Thomas Beatie

Thomas Trace Beatie (born 1974 ) is an American public speaker, author, and advocate of transgender and sexuality issues, with a focus on transgender fertility and reproductive rights.

He competed in karate and Taekwondo, winning a junior championship in Taekwondo forms in the 1992 Aloha State Games.

He graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in health science and later pursued an Executive MBA.

Beatie came out as a trans man in early 1997.

Beatie had gender reassignment surgery in March 2002 and became known as "the pregnant man" after he became pregnant through artificial insemination in 2007.

Beatie chose to be pregnant because his wife Nancy was infertile, doing so with donated sperm.

Beatie underwent sex reassignment surgery involving a double mastectomy, also known as "top surgery", and officially changed his sex marker from "female" to "male" on his state and federal identity documents in 2002.

However, he retained his female reproductive organs, which later allowed him to become pregnant.

Beatie married Nancy Gillespie in 2003.

The couple moved to Bend, Oregon, in 2005.

When the two decided to start a family, Beatie chose to carry the child, since Nancy was unable due to a prior hysterectomy.

Beatie suspended testosterone hormone treatment in order to conceive but the first conception was an ectopic pregnancy with triplets that was life-threatening, requiring a surgical intervention and the loss of the embryos and his right fallopian tube.

He became successfully pregnant afterwards, twice with donor sperm, delivering both children without complications.

Beatie stated that he felt no conflict between his pregnancy and his gender as a man, saying that he considered himself the child's father and his wife Nancy the mother.

Beatie received intense media attention after he wrote a first-person article in the national LGBT magazine The Advocate in 2008.

In it, Beatie described the prejudice he and Nancy faced after deciding to have a child, writing:

"Doctors have discriminated against us, turning us away due to their religious beliefs. Health care professionals have refused to call me by a male pronoun or recognize Nancy as my wife. Receptionists have laughed at us. Friends and family have been unsupportive; most of Nancy's family doesn't even know I'm transgender.'"

The article was accompanied by a shirtless photograph of the pregnant Beatie, which became an object of voyeurism among the public according to the queer theorist Jack Halberstam.

Within weeks of the online publication, news of his story quickly spread through national and international media, who dubbed Beatie "the pregnant man".

Beatie made his first television appearance, an hour-long exclusive interview, on the Oprah Winfrey Show in April 2008.

During the show, he talked about his sense of reproductive right to bear a child independent of his male gender identity.

He commented, "It's not a male or female desire to want to have a child [...] it's a human desire [...] I'm a person, and I have the right to have my own biological child."

The Oprah episode received a spike in Nielsen ratings.

The same month, Beatie was profiled in a six-page story in People, with photography by Mary Ellen Mark.

Beatie delivered his first child in June 2008.

Multiple tabloids as well as mainstream news outlets reported the story, after paparazzi captured images of the family leaving the St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon days later.

People's senior editor, Patrick Rogers, gave an interview to the CBS Early Morning Show about the birth.

An August 2008 issue of People featured Beatie with his daughter, sharing the cover with a larger image of presidential candidate Barack Obama posing with his family.

He gave birth to his second child, a son, in 2009.

The couple's third child, a second son, was born in July 2010.

Beatie later elected to have "lower" surgery, including the creation of a functional penis.

The couple filed for divorce in 2012.

The Beatie case is the first of its kind on record, where a documented legal male gave birth within a marriage to a woman, and for the first time, a court challenged a marriage where the husband gave birth.

Thomas Beatie was born female at birth and grew up in Honolulu as the first of two children.

His mother, Susan Nickels Beatie, was born in Minnesota.

His father, of Korean and Filipino descent, was born and raised in Hawaii.

He is related to two former U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, his fifth great-grandfather, and Benjamin Harrison, his third great uncle.

As a teenager, Thomas was a model and Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant finalist.

The procedure, performed by transgender surgeon Marci Bowers, was documented on his second appearance of The Doctors, in 2012.

The procedure, called a ring metoidioplasty, included transfer of tissue, elongation of the hormonally enlarged phallus, as well as urethral construction and lengthening.