TimesWatch shines a light on this circus we've seen in recent weeks about a supposedly "pregnant man."
They are, of course, talking about a woman who calls herself "Thomas Beatie" who cut off her breasts and takes testosterone to make her body look masculine, but did keep her female reproductive organs and impregnated himself with frozen sperm.
Predictably, the "mainstream" media has been abuzz for weeks about a "pregnant man." As Kristen Fyfe of the Culture and Media Institute points out, this is not a pregnant man:
Beatie was born a female, but underwent reconstructive surgery and hormone therapy to take on the attributes of a male. She has body hair and musculature associated with the male physique, but she opted to keep her female reproductive organs. A man does not have fallopian tubes, a uterus, or two X chromosomes, which means that biologically, Thomas Beatie is and always will be a woman.
Who knows what this testosterone--which doesn't belong in her body--will do to her innocent child. Apparently that is a secondary consideration to her own selfish desires to mutilate her body and make a spectacle of human sexuality.
And the ever "compassionate" media has not to my knowledge raised the question of what damage this woman may be doing to her child...both while it is inside her body, and the confusion to which she will subject the child as it grows up.
I had thought sex changes and transsexualism was the height of nihilism. Apparently I was too naive. Apparently a woman mutilating her body to look like a man, then intentionally getting pregnant (with casual disregard for the welfare of her child) has replaced that standard of nihilism.
It's looking like sanity and concern for anything or anyone other than ourselves are on the way out.
13 comments:
Hi Bob - this article fails to distinguish between sex and gender. Sex is biological, gender is psychological and social.
During fetal development, there are dozens of genes that activate differently in the brains of male vs. female fetuses, before the genes that determine the reproductive biology become active.
That is, brains become male or female before the body does.
Given the number of genes that influence these processes, it's to be expected that there will be a diversity of outcomes. Usually one's gender identity matches one's reproductive biology, but not always. The fixation on reproductive biology is oversimplified and a misunderstanding of the concept of gender.
km
KM, she has female reproductive organs, therefore she's a woman. It's not that difficult.
It's not that simple.
May I ask you to have a look at the Intersex Society of North America website?
There are some men with a partial female reproductive system, eg Persistent Mullerian Duct syndrome. There are some women with male chromosomes.
There are even boys who look like baby girls at birth, and are brought up that way, usually. Then they masculinise at puberty. There's rather fewer women who looked male at birth, but still some.
If you should suffer a tragic accident, and get Bobbitised, would that "change your sex"? I think not. Gender is between your ears, in your brain's morphology, not what is between your legs.
We've known that for over 10 years now, from Autopsies showing Transsexuals had brains that mismatched the gender assigned at birth in particular ways. There's now been a flood of confirming data from MRI scans on living people.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. There's a summary over at BiGender and the Brain. Although it quotes articles with names like "Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency." and "Prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol(DES) in males and gender-related disorders:results from a 5-year study" it's still quite readeable.
As for me - my OB/GYN says I'm female, but for a short time I had at least one partly functional testis. As I'd had any dysfunctional female reproductive tissue removed when young (without my knowledge) my only chance of having children was to have male gametes extracted and used. I did, so am a biological father, despite being a woman.
zoe brain,
I totally agree with what you're saying, but people like Bob just don't get it. They need analogies of home-spun wisdom and visual cues like a penis or a vagina to keep their brains from imploding under the weight of the complex topic that is gender. Reality just needs to be either dumbed-down or ignored for some people to handle it.
KM, she has female reproductive organs, therefore she's a woman. It's not that difficult.
So, you're saying I should ignore the rest of this person's body, including his brain, and focus on the genitals?
Again, "male" is a biological description, and "man" is a social role. You're rejecting the reality of millions of people in cultures around the world throughout history.
Bob -- this is a purely hypothetical question, of course -- how would you like it if someone looked at your picture and concluded that because you're a man you're sexist, and because you're white you're a racist? And you say, no, I'm not, listen to me, let me tell you about myself. And people say, "No, we can see, you're a racist sexist white guy. It's not that difficult."
