Essays on trans, intersex, cis and other persons and topics from a trans perspective.......All human life is here.
This site is the most comprehensive on the web devoted to trans history and biography. Well over 1800 persons worthy of note, both famous and obscure, are discussed in detail, and many more are mentioned in passing.
There is a detailedIndexarranged by vocation, doctor, activist group etc. There is also a Place Index arranged by City etc. This is still evolving.
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In 1594 Daniel Burghammer joined the Austrian army, and also married. He
served in Hungary and in the Netherlands. He was also a blacksmith.
In 1601, he was serving in the squadron of Captain Laymann zu Liebenau of the
Madrucci Regiment, and was posted to Piadena, Italy. In late May he complained
to his wife of pains in his belly, as if something was stirring within. An hour
later he gave birth to a girl-child. His wife called the Captain. Thereupon he
was examined and questioned. He confessed that he had always been half man and
half woman, although raised as male. While in the Netherlands he had had sex
with a Spaniard, and become pregnant, although he kept this secret.
Burghammer suckled the child, although he was able to do this with the right
breast only. The child thrived. The priest christened the child with the name of
Elizabeth, and put her out for adoption: several towns competed for the right to
adopt her. The child was considered a miracle. The church granted Frau
Burghammer a divorce in that Daniel’s ability to give birth was incompatible
with the role of husband.
Richard Wilmer Rowan. The story of secret service. Literary Guild of
America, 1937: 698.
George Tennyson Matthews. News and Rumor in Renaissance Europe The
Fugger Newsletters.Capricorn Books, 1959: 247-8. Online.
Anne Fausto-Sterling. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction
of Sexuality. Basic Books, 2000: 35.
This is a convoluted tale consisting of three strands:
1. Doctors attempting to establish whether a cis man or trans woman could get
pregnant with an ectopic pregnancy. The theory for how to do this was in place
by 1985, but if any such pregnancy has been brought to term, it is not known to
the public
2. Frauds and performance by cis men.
3. Trans men have quietly, and then less quietly, been getting pregnant all
along, often with no aid at all from doctors.
1601
Daniel Burghammer of the Austrian Army, posted in Italy, gave birth to a girl. GVWW.
1807
John Fubbister from the Orkney Isles was part of a Hudson’s Bay
expedition that canoed 1800 miles up river arriving at Pembina Post on the Red
River (in the future North Dakota) for Christmas. There Fubbister gave birth and
was outed. AKA Isobel Gunn: EN.Wikipedia
1936
Nochmen Tenenbaum (born 1911) army sergeant, Warsaw, gave birth in
1936. GVWW
Early 1960s
David Kirby of Oxford University transplanted mouse embryos into the
testes of male mice. See Teresi & McAuliffe, 1985.
Mid-1960s
Cecil Jacobsen of George Washington University Medical School
transplanted a fertilized baboon egg into the abdomen of a male baboon. The
embryo attached itself to the omentum (which hangs in
front of the intestines). The embryo developed healthily, but was aborted after
four months. This was done without external hormones. The embryo produced the
hormones that it needed. However the results were never published. See Teresi
& McAuliffe, 1985. See also EN.Wikipedia and book
and film about Jacobsen.
Jacobsen was a pioneer in amniocentesis, but later
in life was convicted of using his own sperm in in vitro conceptions.
1970
Leo
Wollman flew up to Toronto for the release of Dianna Boileau's autobiography. He rather dominated the event and predicted that
transsexual women would be able to become pregnant within 10 years. This never
came to pass.
1971
Novel: John Varley. The Ophiuchi Hotline. Dial, 1971. A
science fiction novel set the future when alien technology enables persons to
change sex and be fertile. Men become women to have a child, and then switch
back. EN.Wikipedia
Film:Rabbit Test, Joan Rivers (dir),with Billy
Crystal, Roddy McDowell. US 84 mins 1978. IMDB EN.Wikipedia. A
comedy about a sexually inexperienced man who becomes pregnant and gives birth
to a daughter.
1979
Margaret Martin, a NZ cis woman, then 29 gave birth to a healthy girl
in May, eight months after her hysterectomy, thereby establishing that ectopic
[outside the womb] pregnancies were safe and feasible. Her gynaecologist,
Peter Jackson told journalists that this proved that pregnant men were
therefore possible. See Teresi & McAuliffe, 1985.
