Transgender German Man Becomes First In Europe To Have A Baby

A transgender man is the first in Europe to give birth to a baby after becoming pregnant through a sperm donor.
The unidentified man, who was born a woman, delivered the baby boy at home with a midwife in the poor Neukoellin district of Berlin.
He insisted on a home birth because he refused to be listed as the mother on any hospital documents – a legal requirement of in Germany.

The father, who maintained the reproductive organs of a woman, has been taking hormone replacement therapies for years to switch sexes.
Details about the sperm donor or any relationship information has been withheld from the public as the father wanted to protect his son from any attention.

Officially the child, who was born on March 18, does not have a mother, only a father.
A spokesman for the Berlin Senate Administration for Internal Affairs said: ‘The person in question did not want to appear as a mother but as a father on the birth certificate and that request has been honoured.’

The expectant father also demanded that the gender of the child was ‘not to be revealed under any circumstances’. But the authorities overruled this and announced it was a boy.
Germany’s media reacted with astonishment at the news of the transgender birth.
‘Baby belly instead of a beer belly!’ was just one of the many headlines in German newspapers reporting on the birth.

Meanwhile Falko Liecke, the conservative councillor in the district where the baby was born, said: ‘This is something I have never heard or seen of.’
In 2011 Germany’s Supreme Court ruled that an individual no longer had to have his or her’s reproductive organs removed ‘to gain civil legal recognition in the perceived gender’.
That is why the father of this latest child became a man while retaining all the female reproductive organs.

Dr Tobias Pottek of the Asklepios West Hospital in Hamburg said: ‘Even if a woman wants to live as a man and takes hormones to grow a beard, as long as the uterus and ovaries are present, it is also possible to become pregnant.
It is the first case of a child born in Europe of a transgender parent, but in the U.S. the case of Thomas Beatie, a transgernder man who has had three children, is well known.
Mr Beatie was seeking a divorce from his wife, but was refused because the judge could not prove if the he was a man when he married.
The judge decided there was no jurisdiction to grant a divorce if the marriage was not recognized.