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Transgender US man is both mother and father

"The definition of family has changed a lot."

Mark Nichols, professor at Oregon Health and Science University

A transgender man in Oregon says he is pregnant with a daughter, but when the baby is born, he will play father while his wife plays mother.

In the online Advocate.com, Thomas Beatie writes that he was once a woman but kept his reproductive organs when he underwent sex-change hormonal therapy and had his breasts removed some years ago.

"How does it feel to be a pregnant man?" Beatie writes. "Incredible. Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am."

A photo posted online shows the naked upper torso of a lightly bearded man holding his hand on his rounded stomach.

When Beatie and wife Nancy married 10 years ago, he still had a uterus but his wife did not, due to a hysterectomy for endometriosis, an unusual tissue growth outside and around the uterus.

So when they decided they wanted children, they purchased sperm from a sperm bank and conducted the insemination at home after a number of physicians refused to help them, Beatie said.

"I always wanted to have children," Beatie wrote. "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire."

When they decided to get pregnant, Beatie stopped taking his testosterone therapy and within four months got his first menstrual cycle in eight years, he said.

One physician told the Oregonian the biology sounded "plausible."

"The definition of family has changed a lot," Mark Nichols, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Oregon Health & Science University, told the Oregonian.

Beatie said his wife Nancy was happy about the pregnancy.

"To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child," Beatie wrote. "I will be my daughters father and Nancy will be her mother."

But to the outside world, their situation has sparked "legal, political, and social unknowns," Beatie wrote.

He said doctors discriminated against them by refusing to help them with the pregnancy.

"Receptionists have laughed at us," he wrote. "Most of Nancy's family doesn't even know I'm transgender."
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