Perhaps Pregnancy is Not Uniquely Female After All?

Only yesterday did I write, without qualification that pregnancy was “a uniquely female” experience. And now there’s this story zipping all over the web, about a pregnant transgendered man in Oregon. I suppose this demonstrates that my usual insistence on qualifying every statement is probably a sound one. (This is a link to the original story published in the Advocate, a gay monthly.)

What to think? Does one pregnant man invalidate my earlier arguments?

I don’t think he does. Even if pregnancy is not uniquely female, it is nearly so (at least for the time being). I’ll modify my earlier assertion that a woman who gives birth must be a parent and say instead that a person who gives birth must be a parent. But I’ll stand by my assertion that (generally) men and women are not similarly situated with respect to the possibility of pregnancy, and I’ll stick with my assertions about what follows from that. I think only women will be hired as surrogates for the foreseeable future.

Beyond that I have been careful not to make generalizations about men and women as parents. While pregnancy is enormously important at the beginning of a child’s life, the longer the child lives, the more pregnancy becomes just one part of the pattern of parenthood. In the long run, I don’t believe there is or should be a gendered division of parenting functions. (This is part of what makes pregnancy so tricky for me–because at the beginning parenting is gendered .) A man can be a nurturing and tender parent and a woman can teach a child how to throw a ball. And transgendered man can be as much a parent as any one of us.

PS.  I’ve got a different post on this on my other blog, should that be of interest.