Here are a couple of youtube videos featuring Thomas Beatie and his family. I thought these were kind of interesting. It is about the birth of his 3rd child. There is quite a bit of play on common gender roles, such as the man taking out the trash and what not. Sometimes it is nice to match a voice and general self to someone's words and philosophies.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TixtVKWZTrY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKtMIvWjo9w&feature=player_embedded#at=160
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOu3pU0JeQM&feature=related
I can't figure out how to post something to the blog, so I'm just going to leave my blog post as a comment:
ReplyDeleteWhile looking up Thomas Beattie, I came across this brief article about Scott Moore, the "second pregnant man," dating from January 2010:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7079941/Worlds-second-pregnant-man-expecting-baby-boy-next-month.html
Scott Moore and his partner were "both born as girls and have undergone surgery and hormone treatments to transform their sex." Having two adopted children already, Scott was inseminated with the sperm of a male friend, falling pregnant in June 2009. What interests me about this case is how little press it received, compared to the case of Thomas Beattie. This is, of course, understandable, as Thomas represented the very first public case of this new/foreign phenomenon, but it is also notable that this second case technically involves a homosexual couple (vs. the man-woman case of Thomas and his wife Nancy). The Thomas Beattie case really challenges gender traditions because it involves a radical switch between the roles of a man and a woman, while the Scott Moore case is unable to appeal to this idea to the same extent. This makes me wonder how differently the pregnancy of Thomas Beattie would have been portrayed (and how differently the world would have responded to it) had the couple consisted of two men, vs. a man and a woman. It was the very switch in gender roles (ie. having the man carry the baby rather than the woman) that may have shaped the case as an especially interesting one, as it continues to force people to question the validity of gender constraints and to accept the growing elasticity of these traditions.