Oprah talks to pregnant man
April 7th, 2008Remember Thomas Beatie, the pregnant guy? Of course you do. Oprah spoke to him last Thursday…
While Oprah is largely respectful and sympathetic to Thomas and his wife (even as the audience gasps and giggles), it seems that people are still trying to push Thomas into a gender identity that suits their own comfort levels.
Quench zine expresses it best:
“Throughout the interview, Oprah attempts through leading questions and rhetorical implications to classify Thomas into some legible and stereotypical transgender narrative, which Thomas himself seems reluctant to confirm.
“Oprah notes that after Thomas’s mother died when he was twelve, he was ‘basically left with not a lot of feminine images’ (looks like she found his root, eh?); she then asks if Thomas felt if he was ‘in the wrong body’ as a child-some transgender people with whom she had spoken previously knew at a very young age. Thomas replies, ‘I don’t feel like I was born in the wrong body. I felt like I was meant to be exactly who I am today. It’s kind of hard to explain.’
“Thomas’s story, as he tells it, defies a conventional and pathologizing transgender narrative into which Oprah attempts to place him: Thomas is a man, but he was not ‘born in the wrong body.’
“For Oprah (and likely for most of her audience) a set of female reproductive organs certainly appears ‘wrong-bodied’ for a man. It is unfathomable to Oprah why someone male-identified would not choose to have a penis, for penises are essential to men just as female reproductive systems are to women.”
I think this whole issue is crazy. People do not realize what they are doing when they tamper with their God given gender and sexuality. I understand that people sometimes have issues regarding their gender and/or sexuality, and I don’t really want to judge them,but I do have an opinion. If you have female sex organs and can have a baby, then no matter how much hair you have on your face or what your legal gender is changed to, sweetheart, you are a WOMAN.
Malinda Smith ∼ April 7th, 2008 3:59 pmIf it’s pregnant, then it’s a woman. There is no such thing as a “pregnant man”.
Greg ∼ April 23rd, 2008 5:47 pmSeems even here we are prone to judge what we ourselves do not know and have never been through ourselves, shame on you melinda and greg.
shelley ∼ March 8th, 2009 7:07 pmUmm, Shelly, Greg and Melinda are not judging…to judge someone you have to have your opinion based in your own individual feelings. Their statements are based in fact. Whether you like it or not, men do not have ovaries or a uterus, both required for the formation of a child inside the body…therefore, a man cannot be pregnant. It’s a biological fact. You can take hormones, you can snip your dick or have one sewn on…but you cannot (at least yet) implant a uterus or ovaries. Not judgmental, hon, just facts.
sue ∼ September 27th, 2009 4:22 am