1984
Six trans women requested admission to the in vitro fertilization clinic at
Queen Victoria Medical Centre, Melbourne. Their request was turned down. See
Teresi & McAuliffe, 1985.
1985
Dick Teresi & Kathleen McAuliffe. “Male pregnancy”.Omni, December 1985, 8: 50-56 and 118. PDF
Influential and inspiring article that summarized the work done to date.
Afterwards Teresi got Bob
Guccione, founder of Omni and Penthouse to put up $500,000 for Jacobsen to
arrange a male pregnancy, but they then considered the mortality rates and
dropped the idea.
Early 1990s
Trans man, Oleg (born 196?) Moscow: Four months into term his
sperm-donor died suddenly of a leukaemia-related blood disorder. Oleg’s doctor
feared that the baby would also be sick, and convinced him to have an abortion.
Before they could try again, his wife died of a congenital heart defect. Oleg
was considering getting pregnant again, as a way of honouring his wife’s memory.
Discussed in David Tuller. Cracks in the Iron Closet: Travels in Gay &
Lesbian Russia. Faber & Faber 1996: 161-4.
1992
Edwin Bayron, 32, Phillipines, a midwife, claimed to be hermaphroditic
and six-months pregnant. He was able to fake the results of an ultrasound scan
and two urine tests, such that the chief gynaecologist at the Bukidnon
provincial hospital supported the claim. However this was a deceit resulting
from his wish to marry his boyfriend. News
article.
Intersex Karl Holzer, living as male, 31, Frankfurt, Germany, gave
birth to boy in June. Weekly
World News.
1994
Film: Junior, Ivan Reitman (dir), with Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Danny Devito. US 109 mins 1994. As part of fertility research, a male
scientist agrees to become pregnant. IMDBEN.Wikipedia Based
on the theory in the 1985 Omni article.
Sam Dylan More. "The Pregnant Man - An Oxymoron". Journal of Gender
Studies. 7, 3, 1998: 319-328. This article studies nine German trans men who
have been pregnant, and found that they had to engage in significant identity
and body work to mitigate the impact of societal pregnancy scripts.
1999
Matt Rice (born 1964) San Francisco, twice a lover of Pat(rick)
Califia. Pat had undergone a hysterectomy some years before, but Matt had
stopped taking testosterone because of related migraines. With the aid of sperm
donated sexually by three male friends, Matt became pregnant, and as a bearded
man attended birthing classes. Meanwhile Califia started transition. The son,
Blake (born 1999), is autistic, and Matt is raising him alone. 2000 article by
Califia in Village Voice
Lee Mingwei Taiwanese man in New York who exhibited his pregnancy.
”Curiously, the Web site has been up since 1999, and Mr. Lee is apparently still
pregnant! Either the poor man has been in labor for nearly a decade (talk about
a rough delivery!), or the story is a fake. Of course, Mr. Lee doesn't exist;
the Web site is a hoax created as performance art by an artist named Virgil
Wong.”
2005
Meryl Rothstein . "Male Pregnancy: A Dangerous Proposition".
Popular Science, 07.31.2005. Online.
2006
Film: Jules Rosskam (dir). Transparent. US 61 Mins
2006. A documentary about 19 trans men who have been pregnant and are now
raising the child. IMDB
2008-10
Thomas Beatie, (born 1974, completed top-surgery transition 2002,
married 2003) Arizona, with an infertile wife, became pregnant via donated sperm
and a syringe. He wrote an article for The Advocate about the experience, and
was profiled in The Washington Post. He became a media sensation, and did an
hour-long interview on Oprah. He gave birth to a daughter June 2008, a son June
2009 and a second son July 2010. Mr & Mrs Beatie were divorced in 2012-4 in
a case that tested legal definitions of gender. EN.Wikipedia Not the
first pregnant man, but the first publicised.
Film:Pregnant Man, Elizabeth Mcdonald (dir), with
Thomas Beatie. US TV 2008. IMDB
J Wallace. “The Manly Art of Pregnancy”. In Kate Bornstein & S Bear
Bergman (eds). Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Seal Press, 2010:
188-194.
