October 16 2012, 6.08am AEST
He's my mother: motherhood across gender boundaries
Jennifer Power
Research Fellow at The Bouverie Centre (Victoria's Family Institute) at La Trobe University
http://theconversation.edu.au/hes-my-mother-motherhood-across-gender-boundaries-9623 (http://theconversation.edu.au/hes-my-mother-motherhood-across-gender-boundaries-9623)
In the 2005 film Transamerica, Felicity Huffman's character, Bree, is set to begin gender reassignment surgery when she receives a phone call from a teenage boy looking for his father, Stanley, the man Bree used to be. Bree's psychiatrist refuses to sign off on her surgery until she resolves her feelings about her unexpected "fatherhood".
This scenario is primarily a set up for a quirky road trip as Bree sets off to meet her son. But it also reveals a lot about the starkly gendered terms around which parenthood is constructed: How will Bree feel about being both a woman and a father? Is there not an inherent contradiction in these two identities?
Parents who are transgender tend to confront people's ideas about the possibilities of parenthood. In 2008, American transgender man Thomas Beatie went public about being the first legally recognised man to give birth to a child. The media was aghast with the idea of a pregnant man.