Birth: Now Available for Men

I check BBC news online each morning as I eat breakfast. I like the international approach, and the relative lack of garishness—7 a.m.’s a bit early for scrolling, dancing crap. Something did catch my immediate attention yesterday morning, though: a pregnant man, looking delighted with himself.

Thomas Beatie, an American transsexual, and his wife are expecting a child. His.

It was amazing to me to watch my inner reactions to this. I consider myself pro-self-definition and pro-sexual-freedom, to what others might consider a freakish fault. But I had to watch myself struggle with this internally. I could feel an almost primordial, biological revulsion, like my stomach did a moral flip-flop. How odd. Men don’t have babies. He must not be a man…but he’s not a real woman. A real woman wouldn’t remove her breasts…but would still want to have a child. Just with a husband…instead of a fellow wife. Which he has, because he’s a man. With a uterus. With a baby growing inside.

I made a conscious decision to find this awesome. It was an easy decision, that gave me happiness, but I’m still mildly surprised that it took even a bit of will. Is there a basic biological sense of rightness/wrongness that I’m just individually able to overcome? Or have I fallen prey to a bit of insidious gender-role propaganda while I wasn’t looking?

Either way, my conclusion—which, sadly, may not be common—represents to me the act of choosing to be on the side of the advancement of evolution, which will invariably mean an increase in morally and biologically challenging scenarios like this. So what? Let the strong survive. And the strong, at all times, have been those willing to adapt and press forward. That couple isn’t just giving birth to a child. They are in essence giving birth to a symbol of possibility.

In a society where so many of the imaginings of just a couple of decades ago (the space race, transhumanism) have all but been abandoned in favor of desperate safety, I have to applaud this guy and his wife. Good-for-fucking-them. We have the brains to overcome biology and to make our bodies work for us, and we have the strength to come up with a new morality that makes true possibility, psychologically manageable.

Let’s get to it.

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