That Danny!
Here’s a story you would only dwell on briefly if it were on Jerry Springer: a woman who wanted to become a man had her breasts removed and took hormones to make her look more masculine, but still kept all the original plumbing. Then she gets pregnant – not all that surprising, as she’s still biologically a woman.
And then someone has a slow news day, and “Pregnant Man” is born. Yes, it is a human interest story, but repeating the words “pregnant” and “man” in close proximity makes it into much, much, more: a miracle, a mystery, a freak show event.
And the interviews continue – ABC alone shows him four times in less than three months, Oprah puts her hands on his growing belly. A miracle! A pregnant man! A story we will now have to follow to its conclusion and the birth (for which I wish them well, by the way).
Better still, to increase the excitement of the media circus – Pregnant Man announces he wants more kids after this one. “A sequel!” someone cries out in the news room. There will be Pregnant Man 2, and 3 and whole franchise to boot. The Filipino community points out that Pregnant Man, Thomas, was born Tracy Lagundino, to a Filipino father and a Caucasian mother. Someone is writing a book, someone else is writing the script. A man-made kitchen-sink story if ever there was one.
And a couple of trivia notes for your background files:
1. The Druze, a small secretive Islamic sect, believe that the messiah will be born to a man. This new arrival can come at any moment, so all Druze men walk around with baggy sack trousers, to catch the messiah when he pops out, and so that he doesn’t hit himself by falling on the ground.
2. Last year Neonode, a Swedish mobile phone company, also used the Pregnant Man headline to create a buzz – around their new product the N2 Phone. This was apparently because their chief product designer was expecting to “deliver” the new phone – after a long pregnancy. They had set up The Pregnant Man Blog, which I am sure now gets a lot of weird and wonderful traffic.
UPDATE on 4 July: Well “Pregnant Man” has now given birth. The full story is here.
This is a story waiting for a sequel, if ever there was one…
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