Transgender Man from Germany Gives Birth to Baby Boy

An unidentified transgender man from Berlin is the first European to deliver a baby after becoming pregnant through sperm donor.

The father, born a woman, is registered as a man in government records. He opted for a home birth at Neukoellin district of Berlin as the German hospitals require mother's name in their records.

The Daily Mail reported that the father maintained his reproductive and was on hormone replacement treatment to change his gender. "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 honored," a spokesman for the Berlin Senate Administration said.

The baby, born on March 18, officially does not have any mother but only a father. The man also did not want to reveal the gender of his baby but the authorities refused the demand and announced that the child was a baby boy.

"This is something I have never heard or seen of," Falko Liecke, the conservative councillor of Neukoellin district, said.

For transgender people it is possible to carry a child because women can retain their reproductive organs even when they undergo hormone therapy to change their gender.  "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," Dr Tobias Pottek of the Asklepios West Hospital in Hamburg said, according to the Mail.

The case is similar to that of Thomas Beatie, a transgender American man, who had three children. In his appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008 he shared his thoughts about his sense of reproductive right to bear a child independent of his male gender identity. "I have a very stable male gender identity. I see pregnancy as a process, and it doesn't define who I am. It's not a male or female desire to want to have a child-it's a human desire... I'm a person, and I have the right to have my own biological child," he said.