It's My Right to Have Kid, Pregnant Man Tells Oprah

April 3, 2008 — -- Thomas Beatie, a former woman who is now a pregnant man, defended his decision today to have a baby, saying he has a "right to have a biological child."

Despite removing his breasts, growing a wispy beard and legally having his gender changed from female to male, Beatie, 34, kept his female sex organs intact because he hoped to have a child some day.

After years of struggling with his sexual identity and deciding to live as a man, he did the most womanly thing possible -- he became pregnant.

In an exclusive interview with Oprah Winfrey, Beatie said his lifelong desire to have children motivated him to use his still working female reproductive organs when he learned that Nancy, his wife of five years, was unable to conceive.

"I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process and it doesn't define who I am," Beatie told Winfrey.

"I feel it's not a male or female desire to have a child. It's a human need. I'm a person and I have the right to have a biological child."

Beatie was impregnated with sperm from a donor. His wife, Nancy, inseminated him at home with a device she said was like a syringe without the needle. They bought it from a veterinarian and it is typically used to feed birds.

He has an intact vagina, but he he did not say how he would deliver the baby.

Beatie, who was born Tracy, said he first felt he was trapped in the wrong body when he was in his 20s. He quickly went from a Miss Teen Hawaii USA finalist to taking testosterone and growing a beard.

"Sexuality is completely different than your gender," he said, responding to a question about why he did not remain a lesbian woman. "I felt more comfortable being the male gender."

"It was difficult for society to respect the way I felt inside if I didn't look like a man outside. I started wearing men's clothes and people started regarding me as a man."

Despite having two adult children from her first marriage, Nancy said she could no longer have children because she had her uterus removed.

"It wasn't difficult because I can't have children," Nancy said. "I had endometriosis and they had to remove my womb, therefore I don't have a womb."

Beatie and Nancy tried to conceive once before with him carrying the child, but the pregnancy was unsustainable because the fertilized egg had implanted outside of the uterus.