A woman who underwent sex change surgery to look like a man is pregnant for the third time.
Thomas Beatie was called Tracey Lagondino, but she chose to undergo a sex change.
However, during the sex change she opted to keep her reproductive organs and a US website has recently announced that she is now expecting her third child.
Thomas Beatie explained her decision during an interview with Oprah Winfrey in 2008 when she said: “I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn’t define who I am.”
Her ‘wife’ Nancy is unable to conceive due to a hysterectomy.
Thomas and Nancy Beatie currently have two children who Thomas has carried and delivered.
Both of the existing children were conceived using artificial insemination and sperm from donors.
Due to chest reconstruction surgery Thomas Beatie is unable to breastfeed the children, and her wife breastfed the children instead.
Before starting a family Thomas Beatie had been undergoing hormone treatments.
However, she stopped taking these hormones so that her menstrual cycle would resume and she would be able to conceive.
Last month it was confirmed that a 16-year-old boy is set to become the nation’s youngest sex change patient after the NHS approved his surgery.
Currently the youngest Britain to have undergone sex change surgery is Oliver Wheadon, now known as Angel Paris-Jordan, who had his sex change operation shortly before turning 18.
And last year a German teenager became the world’s youngest sex change patient after having an operation at the age of 16.
But critics of sex change operations say that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric problem, not a physical one, and radical physical surgery does more harm than good.
In 2002 doctors from the NHS Portman Clinic – an internationally acclaimed centre – stated, “what many patients find is that they are left with a mutilated body, but the internal conflicts remain”.
Many transsexuals regret their decision to live in the opposite sex. A Home Office report on transsexualism, released in April 2000, said: “Many people revert to their biological sex after living for some time in the opposite sex”.