Thomas Beatie

Thomas Trace Beatie (born 1974) is an American public speaker, author, and advocate of transgender rights and sexuality issues, with a focus on transgender fertility and reproductive rights.

Beatie came out as a trans man in early 1997. Beatie had gender-affirming surgery in March 2002 and became known as "the pregnant man" after he became pregnant through artificial insemination in 2007. Beatie chose to be pregnant, with donated sperm, because his wife Nancy was sterile.

The couple filed for divorce in 2012. The Beatie case is the first of its kind on record, where a documented legal male gave birth within a marriage to a woman, and for the first time, a court challenged a marriage where the husband gave birth.

Early life

Thomas Beatie was assigned female at birth and grew up in Honolulu as the first of two children. His mother, Susan Nickels Beatie, was born in Minnesota. His father, of Korean and Filipino descent, was born and raised in Hawaii. He is related to two former U.S. presidents: William Henry Harrison, his fifth great-grandfather, and Benjamin Harrison, his third great uncle.

As a teenager, Thomas was a model and Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant finalist. He competed in karate and Taekwondo, winning a junior championship in Taekwondo forms in the 1992 Aloha State Games. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1996 with a bachelor's degree in health science and later pursued an Executive MBA.

Gender transition and pregnancies

Beatie underwent sex reassignment surgery involving a double mastectomy, also known as "top surgery", and officially changed his sex marker from "female" to "male" on his state and federal identity documents in 2002. However, he retained his female reproductive organs, which later allowed him to become pregnant.