Post by The Big PINK One♥ on Jul 3, 2008 18:10:42 GMT -5
The pregnant man who conceived a child after a sex-change operation has given birth to a healthy baby girl.
Thomas Beatie, 34, had the baby in a natural birth at a hospital in Bend, Oregon on Sunday, ABC News reported.
“She’s really cute, really pretty,” a source told the network.
The bearded Mr Beatie was born a female named Tracy Lagondino, but had sex-change surgery and is now legally male and married to a woman.
The couple, together for 10 years, run a custom screenprinting business in Bend, where neighbours do not know that Mr Beatie was once a woman.
He decided to get pregnant because his wife, Nancy, had a hysterectomy years ago. He was able to conceive because he kept his female organs when he switched genders.
To get pregnant, Mr Beatie stopped the bimonthly testosterone injections he was receiving as part of his sex change.
The couple bought anonymous donor vials from a sperm bank and, struggling to find a doctor willing to help them, resorted to home insemination with a syringe she bought from a vet that is typically used to feed birds.
“I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn’t define who I am,” Mr Beatie told TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey in April.
“I feel it’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have the right to have a biological child,” he said.
Mr Beatie, who was a child beauty queen in his native Hawaii, caused a sensation when he went public with his pregnancy in the Advocate gay magazine. He posed holding his bulging naked stomach for a photograph reminiscent of Moore’s headline-grabbing 1991 cover photo for Vanity Fair.
“How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible,” he wrote. “I will be my daughter’s father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family,” he said.
A cameraman for the TMZ Web-site filmed him leaving the hospital in a hooded sweatshirt, without a bulging stomach. In his Advocate article, Mr Beatie recounted the struggles he faced to have a child.
“Doctors have discriminated against us, turning us away due to their religious beliefs. Health care professionals have refused to call me by a male pronoun or recognise Nancy as my wife. Receptionists have laughed at us. Friends and family have been unsupportive; most of Nancy’s family doesn’t even know I’m transgender,” he said.
His first successful insemination ended in a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy with triplets, resulting in the loss of all his embryos and his right fallopian tube.
“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’,” he wrote.
In his TV appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the presenter asked: “Why not just be a lesbian?”
Mr Beatie replied: “It’s hard to explain. When I was a teenager I had an attraction to women, but it wasn’t a sexual attraction.
“I was much of a tomboy who liked to play with Legos and go fishing... probably up until puberty I didn’t see anything wrong at all.
“When I turned 14, I started to grow breasts... and that was kind of a shock to me.”
Mr Beatie has said he may have more children, once he has experienced fatherhood.
Uh...
Congrats!?!?!? 
