Thomas Beattie was born a woman, had sex reassignment surgery, and legally changed his/her identity in Hawaii to male.
He/she is now married to a woman, had all along kept his/her ovaries and stuff, and never opted for a surgically created penis thingy.
This, to my mind, makes him/her a woman who may shave in the morning and have short hair and a deep voice, as may many women with a hormonal imbalance.
But if you called him/her a gay woman you'd hurt his feelings. I'm a bit lost here.
Why should I care? Because if it's happening today in California, it'll be happening here next week. We pick up on all extreme trends, and then defend them heatedly as if we invented them in the first place.
It's the kids I worry about. It would be all very well if their mother/father had kept his/her unusual situation private, but he/she has boasted about it publicly, and that stands a good chance of rebounding against the kids, which hardly seems fair.
He/she can give birth to live goldfish for all I care, but I dislike ego trippers bent on being famous, especially at other people's expense.
That brings me to the second major ego-tripper of the week, another Californian.
Trent Arsenault is a proud 36-year-old virgin who has so far fathered 15 children via an age-old but usually uncelebrated manual art.
He's a software engineer and is European, which probably makes him ideal for the purpose if you're racially prejudiced, but he does look goofy.
That makes you wonder if the women who have hatched his offspring paused, in their eagerness to be fertilised, to wonder about the genes that create personality.
Arsenault made a vow to devote his life to science, to be celibate, and never to marry 20 years ago.
He later added that he would not drink alcohol, and is keen on an organic diet which, he assures prospective womb-people of whichever gender, assures organic sperm production.
Arsenault has a cat. That's nice. He never made a vow about cats.
The American Food and Drug Administration is checking him out, and will decide whether the service he provides breaches health and safety regulations - a problem a bit like our sausage sizzles, I suppose.
He makes 15 donations a month, free of charge, and spends the rest of the time either greeting his many visitors, or consulting for a major computer company.
There are many ways to become famous but few aspirants provide such detailed background information.
Arsenault's website notes, for example, that Silicone Valley has one of the highest rates of autism in the world, but not via his sperm, which he guards jealously. Pick-up time for his donation is between 8-10pm, including holidays, when it's prepared for "immediate insertion." Get in line.
To think we once relied on Asti Spumante and the back seat of a Ford Cortina. But that was when reproduction was - it seems so silly now - sexy.
