Every Which Way

Only the female of the species can give birth to creatures of their own kind. The male of the species provides the sperm to the female ova to fertilize and create new life. There is wonder in that, and no little amount of controversy, of late. Transsexuals are altering, in a sense, what nature has decreed.

The last frontier of challenging males to professions that were originally monopolize by men was achieved by women through the revolution that took place empowering women to achieve status formerly denied them.

Females were liberated from traditional roles of nurturer, baby-bearer, and housewifery through Women's Liberation. The end result of that was women became astronauts, engineers, orchestra conductors, members of the military, surgeons, astrophysicists, CEOs and any number of other members of professions formerly denied them.

Men were encouraged to forget about manly pursuits in favour of releasing their softer psyches, the female within. Many men, in sympathy with women demanding an egalitarian society that gave equal weight to both genders, surrendered their previously male role of paterfamilias, sole wage-earner, hands-off fathers, sport-addicted, boys'-night-out role that had become the tradition in Western society.

And now, other new fields of endeavour and achievement are being overturned; men with an aptitude to parenthood are forging ahead with becoming pregnant, bearing a child, and breast-feeding. No, not a challenge to nature and destiny. But genetic inheritance being fully utilized.

Women who despaired at their genetic endowment as female, insisting they were meant to be men, have also chosen to leave their uterus intact. While maintaining an outward demonstration of the maleness they so passionately insisted should be their future, and undergoing certain hormone alterations notwithstanding, some have undergone also in vitro fertilization.

Society has been entertained by the public appearance - rare though it yet is - of a bearded man with a fully rounded belly, obviously carrying a pregnancy. There's the example of a young woman who in her 20s underwent the change to become a man, now named Neil Hope. Mr. Hope went through a successful pregnancy, thanks hugely to the work of Toronto's Create Fertility Centre which claims to be involved in roughly one such case each month.

With the help of the medical professionals at the Centre, Mr. Hope became a "pregnant person" at 37 years of age and is now a proud papa, sharing parenting nurturing with his partner, equally proud and happy, himself representing another transsexual gender alteration. Assisted reproduction can do it, as long as the internal reproductive organs are left intact.

So women who detest being women, can achieve malehood, and still become mothers - fathers, that is.

Mr. Hope asked the surgeon who had performed his gender-reassignment to leave his womb and other female paraphernalia intact. Which enabled intra-uterine insemination many years later. Concluding in the birth of a little boy. Which his father breast-fed to ensure that his son had the very best start in life possible.

It was certainly confusing to people witnessing a bearded man breast-feeding an infant in public. Most peoples' brains probably stopped at the sight of a hirsute woman, and that's that.

This is what is called challenging stereotypes. Who would ever have imagined it? "It's the greatest thing we ever did", Mr. Hope enthused. "A lot of parents say that and it's really true. I can't imagine our lives without him." So there you have it. Reject femaleness in favour of maleness and live as a male but conform to nature's demands by retaining the scaffolding required to produce an heir.

It's a world of ever-expanding wonders.