Pronouns and Surgery Do Not Produce a Man

The Oregonian newspaper last week published an unsettling news story about a man from Bend, Oregon who is apparently five months pregnant.

As it turns out, however, the man in question is no man at all.

"The parent-to-be was born female but identifies as a man, he writes in his first-person account posted this week by The Advocate, a national gay publication. He legally changed his name to Thomas Beatie and married a woman named Nancy...About 10 years ago, Beatie underwent breast-removal surgery and started male hormones, he writes, but kept the uterus and female genitals...Nancy couldn't carry the child because she had had a hysterectomy. So Beatie stopped testosterone injections, and menstrual periods returned within four months. He says he conceived through artificial insemination at home with sperm bought from a sperm bank and that he didn't take fertility drugs."

Beatie is due to give birth to a daughter around July 3. He told The Advocate, "To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child. I will be my daughter's father, and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family."

In the lead paragraph, Oregonian reporter Don Colburn says the case stretches "the meaning of the 21^st century family and the limits of personal pronouns," and later he points out that "Family dynamics circa 2008 can get complicated."

While this story is certainly extraordinary, it cannot escape the inescapable truth: Thomas Beatie is not a man; "he," is a woman, a person who has merely sought to alter his (I use that pronoun in the universal sense denoting ‘personhood') biological identity; however, the fact that Thomas Beatie is truly a female is absolute, for God did not create men (gender-specific, non-universal sense) with wombs. Women who take testosterone injections will grow beards.  Nevertheless, the irony here is that, in spite of a "gender reassignment" procedure, the female body of "Thomas Beatie" is functioning precisely according to God's design. 

Despite his sinful machinations, man cannot finally and fully altar the transcendent and biological realities that define a family; according to God's all-wise design, only a man and woman together can procreate and all the pronominal gymnastics in the world cannot get around it. Sadly, Thomas Beatie's daughter will be raised by two mothers, and never know her actual father, an anonymous donor.