Six months pregnant trans man Thomas Beatie said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he always wanted to have a child and considers it a miracle.

"It's not a male or female desire to have a child. It's a human desire," Beatie said. "I have a very stable male identity," he added, saying that pregnancy neither defines him nor makes him feel feminine.

Beatie, 34, who is legally a man but used to be a woman, managed to become pregnant because he keep his reproductive female organs when he went through reconstructive surgery.

"I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day," he told the talk show host. Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.

Nancy, to whom he has been married for five years and who has two grown daughters by a previous marriage, also appeared on the show, saying the couple's roles will not change once the baby is born.

"He's going to be the father and I'm going to be the mother," she said. Their marriage is legal and he is recognized under state law as a man.

The couple was filmed in their hometown of Bend, Ore., where he underwent an ultrasound showing the baby in his womb, Reuters reports.

"I can't believe it. I can't believe she's inside me," Beatie said while watching the ultrasound image. "We see her as our little miracle."

His obstetrician, Dr. Kimberly James, told Winfrey, "This is a normal pregnancy."

"This baby is totally healthy," she said. "This is what I consider a normal pregnancy."

The couple said they had been turned down by a number of other doctors before James agreed to take him as a patient.

Beatie has been pregnant once before but the pregnancy failed when he developed a tubal pregnancy, resulting in surgery that removed his Fallopian tubes.

The couple said they decided to go public with the pregnancy because they wanted to control the way the news got out. "We're just going to have the baby now," Nancy said. "If we have to, we'll go hide."

Beatie is working on a book about his childhood, his mother's suicide and his life growing in Hawaii where, as a girl, he was a teen beauty pageant contestant and earned a martial arts black belt.

Winfrey called the development "a new definition of what diversity means for everybody."

See a clip from the Oprah show below:

Last update: 04-03-2008 22:59