CRISTINA DC PASTOR, Philippine News
06/26/2008 | 02:25 PM
Email this | Email the Editor | Print | Digg this | Add to del.icio.us NEW YORK — Any day now, “pregnant man" Thomas Beatie – a Hawaii-born Filipino – is scheduled to deliver his first baby.
Beatie, 34, whose birth name is Tracy Lagondino, is expecting a girl. Since his operation to make himself look more masculine, Beatie has legally asserted his right to be called a man and is now married to a woman named Nancy.
"[I consider this] an average pregnancy," Beatie told Oprah Winfrey on her show earlier this year.
The Portland, Oregon transgender appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show where he revealed the circumstances of his pregnancy and announced his scheduled date with the stork on July 3.
Up until that public confession, many of Nancy’s relatives did not know she is married to a transgender.
"It’s an incredible experience," Beatie told Winfrey on his then five-month pregnancy, showing off his belly bump.
The New York Times reported Beatie’s pending delivery as "partly a carnival sideshow and partly a glimpse at shifting sexual tectonics."
Beatie told Winfrey he was born a woman, but underwent chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy that would transform her into a man. He decided to keep her female reproductive organs in the event the couple decided to have children, as Nancy’s womb was taken out in an operation 20 years ago.
'Monster' baby
This is Beatie's second pregnancy.
In 2007, he also tried to have a child but was heartbroken to find out he had an ectopic pregnancy. He was about to have triplets.
"It was a life-threatening event that required surgical intervention, resulting in the loss of all embryos and my right fallopian tube," Beatie wrote in the Advocate, a magazine catering to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals.
Instead of receiving sympathy after the abortion, Beatie said his family had a different take on it.
"When my brother found out about my loss, he said, ‘It’s a good thing that happened. Who knows what kind of monster it would have been,’" Beatie wrote in the Advocate last March.
Reports claim that Beatie has a Caucasian mother and a Filipino father.
“My Father calls intermittently," he told Winfrey, “I believe he loves me. He just can’t see me that way."
Nine doctors, nine months
Beatie said he and his wife have endured public scorn since they came out with their story on Oprah. They’ve been ridiculed by family and friends and discriminated against by health care professionals.
A total of nine doctors turned Beatie down when they found out about his condition.
Beatie disclosed to Winfrey that one of the doctors he saw told him his staff was uncomfortable working with someone ‘like him.’
"This is why it took over one year to get access to a cryogenic sperm bank to purchase anonymous donor vials, and why Nancy and I eventually resorted to home insemination," he said.
After looking around for willing doctors, Beatie finally found a helping hand from Dr. Kimberly James.
"As soon as I met them, obviously a very devoted couple, there’s no way that I felt I could turn them down," James said in the Oprah show interview.
Despite the social stigma, Beatie said he is "so lucky" to have such a loving, supportive wife.
"I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family," he said. The Times said there is no good language to describe Beatie’s situation.
"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," the NY times says.
"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.’" - with reports from Mark Joseph Ubalde, GMANews.TV
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