YESTERDAY was April Fool's Day and the scheduled date of a news conference to reveal all by American Thomas Beatie, the woman who became a man who supposedly became pregnant.

Over the years Beatie has had various surgery and hormone therapy, but retained his ovaries and uterus.

Gender reassignment surgery has been around for decades, but what's drawn international interest (and headlines like "He's Having Their Baby") is his claim, published in the gay rights magazine The Advocate, that he is five months pregnant. Beatie and wife Nancy are expecting their first child on July 3, although they have given few other details.

The inescapable biological fact is that men can not become pregnant. If Beatie has retained his babymaking equipment, then he is, in fact, still biologically a woman, not a man.

This is not the first time that a man has claimed pregnancy. Several years ago, a man named Lee Mingwei was touted on the Web site MalePregnancy.com as the first man to actually become pregnant. Visitors to the site can peruse Lee's pregnancy journal, see video archives of the progress of his pregnancy, and even watch a short documentary film on male pregnancy. The site addresses skeptics by stating that suspicions of a hoax are wrong: "Yes, Mr. Lee is really pregnant."

Curiously, the website has been up since 1999 -- and Lee is apparently still pregnant! Either the poor man has been in labor for nearly a decade (talk about a rough delivery!), or the story is a fake. Of course, Mr. Lee doesn't exist; the Web site is a hoax created as performance art by an artist named Virgil Wong.

Is Beatie's pregnancy also a hoax? It seems likely, although many news media --including Good Morning America and ABC News -- have taken the story seriously, interviewing doctors, surgeons, and psychologists about the dangers of a transgendered birth, both to Beatie and the unborn child.

The story may be a publicity stunt by The Advocate, or a hoax in the style of veteran media prankster Alan Abel.

(SD-Agencies)