Zoe Brain, what you have between your legs and in your chromosomes indicates your sex.
This woman who calls herself "Thomas Beatie" is obviously a woman, despite having cut off her breasts and despite taking testosterone.
It really is that simple. It only becomes complicated when we struggle to justify things we clearly were never intended to have or do.
KM, male and man should be synonymous, and with healthy individuals, they are. Only with individuals who through some childhood abuse, neglect or trauma are they dissonant. But the genitals, the chromosomes, and the physical brain do nothing to indicate that the individual is a female.
Your argument regarding sexist and racist assumptions holds no water. They have nothing to do with the natural and God-ordained sexuality or sex roles of males and females. Someone could certainly make those assumptions, but they would be completely baseless on the the grounds of physical appearance alone. However, to see a male and assume he's a man is a no-brainer; the assumption would never be wrong. The only thing the "guesser" might be wrong about might be whether this individual BELIEVES he's a man or not.
We went through this silly exercise exhaustively on a previous post regarding the New York juvenile system's pandering to people confused about their sex. We won't do it again here. I enjoy healthy debate, but it's a waste of my time to try and argue with people who can't accept common sense and reality in a straightforward manner.
So any future comments of this nature on this or other posts will be rejected.
Gender and sex certainly are not the same thing. Sex is either male or female depending upon the chromosomal make-up and related physical characteristics. Gender is a linguistic term relating to rules such as male and female pronouns. This was understood until the zeitgeist of the sixties when gender was corrupted in the literature of the social sciences (a clear misuse of the word science) and we now have it being used in place of the former descriptive phrase “sex-specific behavior.” This idea that “gender is between the ears” is made of whole cloth to justify preconceived notions about homosexuality, transexualism and other sexual perversions. This is the same kind of “science” that is now being touted at web sites such as Zoe Brain’s. It is mostly junk science that is accepted only by those who wish to advance a particular agenda.
Paul McHugh, MD, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Psychiatrist-in-Chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been quite critical of the psychiatric profession and some anatomists and physiologists who have abandoned scientific inquiry for the easy laurels of pop culture, such as we see in the subjects of previous posts. In “Psychiatric Misadventures” he writes;
“But my other justification for corralling their [his students'] enthusiasms
is the sense that the intermingling of psychiatry with contemporary
culture is excessive and injures both parties. During the thirty
years of my professional experience, I have witnessed the power of
cultural fashion to lead psychiatric thought and practice off in
false, eve disastrous, directions. I have become familiar with how
these fashions and their consequences caused psychiatry to lose its
moorings. Roughly every ten years, from the mid-1960s on,
psychiatric practice has condoned some bizarre misdirection,
proving how all too often the discipline has been the captive of
the culture.
Each misdirection was the consequence of one of three common
medical mistakes--oversimplification, misplaced emphasis, or pure
invention.”
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/mchugh.htm
"So any future comments of this nature on this or other posts will be rejected."
I'll wait and see if Dr. Theo's post gets deleted.
Dr. Theo is one of the publishers at Dakota Voice. His comments were also grounded in reality, not fantasy. Unlike several on this post and others over the last week, he is not denying the reality of biological sex, nor is he attempting to justify the mutilation of a perfectly healthy and normal human body. Folks who believe “I want, I want!” equals a ticket to alter normal, established biology aren’t grounded in reality.
I’ve asked Dr. Theo if he would like to dialogue with some of you, and if he does, fine. Otherwise, comments from Fantasyland will remain restricted.
I'm loving this blog. Finally someone out there is willing to concede what the media won't-Thomas Beatie is a woman and just because she wants to be a man doesn't make her one, or justify her being called one. The media is to blame for much of the perversion corrupting today's society. 15 years ago, Thomas Beatie would have been called what she is. Now, it is politically incorrect to tell the truth. What a shame.
What a completely ignorant article.
What a completely ignorant comment.
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