Talk:Thomas Beatie/Archive 1

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Special heading strongly needed
Nearly every article online talking about Thomas Beatie has comments people make complaining because they hate the statement that Beatie is a man. I'm extremely sure that similar comments might be made on this talk page. Anyone able to put a special banner at the top of this talk page?? Georgia guy (talk) 23:36, 30 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Sure. General discussion of editors' opinions of Beattie have no place here as this is not a forum. MOS is clear that self-identified gender takes precedence. Banner added. Best wishes Span (talk) 11:04, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Pregnancies
So the big story here that makes this case different is that he had children. Yet there is not a single word on how. We are told that his internal female system was not removed, nothing further. It says that he underwent gender reassignment surgery, ie, he has male genitalia - or at least a penis. That leaves a lot of questions about how the pregnancy was accomplished. Rui &#39;&#39;Gabriel&#39;&#39; Correia (talk) 21:43, 9 August 2014 (UTC)
 * Did you read the article? "The procedure he had, sometimes called "top surgery" or "chest reconstruction" involved a double mastectomy, areolar reshaping and grafting, and contouring of the chest to effectuate a male appearance." He had top surgery, not bottom. --90.202.191.244 (talk) 13:45, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

Use of male pronouns in “Early life” section
« Beatie was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, the first of two children. His mother was from San Francisco, and of English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh descent. His father, of Korean and Filipino descent, was born and raised in Hawaii. As a teenager, Beatie was a model and Miss Hawaii Teen USA pageant finalist. He appeared regularly on the nationally televised aerobics workout series and video, Basic Training with Ada Janklowicz, and later became a competitive bodybuilder. » Alright, doesn't it sound like utter bullshit to use masculine pronuns to talk about a model / athlete who was definitely female at the time, and unanimously perceived as such ? If some dude gets wings grafted on his back, does everybody else have to feel obliged to call him a bird from his very birth ? Are we so blinded by ideology that we must be in denial of reality, and formulate supposedly encyclopedic articles in such a nonsensical way ? Is it considered so shocking nowadays to simply say that this person was born a woman, and, biologically, still is a woman, with female chromosomes in every single cell of his/her/their body ? Even Aldous Huxley didn't anticipate that kind of absurdity perpetrated in the name of Science and Liberty...--Abolibibelot (talk) 22:31, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty sure that nobody is born a woman. People are born as babies. They become men and women when they grow up. Regardless, Beatie's notability is based on his life as an adult man, so masculine pronouns are used throughout for the sake of consistency. And as the man Beatie is the present-day subject of the article, his mother/his father etc. is technically correct in any case. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:22, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Saying that nobody is born a woman (or man) – and therefore that everybody is born, what, neutral ? – is an example of what Jean-Paul Sartre called bad faith. It's a kind of bullshit. The fact that society creates partly arbitrary norms related to masculinity or feminity (which was a major theme in Simone de Beauvoir's Le deuxième sexe, summed up by the famous aphorism “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient” – but even she did not pretend that a woman is not a woman in the sense that a table is not a chair) does not preclude the fact that there are two sexes, with clearly defined biologicalal, physiological and genetic characteristics, and as of yet nobody born female can actually become male or the other way around, whatever "transition" there is is purely cosmetic, so no, that person is not a man, will never be, or the very definition of "man" collapses under the layers of meaninglessness and it's therefore pointless for anyone to want to become one. Again, if a person decides to be a bird, with the current "you can be what you wanna be" ideology, what should prevent society from acknowledging his/her/"its" identity as such, how is that more absurd? And it's funny that you mention consistency, when a female model is retrospectively referred to as a man! (Just like some other "notable" freak is referred to as a woman who just happened to win decathlon contests in the men category... As George Carlin used to say: “When you're born in this world, you're given a ticket to the freak show. And when you're born in America, you're given a front row seat.”)--Abolibibelot (talk) 01:17, 25 January 2019 (UTC)
 * Your analysis is amusing but flawed, since "man" is not equivalent to "male", and pronouns are not biological categories. You have also ignored the fact that intersex people exist. I'm unaware of society recognizing anyone's claim to be a bird instead of a human as it does for transgender individuals. In any event, using people's preferred pronouns is endorsed by the AP, The New York Times, and GLAAD, among other organizations, so I'm guessing that's why we use them in the article. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:03, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
 * I also looked for some mention of this issue earlier at the Manual of Style, but didn't see it until someone brought it up in a recent similar discussion about the Wachowskis. Here it is per MOS:GENDERID (my bolding): • "Any person whose gender might be questioned should be referred to by the pronouns, possessive adjectives, and gendered nouns (for example "man/woman", "waiter/waitress", "chairman/chairwoman") that reflect that person's latest expressed gender self-identification. This applies in references to any phase of that person's life, unless the subject has indicated a preference otherwise." —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:16, 30 January 2019 (UTC)