On the day that we meet, Thomas Beatie is looking forward to Father’s Day. His youngest, Jackson, has asked that the family play pickleball. For Beatie and his wife, it will be a distraction from organizing the backyard for their oldest child Susan’s upcoming Pokémon-themed 18th birthday party.
Welcome to Beatie’s very suburban life. Mild-mannered and likable, he runs a T-shirt printing company and lives with his esthetician wife, Amber, and their four children – Susan, 17, Jenson, 16, Austin, 14 and Jackson, eight – in a pretty, split-level house in an unremarkable subdivision in Phoenix, Arizona.
They are, Beatie says, ‘just a typical American family.’
Well, not quite. Because Beatie, 53, is a very particular patriarch. However, as it turns out, surprisingly, conventional as his views about the roles of a husband and father may be, his path to paternity has been anything but.
Eighteen years ago, Beatie made headlines across the globe when he became the ‘First Pregnant Man,’ – a tabloid sensation, a moral outrage, a circle that could not be squared. When, in 2008, the now infamous pictures of him emerged, with his buzz-cut hair and bearded face, looking down on an enormous pregnant belly, the internet lost its collective mind.
He was dismissed as a circus freak – worse, an abomination. Some were outraged that he was a pregnant man. Others equally affronted that he wasn’t – not really – to them he was both freak and fraud, half male, half female… half human, if that.
And so, while he carried his firstborn, strangers wished for his – and his child’s – death and speculated on what sort of ‘monster’ he would spawn.
Now, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Beatie has, for the first time, reflected on that media storm. He has revealed the legal wrangles he went through to be recognized as the man he insists he always was, and the father he was always destined to become. And he has shared his own unexpected take on today’s world in which the woke pendulum has swung so firmly in favor of affirmative therapy for children presenting as transgender.
In an exclusive interview with the Daily Mail, Thomas Beatie has, for the first time, reflected on the media storm that erupted 18 years ago when he became the ‘First Pregnant Man’
In 2008, the now infamous pictures of him emerged and the internet lost its collective mind
Today, he is a father of four children, including Susan, now 17, with whom he was pregnant when he made headlines across the globe
Today, he runs a T-shirt printing company and lives with his esthetician wife, Amber in a pretty, split-level house in an unremarkable subdivision in Phoenix, Arizona
‘I’m glad I’m not a teenager today because, if I were, I have a feeling I would have taken hormones at a young age and maybe had surgery much sooner and I would not have had the children that I have today,’ he said.
‘With so much “support” however well-meaning, I would have thought, “Yes this is what other people are doing, and this is what I’m going to do too,” without being mature enough to understand for myself what I really want. When you’re younger you think you’ve got it all figured out, but you have to remember your brain isn’t really developed until you’re 25.
‘I didn’t know for sure I wanted to have children until I was in my thirties. Everything changes, your outlooks, your desires, your goals, your ambitions… and if you’ve had puberty blockers and surgery in your teens you’ve just completely wiped away that option.’
Today Beatie doesn’t try to negate the years during which he was Trace La Gondido, a pretty girl from Hawaii, sister to two brothers, whose father told her she could ‘have any man she wanted.’
He doesn’t shrink from being ‘dead named.’ He is, he said, ‘glad’ he went through every part of his life, though admitted that part of his certainty that he wanted to start a family of his own stemmed from the rejection he experienced from his blood relatives post-transition.
Beatie’s mother died from suicide when he was just 12 years old and the family disintegrated. He said: ‘I was obviously at a very vulnerable time in my life. I completely climbed within myself. I shut myself off from everyone. My father was a very traditional sort of person, a bit misogynistic.
‘He had expectations for what men and women should do and how they should look and being that I had lost my mother, he was the only parental figure I had and I wanted him to be proud of me.’
As Trace, he did what his father wanted him to do – he entered beauty pageants, he modeled; he wore make-up, he dated boys. He was, by any standards, a feminine and beautiful girl.
‘I don’t regret it,’ he said. ‘But I realized, “I don’t want to do any of this.”‘
He didn’t talk about his feelings with his father – back then, he said, his father assumed, perhaps hoped, he had grown out of being a tomboy, with a distinctly ‘masculine energy.’ He simply acted.
