Pregnant Trans Man

Doesn't seems like the wife was infertile, no real reason to have a "man" have the baby. Just selfishness.

Um, like it or not, the trend of society may have expanded the definition of male/female roles but that's a far cry from thinking there's some great demand for the kind of redefinition posed by this issue.

"Considering the name of this tribe, I wouldnt expect this kind of close mindedness from those oppressed but then again, "

So anyone who disagrees with you on any issue is just closed minded? Physicial, heal thyself....

I advise that you wake up to the fact that the gay community has a diversity of opinion, just like everywhere else. And disagreement with you does not rise to the level of hate crime, nor does it necessitate your being "shocked". What shocks you? That not everyone thinks like you?

As I've said, I think this person is spotlight hunting. It would have been very easy to "remain" female until after the birth. To do otherwise, and to use a baby in this manner seems selfish to me. It isn't news to me that people in the GLBT community have the same issues as the rest of society.

I don't see this person as "enlightened" or "progressive" or any of the other self serving adjectives that occasionally get thrown around in an attempt to raise ever single action to the level of civil rights superhero.

If you don't like my opinion, tough.

"But the true repercussion for this action is to create a visible reality that already exists and making it more visible and ultimately it will make it acceptable."

Get real. This situation will never become acceptable.

<<Like it or not, the trend of society has shifted away from the standard male/female roles. It is becoming GENDER FLUID.>>

Not really. It is, as your own words point out, becoming more gender-ROLE-fluid than it has been. It's also slowly coming to the realization that just like morphological sex and sexuality, morphological sex and gender identity are actually two separate things with one not necessarily having any bearing on the other.

This particular instance raises at least 3 entirely separate issues:

1) The question of whether or not transmen ought to be bearing and birthing children (with the ancillary questions of the "heroic measures" by which this transman became pregnant, and what if any effect this has on that transman's man-ness).

2) The treatment of said transman by doctors both before and during the pregnancy.

3) The seeming attention-seeking behavior of this couple toward their unusual situation.

In the case of Issue 1, all I can say is that just because you can doesn't mean you should, but just because you can inveigh against something doesn't mean you should either. I have to agree with Mercedes that it certainly isn't a choice I would have made in their shoes...especially given what it took...but then, I'm child-free by choice for a host of reasons. It's a free country, and people have made and continue to make similarly disparaging comments about children raised by same-sex couples and mixed-race kids as well. As for Issue 1a (the heroic measures), the jury's still out on that for me, though I do think that the doctors should have been more sensitive in their treatment of this guy.

And Issue 1b (what, if anything, does this say about the transman in question's "man-ness"?), well, what we have here is one of those taxonomy-shattering situations I referred to in my most recent post to the most recent "labels" (aka "pomo") thread. It just happens that we have a situation in which people can be male-gendered without being male-sexed. Society's just going to have to deal with that. Whether it, or any member of it, likes it or not, the situation has come up.

Let me tell you a short story...when I was younger, in my 20s, I was in love with a Canadian girl and wanted to spend my life with her. It ended up being 3 years, but that's beside the point. The only way I could legally do that rather than suffer the hell that afflicts bi-national same-sex couples was to take advantage of the legal loophole afforded us by my male birth certificate and marry her...complete with deeply degrading affidavit signed over to the County of San Francisco that I was "biologically male". Does that make me any less of a "woman"? That I shouldn't have been required to do that to marry someone is beside the point. The laws were what they were and I exploited them. This guy's biology is what it is and he exploited it to enable a couple that's probably going to suffer less than most same-sex couples do in our society because they will be, for all intents and purposes, mixed-sex when all's said and done. And the mild media brouhaha about the pregnancy is loooong since forgotten.

So on that point, Jean, you're just wrong and being churlish (IMHO). I don't agree with this couple on a lot of levels, even find them kind of distasteful for the attention-seeking (see Issue 3, below), but that doesn't—and shouldn't—affect my thinking about Issue 1.

On Issue 2, there's just plain no excuse for a lack of professionalism on the part of the doctors or the insurance company...if someone's pregnant, regardless of who they are or how they got that way, that person *does* have a right to quality, sensitive medical care aimed at ensuring the health of both themself and the baby. This one is utterly black-and-white to me.

As for Issue 3, on a purely personal level, I disagree with the couple's mass-media appearances. It smacks of ramming this titillating situation down the throats of middle America and tempting backlash. There has GOT to be a better way to make one's point with people than a shock-segment on a mass-market talk show. I mean, The Advocate is one thing...Letterman something else quite again. But it's also not my life, and frankly, by the time the kid is in any way conscious, people will have utterly forgotten this story (or at least the names of those involved). There are people in trailer parks and on ranches in Montana doing far worse, you ask me.