Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: gender, gender queer, pregnant man, sexuality, thomas beatie, trans
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This is beautiful and amazing, and moreso in that this is the first time I’m hearing about this. Thomas Beatie, who it seems became famous as ‘The Pregnant Man’ gave birth to a baby girl today in a Bend, Oregon hospital.
Especially in that he is trans and was born with female organs; I love that his birth (which will presumably get blown up close to everywhere) makes people hopefully question what it is to be male. Maybe even start to separate gender constructs from biological functions? One can only hope. |
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All is not well in gender queerness-meets-medialand however, as this really interesting Salon article discusses. From what I’ve seen so far, mainstream media seems to be fairly decent, or at that, carefully PC. Save for the sprinkling of inverted commas around ‘pregnant man’ (just like that) though.
Seems to me like all this media attention would still mostly have positive effects for the trans community? It’s pointed out however that this could have adverse effects for people’s accessibility to hormones or reassignment surgery. Plus the whole overshadowing aspect. I definitely can’t resume to speak for the trans community so hm I really don’t know. As he says in his editorial though:
This I can definitely agree with, and hopefully everyone else would too. Something else to think about: transgender and radical feminism |
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This is fascinating. While everyone loves loves loves to talk about the “gender as a social construct,” biological sex has long seemed to many people to be a pretty safe base from which to build understanding of concrete differences between men and women. Race, for example, can be biologically disproved, but can sex? When there are distinct physical differences at birth, can we make them totally irrelevant through science and surgery?
The article on p-orridge in this month’s radar (yeah, yeah, shitty magazine) is interesting: http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2008/06/julyaugust_2008_table_of_contents.php
Comment by SRL July 4, 2008 @ 2:21 amThe lovely and transcendent artist and her/his lover got plastic surgery to look alike and get beyond gender. P-orridge discusses destroying the ultimate control – DNA. hrm.
I find it fascinating site our biological differences for our differences in gender experience meaning our gender normative behavior is determined by our sex. They don’t even realize that the penis is simply a clitoris exposed to masculinizing hormones and testes are overgrown ovaries. Ever wonder why those things look like eggs? I am thrilled (and hopeful) that we can use this as a way to expand the boundaries of masculinity although I fear that will be hard for many. Hopefully Thomas and Nancy will continue to allow us into their lives to teach us all a lot.
Comment by prometheustherebel July 5, 2008 @ 3:42 amI think the problem Sarah comes when you can no longer binarise the world into male and female genders, and equally so, locate these genders in biological sex organs.
And I tend to see gender as yeah, a social construct, and it’s a cliché, but gender is a spectrum! As opposed to the maybe more limited number of biologically assigned sexes.
And with it, gender as a completely chosen identity. You wouldn’t, for example force someone who identifies as trans/gender queer into ‘male’ behaviours just because they’re born with that set of organs. Thomas Beatie’s a good example of this fluidity of identity – although he became a man, he chose to retain his female organs too.
Comment by killingdenouement July 7, 2008 @ 7:36 amPrometheusrebel – that’s pretty interesting I’d never even heard that before. Rather than expand I’d love to see this moving towards dissolving all gender boundaries.
Comment by killingdenouement July 7, 2008 @ 7:39 am