Labor of Love

November 3, 2008
Best known as the world's first pregnant man, transgendered father and husband Beatie recounts, in touching detail, his difficult path to the 2007-08 pregnancy that briefly captured the world's attention. Born a girl in Hawaii to a violent, unpredictable father and a caring mother (who committed suicide while Beatie was a teen), Beatie learned to understand the nature of his identity against a backdrop dominated by fear and instability. Beatie is a detailed and engaging writer, relating his upbringing, his romance (with wife Nancy) and the process of transitioning from female to male with humility, honesty and plenty of opinion, and little to court sensation or controversy. For better and worse, the memoir reads predictably until Beatie and Nancy, 200 pages in, begin their struggles to get pregnant with daughter Susan. Once Beatie finds his focus in the obstacles he and his wife faced and overcame, his account becomes a compelling, unique narrative. Beatie's straightforward, apolitical style and compelling, elemental story-one man's struggle, against all odds, to create a family-will make it easy for most readers to identify.

November 15, 2008
Hawaii-born Thomas Beatie and his wife, Nancy, are just like any other married couple, except that he is the first legally defined male to become pregnant and give birth. Born female, tomboy Tracytook testosterone to build muscle mass and chose surgical breast removal in his twenties but not the surgical construction of a penis, nor removal of the female reproductive organs needed to bear a biological child, the authors hearts desire. Hawaii requires only two conditions for legal gender change: a medical doctors letter attesting to a legitimate psychological reason for the gender switch and irrevocable gender-altering surgery.Thus, the onetime lesbian womancould marry Nancy as her husband and carry their child since Nancy had had a hysterectomy. After an abusive childhoodwith a rageaholic father (who still refuses to acknowledge his granddaughter) and an ill-fated relationship with an alcoholic, Beatie sought, above all, a close, caring family and finds in his new life the heart that I call home.An unforced, unpretentious, and very readable account, sure to draw attention.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)