Thomas Beatie, Oprah, and pathologizing pregnancy
http://quenchzine.blogspot.com/2008/04/thomas-beatie-oprah-and-pathologizing.htmlSo it's been pretty interesting, and also disheartening, to watch the media flurry surrounding Thomas Beatie, a transman from Oregon who chose to keep his original reproductive organs and is now pregnant. emily0 and I discussed it briefly, and she mentioned that it's a bit strange how Thomas has been receiving so much press when he's not the first example of a transman choosing to become pregnant. I don't know too much about the history, but I suspect it might be the result of the striking gender dissonance that his image (by now widely circulated on the interwebs, even more so now that Perez Hilton has picked up on the story) creates: Thanks to testosterone therapy and chest reconstruction, Thomas has facial hair and a chest that appears masculine, yet also a prominent pregnant belly which is usually culturally coded as feminine and, perhaps even more important to the discursive dissonance, motherly. So there's some serious genderqueering and binary destruction going on here, and it seems like not too many people are really okay with that so much.
