[When I had my son I never felt like more of a mammal.]

after getting over my laughter on this, i was surprised to see such a purely biological feeling on the subject. it's not particularly relevant to the discussion, but it's still hilarious.

[Beatie has made it pretty clear that he perceives himself as a man. The main reason underlying the argument that Beatie can't be a man is because men do NOT and cannot get pregnant.]

without being mindlessly pedantic, it's the gametes that are really the concern. the main exception that many armchair biologists (like myself) would point out is that male seahorses are the ones who carry their offspring. males are the ones who have smaller gametes comparatively, for that species. for more discussion, i wholeheartedly recommend richard dawkins's "the selfish gene."

gametes are precisely why mr. beatie is not a man in the way we usually talk about. i'm happy to call him whatever he likes, because that's not my concern. the situation that we have come to is a matter of simple wordplay.

many people who have spent time with young children know they like to call things by different names than what are conventionally used. i once knew a child who, on the occasion of seeing a horse for the first time, pointed at it and said "big doggy!"

before anyone says i'm comparing him to a child, it's a simple matter of definitions and referents. in the same way that a child can call a horse a "big doggy", a person with ova can be called a man.

but calling the horse a "big doggy" does not in fact make it a brown version of clifford. regardless of what tools we use to describe the world, it does not change the world.

so what saletan and the biologically minded are saying is that you can call a person whatever you like, it doesn't change the person's gametes, dna, or plumbing.

this is while the post-modernists are saying that we choose arbitrary names for things. the definitions of being a man are different from being male because they refer to different properties.

what everyone should be willing to agree on is that this is a non-story. a person with a pair of testicles did not give birth. everyone can go home.