I am not generally gullible but on Tuesday 1 April I saw penguins fly on the BBC breakfast news. I usually consider myself to be quite a morning person; it doesn’t take all day for me to come round, rather I usually feel pretty chirpy by the time I am dressed. But on Tuesday it took me until I arrived at work to realise that the whole thing was an April fool; perhaps I am losing the plot? Sadly what I just saw on BBC breakfast was not an April fool. A man appeared on Oprah in the US to tell the world that he is 6 months pregnant! It turns out this ‘gentleman’ is a transexual who has be gender reassigned from female to male but who kept her internal reproductive organs. At 6 months pregnant, the person sitting on the sofa facing Oprah with what looked like the kind of facial hair my 17 year old son can manage and what also appeared to be something of a beer belly, though of course it is not beer that got him or her in this position.I am struggling right now to know quite what I think of all this. I understand and sympathise that some people grow up realising they have been born into the wrong gender, I support the idea that people will put themselves though hormone therapy and painful surgery to put right what they consider a wrong. But there is something very odd in my mind if you put yourself through all of that, keep the organs you apparently never thought should have been yours and then go on to use them. Thomas Beatie and his wife apparently carried the insemination out themselves using sperm they had bought. This raises a number of questions: Where do you go to buy sperm? If it was possible to inseminate Thomas in this way then surely Thomas has not had the full surgery and is not really a man? What gender will Thomas feel that he is when he has given birth to this baby? What on earth are they going to tell the baby?

Given a choice I think I’d rather the story of penguins flying were true and that this one was an April fool!