Gender analysis of the pregnant man

Pregnant Man

Being born a biological female seems to confer the essential right to conceive and bear children. After all, mothers around the country ingest hormone concoctions to increase their chances of conception. Even if the result is octuplets, the choice to bear biological children is considered a human right.

Thomas Beatie was born classified as a biological female. Subsequent sex reassignment surgery changed Beatie's gender identity and gender classification to male, but doing so did not alter Beatie's ability to bear children. Beatie's internal reproductive organs remained female. In fact, Beatie states, "I didn't have to take any exogenous estrogen, progesterone, or fertility drugs to aid my pregnancy." Ironically, many females do need to enhance their body's ability to bear children. Beatie is legally classified as a male and needed no such assistance.

Undoubtedly Thomas Beatie has done gender differently than most Americans. His autobiographical piece "Labor of Love" appeared in the Advocate last year. Beatie's story is remarkable in the sense that what his sex reassignment surgery did was to effectively blur the most deeply held assumptions about gender and gender roles. Living has a male married to a female, Beatie fulfills the social expectations of what being masculine means. Beatie looks like a male, and his neighbors treat him as one. That is, until Beatie became pregnant.

The state of pregnancy is one that is socially reserved for the female gender: and categorically so. Until sex reassignment surgery was possible, males could not bear children because they lacked the biological apparatuses with which to do so. Now, gendered males like Thomas Beatie have the opportunity to experience a state of being once fully reserved for the female gender. After bearing his child, Beatie will be a father, not a mother. His social status and social role will be male: paternal and possibly bread winning. However, Beatie's story reveals the deeply rooted prejudices, fears, and biases inherent in a culture with binary gender categories. As Lorber points out, societies generally offer a limited number of gender statuses. Male and female are niches neatly carved out. Pregnancy and childbirth reside in the female niche, but Beatie proves that such dichotomies are meaningless. Gender boundaries are "breachable" because they are artificially rigid, notes Lorber (p. 43). If gender were a more fluid conception, then Beatie would not be writing an article for the Advocate detailing his experiences with discrimination during the pregnancy.

Beatie's wife Nancy had been deprived of the ability to bear children because of a hysterectomy. Her inability to bear children does not categorically deny Nancy a female gender identification. Nancy is still a woman, albeit one who cannot bear children. Beatie, arguably, is still a male even if he is one who can bear children. Bearing children is a female role only because it has been socially constructed and not because it is absolutely attached to gender. Until science made gender reassignment surgery possible, pregnancy could have been singled out as the only experience fundamentally impossible for a male. Beatie proves that even pregnancy is a gender-neutral experience. As Beatie himself claims, "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire."

Interestingly, though, Beatie himself perceives the world through gendered eyes. By identifying strongly with the male gender and with the concurrent roles such as husband and father, Beatie achieves a logically challenging situation. Beatie blurs gender roles and sex categories while clinging to binaries at the same time. He claims, "my gender identity as male is constant" almost as if to entertain gender bending would threaten his grip on who Thomas Beatie is. Beatie subscribes to a conventional view of gender in spite of his blatant blurring of gender lines.

However, Beatie does usurp what West & Zimmerman call "the activity of managing situated conduct in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one's sex category," (p. 1). Beatie's experiences raise an interesting point about reproductive organs, too. Reproductive organs are typically hidden from view. Male reproductive organs are covered with clothing; female reproductive organs are hidden within the body as well. To the outside world as well as to himself, Thomas Beatie is a male. The people he worked with an in fact, most of his wife's family, accepted Thomas Beatie as a male. As Beatie points out, "most of Nancy's family doesn't even know I'm transgender." Beatie's ability to "pass" as male is mainly due to his sex reassignment surgery. West & Zimmerman and Lorber refer to "passing" both in the context of transsexual and also in the context of transvestite individuals. Passing requires conformity to social ideals of what "males" and "females" look like. Because a bulging belly is a "female" social construction, it becomes difficult to "pass" as a pregnant male. Beatie's body conforms to both the imagery of "male" and of "female," which made his doctors uncomfortable. Beatie's doctors have undoubtedly treated people with a wide variety of health problems as well as females who required fertility drugs in order to become pregnant. Yet a pregnant male was a reality so difficult to contend with that Beatie and his wife were scoffed and laughed at, scorned and discriminated heavily against.

The discrimination Beatie and his wife encountered demonstrates society's attempt to "fragment the individual's bodily and social experiences," (Lorber p. 47). Fragmenting a human being's bodily experiences precludes Beatie from being treated equally in the American health care system. Gender fragmentation also prevented Beatie from telling his in-laws about his sex reassignment surgery. The fragmentation also carries over into social experiences and social roles. If Beatie wants to be accepted as a male, he must do "male" things: activites that do not include carrying children. One doctor told Beatie to shave his facial hair: as if shaving off his facial hair would make him better able to carry a child, or somehow mark him as being more suitable to the job of parenting.

Beatie's story raises pertinent issues about defining motherhood. Motherhood is defined in terms of reproduction and also in terms of social status and role fulfillment. Biological females who adopt children are "mothers" even though their bodies did not carry the child. Their role as mothers is a socially constructed one: mothers may be expected to offer nurturance and emotional support. Fathers, on the other hand, may be expected to tease and play with their children. Gender neutral parenting is a relatively new concept.

As Lorber points out, an increasing number of fathers are fulfilling motherly roles. Fathers can be stay-at-home dads, their wives the breadwinners. Gender roles in the domestic environment are shifting. As gender role differentiation and division of labor cease to exist within the nuclear family, men like Thomas Beatie enjoy an expanding range of social opportunities. Beatie can opt to stay home and take care of the baby without jeopardizing his social status as a male. Domestic labor is, therefore, becoming recognized and valued. Still, Beatie will identify with the role of "father" because of his firm ascription to the male sex category.

Beatie's first-person account of gender bending reveals what "culture has made invisible…the accomplishment of gender," (West & Zimmerman p. 1). We "do gender" without thinking about it because gender is embedded in the "routing ground of everyday activities," (Lorber p. 41). The assumption is that a male can dress like a female but as soon as the person identifies fully with the male sex category certain actions are forbidden. Childbirth is one of them. It sometimes takes a pregnant man: what Lorber would call a "deliberate disruption of our expectations," to pay attention to gender and its social construction (p. 41).