'Transman' bends views on gender, parenthood

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6/25/2008

"The broadening legal scope of marriage has also had its effects on people such as 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 moved from Oregon.

Americans, 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 New York) whose sex change in 1951 was performed by doctors in Sweden.

The Jorgensen case was treated as groundbreaking, just as Beatie's was on Oprah, despite the fact that physicians at the German Institute of Sexual Science had performed successful sexual-reassignment surgeries decades before."