Welcome to Breakpoint, daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stum Street.

Forty years ago, Monty Python's life of Brian mocked a male character that wanted to become a woman and have babies.

You haven't got a womb stand, John Cleese's character reminds him.

Where's the fetus going to gestate? You're going to keep it in a box?

Well, for the most part, men who identify as women and vice versa accept that

no amount of cross-dressing hormones or surgery really can allow them to play the opposite sex's role when it comes to reproduction.

As Cleese rightly observed, men can't have babies because they haven't got wombs.

But what if they did? What if medical science did enable womb transplants,

giving men the ability to carry and bear children within their bodies?

Would that then make them women?

And her book, The Genesis of Gender, Abigail Favoli, tells the story of the first real-life attempt at a womb transplant,

which took place in Germany back in 1931.

Danish artist, Einer Wagner, who went by the name Lily, was obsessed with becoming a so-called complete woman.

And for him, that meant the ability to carry and bear children.

Wagner turned a magnus Hirschfield, a German physician who invented the term transexual.

In four grizzly surgeries, Hirschfield removed Wagner's genitalia and transplanted a cadaver uterus into his body.

Predictably, Wagner's body rejected the organ and he died shortly thereafter.

That tragic ending to Wagner's story didn't stop Hollywood from celebrating him as a so-called

transgender pioneer in the 2015 movie The Danish Girl.

Back in the 1930s, the technology to do successful womb transplants simply didn't exist.

But what about today?

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