‘I didn’t vocalize my feelings. I think I “told” him by cutting my hair and having surgery. I don’t think he even realized until I showed him. He knew I was physically changing – I was taking testosterone; my body was different. But he didn’t know that I had legally changed my gender and had surgery until I just whipped my shirt off in front of him one day and he said, “You look like me.”‘
Today Beatie doesn’t try to negate the years during which he was Trace La Gondido, a pretty girl from Hawaii
He doesn’t shrink from being ‘dead named.’ He is, he said, ‘glad’ he went through every part of his life
Beatie’s mother died from suicide when he was just 12 years old and the family disintegrated
As Trace, he did what his father wanted him to do – he entered beauty pageants, he modeled; he wore make-up, he dated boys
It was 2002. Beatie was 23 years old and though he had not had lower surgery and had kept his female reproductive organs, he had found a doctor to sign documents stating that he had had the necessary surgery to be considered legally male.
Trace was gone. In her place was Thomas – a person his father would never recognize: ‘Occasionally we’d go out to dinner, and he’d refer to me as female pronouns. He’d say, “She’ll have…” whatever, and you would see the server looking around confused wondering who he was talking about.’
Beatie was already in a relationship with his first wife, Nancy. Being legally male meant the two could marry and they did so in 2003 and moved to the small, conservative town of Bend, Oregon. There was never any discussion over who would carry their children should they have any – Nancy had undergone a hysterectomy in her twenties.
‘I could get pregnant,’ Beatie said. ‘I think I quite naively thought that was something that we could just do in secret and one day I’d just emerge with a baby.’
It was, unsurprisingly, not that straightforward. In fact, Beatie recalled, it took years and a string of fertility doctors unprepared to work with ‘someone like him’ before they found a Californian sperm bank prepared to consent to releasing a sperm sample to them.
‘Doctors were just not willing to sign off on it. They wanted me to talk to boards of psychologists and answer why I wanted to have a baby. You know so many people get accidentally pregnant and are not the best parents, but Susan was deeply planned and we wanted to give her a wonderful life.’
Beatie stopped taking his testosterone in preparation for pregnancy. His voice went up an octave and his skin softened. When the cryogenically frozen sperm arrived at their home via FedEx, he and Nancy followed the instructions on how to thaw it and she inseminated him using a needleless syringe.
Beatie knew right away that he was pregnant. But the pregnancy was ectopic resulting in a medical emergency. He was rushed to the emergency room where, he recalled, doctors were ‘floored’ by what they were seeing. He learned he had been pregnant with triplets.
‘It became very clear that this was not something we were going to be able to keep to ourselves,’ he said.
So, when Beatie became pregnant a second time, and as his belly grew, he wrote an article for The Advocate, an LGBTQ magazine: ‘I was naively convinced that someone else had done this and someone else was navigating the issues I was.’
Nancy took the picture of him, topless and pregnant, standing against the shower curtain in their bathroom at home. It was published. And the world ignited.
‘People online, people in the media, were just very cruel. I remember one TV commentator asking what I was going to do when I “popped out the three-eyed Ewok” I was carrying.’
Beatie’s younger brother had expressed relief when the first pregnancy ended saying, it was a ‘good thing’ it had happened because, ‘Who knows what kind of monster it would have been.’
‘I was so beside myself,’ Beatie recalled. ‘Family and life and love and having a baby is meant to be one of the most joyful moments in a person’s life. Humanity is meant to lift that up. And here were all these strangers, and I would say 99.999 percent of people were either rooting for my death, Susan’s death or our family falling apart…I just didn’t understand it.’
Looking back, Beatie thinks, much of the vitriol was fear driven: ‘I was no threat to anyone’s family, but people behaved as if I was. I was the unknown. They just couldn’t make sense of me.’
Nor could the legal system. When Susan was born – all healthy 9lbs 5oz of her – Beatie was originally registered on her birth certificate as her mother. He said: ‘And because they couldn’t have two mothers on the certificate, they actually issued one in which I was the mother and Nancy was the father, which just made no sense at all.’
Ultimately Beatie legally adopted all three of the children that he bore so that he would be legally recognized as their father and Nancy as their mother.
