United States of America

As the media world buzzed about the "pregnant man," trans activists stayed relatively mum. Now we're asking: Has Thomas Beatie's public exposure hurt the transgender movement?

When Oregon trans man Thomas Beatie first told the world that he was pregnant in The Advocate in March, readers learned that he transitioned about 10 years ago, underwent a double mastectomy, and began testosterone injections. He and his wife, Nancy, decided to have a child, but because of a hysterectomy years ago, Nancy couldn't carry the baby. So Beatie stopped his hormone injections, underwent artificial insemination, and, after several doctors refused to treat him, finally found an obstetrician who would. His pregnancy, he wrote, was "free of complications." Health complications, maybe, but it would not be without other difficulties.

Transgender man Thomas Beatie set off a firestorm in the LGBT population and the world when he announced that he is having a baby and continues to identify as a man. His article in The Advocate, "Labor of Love," left many, even some transgender people, wondering how someone can identify as male and yet be pregnant. Some have even gone so far to suggest that by bearing the child he is less, or even not, male, despite Beatie's declaration that he continues to identify as male.

Thomas Beatie gives The Advocate a first-person account of how it feels to be pregnant and carrying a child for his wife and himself.

To our neighbors, my wife, Nancy, and I don't appear in the least unusual. To those in the quiet Oregon community where we live, we are viewed just as we are -- a happy couple deeply in love. Our desire to work hard, buy our first home, and start a family was nothing out of the ordinary. That is, until we decided that I would carry our child.

In Western society we are bombarded with messages about sexuality from the popular media, and yet it can be embarrassing to talk about our personal sexuality, especially any sexual concerns we may have. Sexual problems can have a ripple effect on many other areas of our lives including intimate relationships with a partner, the family, and work, and our general well being. At the same time all of our life interactions and activities can affect our sexuality The media tends to present sex as easy, good, and spontaneous, and it implies that we should always be in the mood for it. If only sex were that simple.

Last November, Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's former campaign strategist, derisively said that Barack Obama's supporters "look like Facebook."

Chris Hughes takes that as a compliment. Hughes, 24, was one of four founders of Facebook. In early 2007, he left the company to work in Chicago on Obama's new-media campaign. Leaving behind his company at such a critical time would appear to require some cognitive dissonance: political campaigns, after all, are built on handshakes and persuasion, not computer servers, and Hughes has watched, sometimes ruefully, as Facebook has marketed new products that he helped develop.

"It was overwhelming for the first two months," he recalled. "It took a while to get my bearings."

But in fact, working on the Obama campaign may have moved Hughes closer to the center of the social networking phenomenon, not farther away.

The Obama campaign's new-media strategy, inspired by popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook, has revolutionized the use of the Web as a political tool, helping the candidate raise more than two million donations of less than $200 each and swiftly mobilize hundreds of thousands of supporters.

According to a new study published this week in Breast Cancer Research, daily aspirin use appears to slightly reduce the risk of estrogen receptor-positive (ER+) breast cancer, the most common type of breast cancer. However, the current evidence isn't strong enough to suggest women take aspirin as a preventative measure, and experts caution against regular use of the painkiller for this purpose, warning it can cause serious gastrointestinal bleeding.