensen case in 1951 was treated as groundbreaking, just as Mr. Beatie’s was on “Oprah,” despite the well-established fact that physicians at the German Institute of Sexual Science had performed successful sexual reassignment surgeries decades before. If Miss Jorgensen’s story prefigured Mr. Beatie’s, it also pointed toward a future in which gender continues to change in response to changing laws and mores and, as important, new technology.

“The Beatie case seems like a way of having some of the Trans 101 discussions publicly, giving them one kind of a face and doing it in a way that’s not asking anybody for anything,” said Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a professor at the City University of New York graduate school of English who has written extensively on gender. “He’s pregnant, he seems happy. It’s not in happening in any kind of a judicial, let alone criminal, context so it’s not a matter of claiming a right. It’s a matter of exercising one.”

By bringing his story to the public and disclosing the particulars of his anatomical journey, Ms. Sedgwick added, Mr. Beatie is “making visible the fact that a lot of people’s experience of making these decisions isn’t about getting a penis or losing a penis.” For many transgender people, she said, “genital surgery is not what defines gender, and that will be news for lots and lots of Americans,” who may have trouble comprehending the idea that for some, anatomy does not define woman or man.

Mr. Beatie does not have a penis; his clitoris was surgically reconfigured to mimic a phallus. And the person born in Hawaii in 1974 as Tracy Lagondino also altered his body with chest reconstruction surgery, took bimonthly testosterone injections for years to suppress feminine sex characteristics, grew a beard and saw his hairline change. Like many transmen, he chose not to remove his female reproductive organs. And so, when it was clear that his wife could not have another child (she has two grown daughters from a previous relationship), Mr. Beatie stopped hormone therapy until he could conceive.

“Not a lot of transmen get what’s called ‘bottom’ or ‘lower’ surgery,” Ms. Halberstam explained, referring to procedures like the one Mr. Beatie had, and to yet more radical interventions like hysterectomy. “If they want a penis, they don’t want a micro-penis,” she said. If what they want is to be men, she added, they see no reason why that goal is compromised by keeping their ovaries.

Issues like these have made Mr. Beatie’s story so compelling; the sense that trans identity in the Webster sense of the prefix signifies some threshold state of being — “across” or “beyond” or “through.”

Ms. Sedgwick said that if you look at postings on Web sites like Oprah Winfrey’s and The Huffington Post, “It seems as though there are lots and lots of comments saying: ‘That’s not a man having a baby. That’s a woman having a baby.’ ”

Partly that reaction results from what Ms. Sedgwick calls a phobic response to changes in identities that for most people seem God-given and settled at birth. Partly it is a matter “of people having to go through the stages of figuring things out,” she said.

As Ms. Kiesling, of the National Center for Transgender Equality, noted: “The long-term benefit of this story is not ‘Pregnant Man Trims Hedge,’ ” referring to a widely circulated photo of a bearded and pregnant Mr. Beatie wielding a power tool. “The Beatie story raises questions we’re all looking at now, in a lot of contexts,” about the welter of new possibilities produced by a landscape in which legalized same-sex partnerships reshape traditional ideas about husband and wife and mom and dad.

Contacted at home in Bend, Ore., Mr. Beatie declined to comment for this article. He was resting, he said, and would reserve further comment until after the baby is born. A book that he was contracted to write has been shelved, according to his publishers, St. Martin’s Press. And so once the “pregnant father” delivers, he can return to being the person his neighbors refer to as “a quiet, regular guy.”

By then his story may have served its purpose, Ms. Sedgwick said. It will have showed us that: “People experience gender very differently and some have really individual and imaginative uses to make of it. That’s an important thing for people to wrap their minds around.”