When Susan was born in 2008 – all healthy 9lbs 5oz of her – Beatie was originally registered on her birth certificate as her mother
Ultimately Beatie legally adopted all three of the children that he bore so that he would be legally recognized as their father and Nancy as their mother
‘People online, people in the media, were just very cruel,’ Beatie said after his article for The Advocate, an LGBTQ magazine, published
Of course, they were concerned that the children would face difficulties thanks to their very peculiar and public birth story. Bend, the town on which the world’s media had descended, felt too small and so, when Austin, then the youngest, was just six months old, they moved to Arizona to start fresh.
‘It actually went swimmingly with the children,’ Beatie reflected. ‘Especially for Susan who saw me pregnant with her siblings. It was very much just her normal. There were only really one or two occasions when, for example, she said in school that her daddy had her, and another kid said, “That’s impossible. My daddy says men can’t have babies.” But their school was very good about preventing any bullying.’
But however well the children fared, the marriage did not. In 2012 Beatie and Nancy divorced – and found another legal hurdle erected in their path. A judge in Arizona refused to grant the divorce on the grounds that the marriage was not legal in the first place.
Beatie had borne their children and therefore was, the judge stated, female. Same sex marriage was not recognized in the state of Arizona until 2014.
Beatie fought the decision and ultimately won: ‘It would have been simpler in some ways to just say, “Fine” and walk away from the marriage. Who wants to get a divorce? But doing that would negate who I am; it would bastardize my children, it would invalidate my life.
‘I never felt like a mother – I was a vessel bringing this life into the world. That didn’t make me female. My role in society is, and was, as a husband and a father.’
It took three and a half years, but Beatie and Nancy got their divorce. It was, he admitted, a particularly bitter one with the ongoing custody battle that lasted a decade and was only finalized with Beatie and his now wife, Amber, gaining full custody of all three children when Susan was 15.
For Susan, it is her father who has always been the constant in her life. Today, she said, she has no real relationship with her mother, which is a source of both sadness and some relief.
Beatie met his second wife, Amber, when she worked at the preschool his children attended. He underwent lower surgery not, he said, because his wife saw him as anything less than a man but because he wanted to be able to pee standing up. ‘Ultimately it was about being functional,’ he smiled.
And when they decided that they wanted to grow their family, it was Amber who carried the child, conceived using the same sperm donor as Beatie’s three other children.
The family celebrated the gender reveal by posing for a photograph. In it, a heavily pregnant Amber, then 48, stands alongside Beatie, Susan, Jenson and Austin, all with their T-shirts pulled up to expose the ‘pregnant’ bellies they cradled in an echo of the picture that ricocheted around the world all those years ago. It hangs on their living room wall today.
Beatie met his second wife, Amber, when she worked at the preschool his children attended
Beatie said: ‘I never felt like a mother – I was a vessel bringing this life into the world. That didn’t make me female. My role in society is, and was, as a husband and a father’
Susan Beatie, who is about to turn 18, is looking forward to starting a course in psychology at university in August
Two decades ago, Beatie reflected, ‘I had to separate myself from the hatred. The concept of transgender was so foreign to people and it’s really easy to dehumanize something that’s foreign.
‘Eighteen years ago, the focus was on “the pregnant man.” Eighteen years on it’s not about that, it’s about having a fulfilling life, being who you are, having these beautiful children because they’re not symbols, they’re human beings. I’m not a symbol. I’m not representative of all transgender people.
‘I just think the most important thing I can do is simply live and exist. Even though being visible is sometimes uncomfortable, I think that visibility – especially when you’re functional and successful and happy – speaks more than any words.’
There are still parts of his story that Beatie is trying to process today. He wishes his father had met his grandchildren – he died in 2015 without ever doing so. And he doubts he will ever understand the cruelty of others.
‘Does this look like a monster to you?’ he asks, gesturing to Susan, who sits beside him, all 5ft9 of her – her long, highlight-flecked hair tumbling down her back, her smile broad and shy.
She is looking forward to starting a course in psychology at university in August. ‘I want to understand how people think,’ she said. ‘And what makes them the way they are.’
