“When a man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines,” the Associated Press reports.

“In reality, he was pregnant – a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.”


He was pregnant?

Writing in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan explains that “He [the patient] was rightly classified as a man . . . but that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”

Which is nonsense, of course. The patient was incorrectly classified as a male. Because, evidently, men don’t get pregnant. And, evidently, in this case, the result of this misclassification was avoidable harm to both the patient and her unborn child.


In medicine, there’s no saying where the abandonment of objective sex classifications might end. Let’s imagine, for instance, that this patient — a pregnant female identifying as a male — donated blood which is later given to a male. Research suggests that males who have blood transfusions from females who have been pregnant could be a higher risk of premature death.

Or let’s imagine a different case. Let’s say a male who identifies as female takes a pregnancy test, and it shows up as positive: That male isn’t pregnant, but he may very well have testicular cancer. What treatment would he receive from doctors if they were treating him as a female?


This is to say nothing of how wasteful all this is. Britain’s National Health Service, which costs around £130 billion (approximately $166 billion) per year to run, routinely invites males who are registered as females for cervical screenings — despite the fact that they don’t have cervixes.

That’s “progress,” apparently.