Controversial couple welcomes baby boy

Jun 10, 2009 13:45 GMT  ·  By

Thomas Beatie, the woman who is now legally a man in the state of Oregon and is married to Nancy, has just given birth to his second child, ABC News confirms. Beatie, who made headlines throughout the world last year with his decision to use his female reproductive organs that he still retained to carry a pregnancy to term, has given birth to a baby boy that wife Nancy will nurse, the same media outlet says.

“Thomas Beatie, the controversial ‘pregnant man,’ gave birth to his second child, a healthy baby boy, early this morning, ‘20/20’ has learned. Sources close to the couple say that it was a ‘natural childbirth’ and that they have not yet decided on the boy’s name. Beatie’s wife, Nancy, will be breastfeeding their son, as she did with their daughter, Susan Juliette, who was born last June.” ABC says, citing extremely reliable sources close to the controversial couple.

As it’s already common knowledge, Beatie decided to retain his female organs when he and wife Nancy learned that she could not have children. When Beatie got pregnant, the couple decided to make the news public until it leaked in the media, this way preventing an almost certain backlash. Either way, the announcement made the newspapers worldwide and caused a much unexpected reaction from the public. While many questioned what this was doing to the traditional notion of gender and family, most embraced Beatie’s decision and lauded his courage, and he thus became the most mediated transgender to ever give birth.

“Hiding a pregnant man is like hiding an 800-pound gorilla. Nancy and I wanted to tell our story from our own mouths before it got out. I was shocked that it looped around the world in 24 hours. I mean, it was on Chinese Web sites and, you know, Web sites in Romania and Russia and Brazil.” Beatie was telling Barbara Walters a while back, when he first invited TV cameras into his house. Also then, he announced that he was pregnant with a second child, but insisted that, at the end of the day and no matter what people said about their life, he, wife Nancy and their daughter were just a regular family, with nothing out of the ordinary.

Thomas Beatie, 35, wife Nancy, 46, and daughter Sarah still live in Bend, Oregon, where they run a small company called Define Normal. They have been targeted in the media and continue to receive anonymous threatening phone calls and texts to this day, yet they refuse to move, saying that they’re just a normal family, and no normal family would switch residences just like that.