The pregnant man and the transgenic mouse

IMPORTANT NOTE: This article is from 2005 and is about an art installation. You probably want to know about the case of Thomas Beatie, a trans man who has decided to get pregnant; that is not covered here. I suggest you see this article from the newspaper El Mundo, if that is what you are interested in.

The following article was published in *2005:*

You can read about the world’s first pregnant man on the site of RYT Hospital, where they are so advanced in biotechnology that, in their search for a cure for Alzheimer’s, they accidentally created a transgenic mouse with human intelligence: clyven.

The sophistication of this medical center has allowed them to develop cutting-edge nanotechnology, with medical nanorobots.

Actually, the site is not real. It is an installation by the artist Virgil Wong.

The impact this page causes is interesting all the same. The degree of credibility people are willing to give the internet amazes me, like the fact that today this site was mentioned on the news and the journalists discussed it with amazement and a touch of scandal.

The worst part is that at EMOL they bought it (EMOL is the online edition of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio). They have since reworded the story, but thanks to Cazuela de Pingüino, we were able to rescue the text as they originally had it:

NEW YORK.- Just when it seemed nothing could surprise the world anymore, news broke in New York that would be hard to believe if you couldn’t see it. It is the first “pregnant” man, who, to dispel any doubts about his unusual fatherhood, has his own web page, where he includes videos and images of this period of his life.

The lucky man is the Japanese Lee Mingwei, who carries in his belly a fetus that is developing normally. He says he is living “the most beautiful experience of his life”.

“I understand that it may be shocking or seen by people as something terribly monstrous”, Lee said in an interview, but he argues that this is a “sexual revolution”, one that makes it possible not to assign fixed roles.

The details of the pregnancy can be followed at www.malepregnancy.com, which includes, besides arguments in defense of his choice, videos of Mingwei strolling with his bulging belly through the streets of Manhattan and audio of the baby’s heartbeat.

developing story

I am afraid the excess of information is not matched by adequate reflection, or by taking the time to think about whether what I am looking at is real or not. That, together with the inexperience of many of our journalists, can end up creating distorted pictures of reality.

If you are not on google, you don’t exist, seems to be the motto these days. But careful: not everything on the net is true, and not all of it is useful, even if it is still fun.