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Wednesday, Jan 7, 2009
Thomas Beatie brought us a media circus and late-night punch lines. But there's something missing, say some transgender advocates -- more respect.
By Thomas Rogers
Read more: Oprah Winfrey, Sex, Media, Sexuality, Surgery, Transsexual, Life, Thomas Rogers
Screenshot from CNN
Thomas Beatie
July 3, 2008 | By the time Thomas Beatie, "the Pregnant Man," strode across Oprah Winfrey's stage on April 3, his story had already become a worldwide phenomenon. Beatie -- a transgendered man who was born a woman and became pregnant through artificial insemination -- had captured headlines, and worldwide attention, in the preceding weeks. On the show, Oprah clutched Beatie's belly like a touchy aunt and asked him nosy questions about his family, his sex life and the appearance of his clitoris. ("It looks like a penis," he answered, uncomfortably.)
The episode -- which garnered a 45 percent audience increase compared to the same time slot in the previous week -- was actually one of the more nuanced moments in a bizarre uproar over a bizarre pregnancy that became fodder for news anchors and late-night comedians. The night before, David Letterman had aired a top 10 list of "messages left on the pregnant man's answering machine." No. 1 was, "Michael Jackson here -- just wanted to reach out to another androgynous freak show."
The transgender community has often been caught in the shadow of its gay and lesbian brethren, and Beatie's story offered an opportunity for some much-needed attention. But with the spotlight hopelessly focused on such salacious details as Beatie's genitalia, and the story becoming little more than a punch line, it has left many transgender activists wishing the Thomas Beatie media circus would simply go away.
Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen. Beatie is due to give birth Thursday, July 3, via Caesarean section, an event likely to ignite a new wave of media coverage and unfortunate puns, and once again raise some prickly questions: What does the media's treatment of Thomas Beatie tell us about the way America thinks about the transgender community? Why do we even care about him? And what, if anything, can the pregnant man teach us about the changing nature of gender in America?
The story of the pregnant man began, demurely enough, with an essay in the Advocate, a gay and lesbian magazine, describing Beatie's pregnancy and his trouble finding a doctor. It told the poignant tale of Beatie's transition, his wife Nancy's hysterectomy, and his decision to become pregnant with a child. There was little that was medically remarkable about Beatie's pregnancy -- facial hair excepted -- and, as a matter of fact, he is not the first transgendered man to carry a child. (The Village Voice published an article about a transgendered male pregnancy as far back as 2000.)
Then why did Beatie become the focus of so much attention? It's partly because, unlike other pregnant men, Beatie has demonstrated a remarkable willingness to speak to the press (including dubious tabloids like the News of the World). And, according to Paisley Currah, a transgendered associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of the upcoming "The United States of Gender," "the idea that seems to draw the public is the idea of the supposed freakish body of the transgendered man." In other words, people are attracted to the story because staring at Beatie's body -- the large stomach protruding from his manly chest -- is both an unsettling and captivating experience, and Beatie, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to mind the attention.
While transgendered people have become increasingly visible in popular culture in recent years -- with films like "Transamerica," about a shrill transgendered woman traveling across the country, and TV shows like "Dirty Sexy Money," featuring a character with a transgendered mistress, and "Ugly Betty," with Rebecca Romijn as the recipient of some very convincing surgery -- most characters have been middle-aged transsexual women. Transgendered men, like Beatie, have remained largely invisible, and this, apparently, has led to confusion in the press. Many journalists don't seem to know how to talk about him, and some, like Diane Sawyer, have had trouble keeping their pronouns straight. "I don't get the sense that people have correlated female-to-male with male-to-female," says Jamison Green, a transgender policy advisor. "They really see Thomas Beatie as a woman."
The highly respected International Herald Tribune, for example, published an opinion piece by Jeff Jacoby (under the headline "Pregnant, Yes -- but Not a Man"), which referred to Beatie as "her" and argued that "there is no 'pregnant man' ... there is only a confused and unsettled woman who proclaims that surgery, hormones and clothing made her a man, and is clinging to that fiction even as the baby growing in her womb announces her womanhood to the world." Dramatic, yes; informed, not so much.
Part of what seems to have unsettled Jacoby, in particular, is the way that advances in technology have made physical gender far more malleable than ever before. People can use surgery to remove -- or add -- breasts, and use hormones to change their voice and facial hair, while leaving other parts of their body intact. In Beatie's case, Currah says, "gender ideology is colliding with the materiality of bodies." Or, in slightly less abstruse terms, Beatie reminds us that sometimes our bodies and our gender don't necessarily align in black-and-white terms -- an unsettling feeling that some men encounter when they gain weight and grow breasts, or when women discover unsightly facial hair -- and the pregnant man is such an extreme case that it's almost impossible to look away.
According to Judith Halberstam, a gender theorist at the University of Southern California and the author of "Female Masculinity," Beatie's pregnancy also feeds into a more fundamental discomfort with the ways that medical technology has changed pregnancy. "It seems like the real reason it appeals to people is because the pregnant body is so sacred," she says, "and the pregnant woman still represents something to people about nature." Beatie's protruding stomach, when combined with his male body, destroys the fantasy that pregnancy is a purely natural process. "His pregnant body is evidence that pregnancy has become another site of human engineering."
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