Jennifer Finney Boylan, who was born male, married a woman and fathered two young boys. The marriage survived Boylan's transition from male to female.
(ABC News)
"We've been seen as freaks over the years," said Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby College. "Now we've made all this progress in which we're starting to be seen as peoples' neighbors and as familiar people."
Boylan, who was born male, married a woman and fathered two young boys. The marriage survived Boylan's transition from male to female.
"You can say she's crazy," Boylan said of her wife. "But she decided in the long run that her life is better with me in it than without [me in] it."
Boylan, the author of the memoirs, "I'm Looking Through You" and, "She's Not There," about her transgender experience, added, "There are so many different ways of being a family."
Often, transgender people are becoming parents and creating families with the help of reproductive technology.
One married couple told ABC News of their complicated path to making a baby. The husband is a transgender man. Before he transitioned from a woman into a man, "she" had "her" eggs harvested and fertilized with donor sperm.
Later, the embryo was implanted into his wife, who is now pregnant with their baby. They declined to go on camera because they were afraid of the public's reaction.
Tiffany and Bridgette Woods, a married lesbian couple in California, also relied on in-vitro fertilization to become parents. In their case, Tiffany was born biologically male and Bridgette is biologically female.
When Tiffany transitioned into a woman, however, she chose not to have vaginal surgery so that the couple could conceive children "the old-fashioned way." But they were thwarted by infertility issues that were unrelated to Tiffany's transition.
Through donor sperm and several attempts at IVF, Bridgette eventually became pregnant. The couple has had three children using this method.
"After all of this, being a trans parent seems so much an afterthought to us," Tiffany told ABC News.
"Altogether, our family cost us somewhere over $40,000, and more tears, stress, and heartache than one can imagine. So now we are trying to just be a family, one that does not take each other for granted and truly knows all about the miracle of birth."
"Thomas Beatie is only one face of transgender families," said Brill. "There are so many ways for transgender people to make families."
Added Boylan, "For the most part, if you look at our family, what do you see? You see a group of people that love each other."
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