Thomas Beatie lives in a former logging city in Oregon with his wife, Nancy Roberts.
Born in Hawaii as Tracy Lagondino, the 34-year-old was a prominent gay-rights activist who found he identified with being a man.
He underwent a sex change, which involved regular injections of testosterone, and having his breasts surgically removed (but keeping his female reproductive organs) and legally became a man.
After marrying, he and his wife moved to the US mainland. They wanted to start a family but health problems meant Roberts could not conceive. So, according to the account Beatie gave the Advocate, a US gay and lesbian magazine, he stopped his twice-weekly hormone injections, allowed his periods to return, and tried for a baby.
A first attempt ended in a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. Now, after anonymous sperm donation and home insemination, Beatie has given birth to a baby girl.
He said before having the baby: "Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am".
"To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child – I am so lucky to have such a loving, supportive wife. I will be my daughter's father and Nancy will be her mother", he wrote.
The dramatic first pictures of a bearded, apparently pregnant, Beatie in March sparked horror in the tabloids and in conservative circles – with some claiming it was a hoax.
Yet a "man" becoming pregnant is not new. Transgender man Matt Rice gave birth to a baby boy in 1999 and his trans man partner, Patrick Califia, later told Village Voice magazine about his toddler son who "shrieks with delight at the sight of the tortoiseshell cat".
Straight neighbours were "pretty sweet" about it, he wrote. "The only people who have gotten upset are a handful of straight-identified homophobic FTMs [female-to-male transgender people] online who started calling Matt by his girl name, because real men don't get pregnant."
The fact that even other transgender people react with hostility reveals the levels of unease and prejudice a pregnant man can face. A common reaction is to wonder how someone can identify themselves as male and yet embrace pregnancy.
"That's like saying you can't be a woman and have a career," says Christine Burns, a trans woman and equality and diversity specialist.
"The irony is we've had a debate in feminism about the idea that if men were able to have children we would be in a very different position and yet when it happens there is enormous fear."
Lewis Turner, vice president of trans campaigning group Press for Change, says that having a male gender identity does not prevent you wanting to bear children.
"As a trans man myself I wouldn't ever dream of getting pregnant. But I think Thomas Beatie identifies himself as male as much as I do and he just wants to reproduce."
Much concern has focused on the confusion the child may experience growing up with a transsexual father.
"There is going to be an extra degree of complication or confusion about 'where am I from?'" says Robert Withers, a psychoanalyst who has treated transgender patients.
Kerrick Lucker, a gay activist at the University of California, Berkeley, has met two children with trans man birth mothers. "In my experience, they were extremely well-parented and well-adjusted. The only unusual challenges these kids face come from members of the public who see gender ambiguity as a great wrong," he says.
Turner says there is no reason why a child should be troubled by having been born from their father. "There are loads of trans people who have kids and I have not met one who is disturbed because of their parents." Turner does, however, acknowledge that such children may face bullying at school.
Beatie has already written of the prejudice he has experienced – from doctors telling him to shave off his beard and refusing to address him "by a male pronoun" to refusing to treat him. Lucker spots triumph in this adversity. "Generally speaking, a man whose desire for a child is strong enough to overcome the obstacles that transgender men must face in bearing one is likely to be an extremely caring father".
Source: guardian.co.uk
