A big fan of women, a straight male friend of mine likes to jokingly call himself a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. While the gag has largely been met with chuckles in the past, I fear that the story of Thomas Beatie may render it a bit too close to reality.

Born in Hawaii, thirty-four-year-old Thomas Beatie lives with his wife Nancy in the town of Bend in mountainous central Oregon. After several years of marriage, Thomas and Nancy are excited to be expecting their first child, a little girl.

But if you’re assuming that Nancy is the pregnant one, you’re wrong. It’s Thomas.

Put the words “pregnant man” together, and you will be pretty quick to create a small media frenzy. Thomas is no exception. A shirtless picture of him looking contemplative—complete with facial hair and protruding belly—is making quite the buzz on the web. Even Oprah jumped on board by having him on her show Thursday.

If Thomas’ situation were a medical phenomenon that doctor’s couldn’t explain, it might warrant some attention. But this is no medical mystery, simply because Thomas is not really a man. “He” is a biological woman—a lesbian once named Tracy—who decided several years ago to undergo breast removal surgery and take male hormones to grow facial hair. Legally Thomas is a man, but with reproductive organs that are still fully female.

Finish unraveling the gender-bending layers, and what sort of news story are you left with? “Woman becomes pregnant.”

Big deal.

But the media are eating this up because it’s a freak show. This pregnant woman looks and behaves like a man, and a story like that is just too good to pass up. As our research intern puts it, Thomas is not so much a freak of nature, but a freak of culture—a freak of culture that happens to mesh perfectly with the media’s prevailing liberal ideology.

These media narratives seem to all play the same tunes: It’s okay to be born a woman who wants to be a man. It’s okay to be a man who wants to bear a child. It’s okay to be born a woman who becomes a man who wants to bear a child. Seriously, the combinations are endless.

Radical leftists use culture-freak stories like these to further their vision of a gender-neutral society. The male-female “dichotomy” is being deconstructed as we speak. Say goodbye to the neat simplicity of the two sexes, and say hello to the gender spectrum. Continued...