Transgender Man Gives Birth to Baby Boy
Trystan Reese, the 34-year-old transgender man living in Portland, Oregon, has just given birth to his first biological child — a healthy baby boy weighing nine pounds and six ounces. By revealing their experience, the couple hopes to send the message that their unique family is the new normal.
This may be the first time for Reese to give birth, but caring for a child is nothing new to him and partner Biff Chaplow. The couple already has two children — Riley, 9 and Hailey, 7 — whom they adopted from Chaplow's sister after she could no longer care for them in 2011.
Reese was considered female at birth and lived as a woman until his late teens. He began taking hormones at age 20 and identified himself as a man. He met Chaplow in 2009 until they both decided to have a biological child, which entails Reese getting pregnant, which is possible considering he didn't undergo gender reassignment.
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"It's actually not that different than if a woman is on hormonal birth control and their cycle stops. So I stopped taking my hormones and eventually my cycle came back," explained Reese, who shared updates of his pregnancy online. "About five months later, we got the positive pregnancy test," Reese went on to say.
Reese concedes he is not the first transgender man to give birth. The earliest known recent case was in 1999 when Matt Rice, a female-to-male transsexual, gave birth to a baby boy through artificial insemination. But even he can't claim to be the first as only a few transgender men make their pregnancies known to the public.
During the 15th century, there lived a man named Daniel Burghammer who became a blacksmith, husband and Italian soldier. What no one knew, including Burghammer himself, was that he was a hermaphrodite who had both male and female reproductive organs. So, it came as a shock to the world when he gave birth to a baby girl in 1601.