2011
Yuval Topper (born 1988), Israel, top-surgery 2009, gave birth to a
son in December 2011. Gay
Star News. And a daughter in 2014. Jews
News
Trevor MacDonald (born 1985) Manitoba, top surgery in early 20s, gave
birth to a boy in 2011, and a second child in 2014. He was helped by La Leche
League Canada, the breastfeeding support group. He applied to be a LLLC coach
but was rejected as he does not regard himself as a mother. However LLLC set up
an internal review and a year later expunged gendered language from its
requirements. He founded in 2012 "Birthing and Breast or
Chestfeeding Trans People and Allies which has 1700 members, and in 2014
formed a research team with funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health
Research . The
StarEN.Wikipedia
2012
AJ Kearns (born 1974) Melbourne, started transitioned at age 35. His
wife had birth complications with their first child, so AJ postponed transition
to give birth to their second child in 2012. The couple have since separated. Daily
Mail
2013
Kayden Coleman (born 1985) Philadelphia, and his husband gave birth to
a daughter in 2013. NY
Daily News
Damien W. Riggs. “Transgender men’s self-representations of bearing children
post-transition”. In F. Green. & M. Friedman. (eds.) Chasing
rainbows, Demeter Press, 2013. PDF
2014
Alexis D Light, Juno Obedin-Maliver, Jae M Sevelius, Jennifer L Kerns.
“Transgender men who experienced pregnancy after female-to-male gender
transitioning”. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 124, 6, Dec 2014: 1120-7. AbstractNews
article
There is also a book The Pregnant Man by Roberto Zapperi, Harwood,
1991, translated and revised into English by Brian Williams (original Uomo incinto,
Cosenza, 1979). This book is not listed in Amazon. It is not about attempts or
success of pregnancy in life, but in folklore and in psychoanalysis. It appears
that he is totally ignorant of queer studies, but cites Freud, Ferenczi and
Devereux instead as the latest research.
-------------------
So is a pregnant trans parent a mother or a father? Trans women with children
are divided: some insist that they are mothers to their children, while others
talk of their duties as a father, and allow their children to call them ‘Dad’.
However trans women parents are, almost all, parents before transition. The
trans men whom we list above had done most of transition before they became
pregnant.
There are three factors:
1. Fathers impregnate, mothers gestate.
2. Mothers produce a single or a small number of DNA units surrounded by
protein (eggs); fathers produce a large number of motile DNA units without
protein and which cannot divide, but have a tail (sperm). Fish species of the Syngnathidae family, of
which the best known is the seahorse, are said to exhibit male pregnancy. So why
do we not regard the gestating parent as a mother? It is because it produces
sperm, and receives eggs from the other sex.
3. Gender identity.
Obviously (1) and (2) would make a pregnant trans man a mother, however the
current social construction is that (3) trumps (1) and (2). A valuable tenet of
second-wave feminism was that gender is a social construction, and that received
gender roles should be deconstructed. The more advanced position is that sex, as
well as gender, is socially constructed. Male pregnancy is a step further and
challenges the historical cultural baggage that we inherited along with the
basic biology of making babies. The queering of everyday life continues.
Nochmen Tenenbaum served with distinction in the Polish Army in the early 1930s. He
earned medals after saving several persons from drowning, and was promoted to
sergeant.
A year later in 1936, after physical and psychological changes, and leaving
the army, Tenenbaum, still in male clothing, arrived at a maternity home in
Warsaw and requested a room, stating that he was about to give birth. A 4 kg
child was born. The father was an artist.
“Nine-Pound Child Born to Ex-Soldier A Year after “he” Changed “his” Sex”.
Daily Mail, 7 August 1936. Reprinted in George Ives (ed Paul Sieveking).
Man Bites Man: The Scrapbook of an Edwardian Eccentric. Penguin Books,
1981: 41.
“Soldier Shocks Doctors, As He Becomes Mother”. Daily Mirror, 10 August 1936.
Online.
------
The anti-sodomy laws in Poland had not been enforced since independence in
1918. They were officially repealed in 1932.
The Daily Mirror story contains the comment: “Although there are many
authentic cases of sex changes on record, this is believed to be the first time
in the history of medical science that the metamorphosis was so complete
that reproduction was possible”. This in 1936!
Most likely, Tenenbaum was female-born, had transitioned (without hormones, which was the only option at the time) in order to serve
in the army, but had been sexually compromised and become pregnant. We know
nothing of him after 1936.
