So it's study time, and I must confess to going quite nocturnal. One of the last nights I was up in the wee hours reading and thinking, there was an earthquake. Tonight, a tiny news headline almost slipped unnoticed, but having clicked it open it is clear that an earthquake of the figurative sort is about to be unleashed.

Thomas Beatie is pregnant. Those of you that follow Oprah may have already heard this story and may have seen the interview with Thomans and his wife Nancy. The long story made short, Nancy had to have a hysterectomy because of endometriosis, so they opted to become pregnant via Thomas. Thomas has a uterus because he was born biologically female; however, he has leapt through the many long and arduous hoops one has to pass to reassign sex, so Thomas is not only self-identified as a man, but also legally a man.

Unlike many people that are sure to come across this story, I don't find this situation hard to understand. In fact, for so many reasons, this situation was inevitably going to happen--for those that are curious, look up transsexualism in Wikipedia and follow the links, and you will eventually find yourself reading about Lili Elbe, the first person widely known to have undergone gender reassignment surgery (in 1930). In fact, Lili died from complications subsequent to an attempt to transplant a uterus so she could become a mother.

It's hard for many people to take this as an intuitive natural fact, but the world is not neatly gendered into male and female. Even those who identify as heterosexual and female or male, and were born checking off all the boxes in terms of expected physiology for that identity, experience crises of femininity or masculinity. Anthropology and gender studies have tons of jargon to help us talk about the processes that make recognizable women and men, like heteronormativity. This is the edge of the rabbit hole, and if you peek in you can see a whole world of difference that gets narrowed down, sorted out, valorized or pathologized against a rather odd and restricted view that we can understand all of this through the lens of a binary--male and female.

What I find really interesting about Thomas's situation is that he has a very stable male gender identity, and yet certain ideas upon which masculinity is often predicated are absent for him and a number of other things are present. I could write a number of essays with the thoughts I'm having now, but one thing that keeps coming back is an interesting idea to do with touch and the difference between masculine and feminine understandings of the world.

This idea is borrowed from an idea in one of Iris Marion Young's essays. In it, she talks about the huge changes pregnancy brought upon her mental understanding of how she physically fit into the world. Men may experience many types of sudden physical change, but few will make them aware of the blurred lines of individuality, of a rapidly changing shape that within a few months displaces them from their entire wardrobes and puts a big belly on a previously slim body. They don't find themselves legally entangled in the question of how their treatment of their own bodies may be construed as a crime directly against a small human inside of them. Consequently, the argument goes, men can more easily view the world as having subjects and objects, observers and observed. Women, on the other hand, know much more intimately about interactions that touch, where subject and subject effect each other and impact upon each other's development.

I find Thomas's stable male gender identity very reassuring, because he has found a core of masculinity that encompasses so many things that masculinity is typically seen as opposing. There's so much more that I could talk about here, but it's very late and I need to get some shuteye before I become totally incoherent...

But the last thing to mention is the birds. Many birds that find their mates by song are finding it hard to communicate over the din of city noise. This is causing some to diminish, others to be louder, and yet another group to sing at night, when it's quieter. The outcome of this, it has been suggested, may be the development of distinctly different urban and rural varieties of the same birds, since they will become more and more different as their mating rituals diverge into different schedules. In my neighborhood, the birds sing at night. They aren't confused, or wrong, they're just finding a new way to live and procreate in a world of endless change. Somehow, I find this slightly inverted take on the birds an amusing co-parable with the extraordinary pregnancy I've just been learning about.