Thomas Beatie, once known as the ‘pregnant man,’ talks about life in Arizona

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — Thomas Beatie, now an Arizona resident, was once someone whose name topped headlines just about everywhere you looked. He currently lives a relatively quiet life working as a stockbroker. “I do public speaking. I do acting as well, which is I’m an actor about I speak about diversity, and just my whole life story, which, you know, the whole transgender thing and having babies and, and all that good stuff,” Beatie said.

In 2008, Beatie’s life was in the spotlight because he was living as a transgender man, then married and pregnant with his first child. “I was pregnant, and I went into the hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. And so I shocked the doctors, I shocked my neighbors. Word was kind of getting back in my small community, Bend, Oregon. I had to regroup with my wife and think OK, this, this is a situation,” Beatie said.

Three years after the frenzy around his pregnancy, Beatie and his first wife, Nancy, divorced in a long, drawn-out court battle centering if his marriage was even considered legal. He is now happily remarried with four children. “I am surprised that when my story did come out in 2008, how the world took it like it was such a foreign concept. There was so much resistance to the idea, and there was so much misunderstanding and even hostility toward the idea. When I put myself back in that time, I [felt] like I was living in a fishbowl. I was willingly speaking about my life in a public way. I didn’t seek to do that. But once it did happen, I felt an obligation to do that just for the sake of it. Just for the right of it, because I felt like what I was doing was important, it was right, it was good. It was good for my family,” he explained.

“I had a lot of patience at the time because I couldn’t materialize all of that in the moment. I was hoping for the future that one day it would be OK. That one day I’d have my children running around and we’d be a big happy family, which we are, but at the time, I didn’t have any support. I just, I had faith in human beings that we would get there,” Beatie said.

Aside from Beatie’s finance career, he also dabbles in the world of acting. He also started a company called “Define Normal” clothing brand and an upcoming TV series. He says his show’s goal is to start conversations, encouraging people to define and accept their definitions of normal in their lives.

Copyright 2022 KTVK/KPHO. All rights reserved.