“I hope it’s the worst experience of his life. I hope the blood vessels burst in his eyes. I hope it is so painful, ’cause it is kooky, totally kooky.” That’s what Tracy Byrnes said about Thomas Beatie on Fox News’ “Red Eye.” Thomas Beatie is a man who happens to be pregnant. Beatie was born a woman and underwent sexual reassignment surgery, which kept his uterus intact. He is now legally a man, married (legally as well) to a woman. Beatie offered to carry the baby after his wife couldn’t.
The thought of a pregnant man threatens many long-held notions, but so did the idea that skin color didn’t indicate brain capacity. Discomfort from straight society is expected, but the media’s reaction has been characterized by unfiltered hate speech. Pundits for FOX and even comedian David Letterman have called Thomas a “freakshow” and refused to call him by anything other than “she,” an abominable insult to any trans person.
Open hate is one thing, but intellectual laziness is another. Overall, media commentators have shared the slack-jawed position of being puzzled out of their minds by a very simple concept. A man is pregnant. Let’s move on. Pundits have been so moved by their disgust and confusion as to declare the baby will be a “freak;” their minds sidestepping the basic biology of a functioning uterus.
The world we live in is big, almost unfathomably big. It is sometimes scary, sometimes beautiful and always breathtakingly diverse. FOX forgets that it is the male seahorse that is the vessel for its young. A variety of lizard in the American Southwest has evolved to exclude the entire male gender from its species. A multitude of Caribbean reef-dwelling fish, like the Lantern Bass and its undersea companions, switch gender at will. What’s more, thousands of human children are born intersexed every year. Doctors, unable to match their genitals to a single model, are often forced to ask parents to pick a gender. More often than not, as the child’s true self manifests later in life, they choose the wrong one.
Thomas Beatie represents a wonder of biology that is being interpreted as a threat. The thing about this world of ours is that nature, like the truth, doesn’t answer to man’s prejudice.
