The Pregnant Man

I was flipping channels the other day, idly staring at the TV as I'm prone to do throughout the day, when I caught this one hour special on Discovery Health titled The Pregnant Man. You've read that correctly. Not a pregnant man, but the pregnant man, as in the one and only man (I say that very begrudgingly and with a sigh of annoyance) to defy nature. The guy in question is Thomas Beatie, and he was all over the news and the daytime talk show circuit last year.

But as any elementary school child can tell you, men cannot get pregnant. Females are the sole creatures who bear the gift of life, thanks in part to the sometimes mystifying, consistently wonderful, occasionally elusive but always sought after vagina and its accompanying organs. Men, on the other hand, have penises, which is what Thomas Beatie lacks. He was born a woman and at some point in her life decided to undergo hormone therapy and the appropriate surgeries to let the man inside her out; she, however, opted not to change her genitals, hence her pregnancy.

I'm all for equality and whatnot, and I really don't care what a person does to their body. What gets my goat (I've been wanting to use that ever since I heard Devo's "Gut Feeling") is the fact that people keep referring to her as a pregnant man. Never mind her masculine appearance, and lets ignore Oregon's decision to legally recognize her as a man (I'm assuming this was before her pregnancy). What remains, and what will always remain, despite the number of surgeries she or others like her go through, is that she is biologically a woman. And you can't change DNA. In my mind, she will always be a wolf in sheep's clothing, no matter how technologically advanced and visually deceiving the clothing may be.

I know that really had nothing to do with London, but I just had to get it out. It was irking me something vicious.