“It doesn’t make me want to go and shave my legs or something. I’m a man, I just happen to be a pregnant man.”

Mr Beatie went on: “I think that different is normal and love makes a family. And that’s all that matters.”

He told Oprah that he had a sex change but “opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day”.

“I didn’t know how, it was just a dream,” he said.

“There was no plan laid out.”

Mr Beatie, who described himself as a tomboy growing up, is a former Miss Teen Hawaii finalist and told Oprah he “found himself” at college after a boyfriend told him he was not feminine enough.

“I feel like I was meant to be exactly who I am today,” he said.

Mr Beatie said many US organisations which the couple contacted for help said going public was not a good idea and told them: “The world’s not ready for something like this.”

But he said: “I think that people will be shocked because no-one’s ever heard of a man giving birth before.

“I guess it’s a shocking concept, but in this day and age that’s possible. And it’s happening now.”

Asked why they had chosen to go public, his wife said: “We thought it was best we tell the story, rather than having other people tell the story for us.”

Dr Kimberley James, the couple’s doctor in Bend, Oregon, told the show: “This is a normal pregnancy. This baby’s totally healthy and this is, I consider, an average pregnancy.”

Asked about her own reputation, Dr James said: “I hope I’m perceived as someone who’s providing quality care for a pregnant patient.”

The couple are supported by Mrs Beatie’s two grown-up daughters, Amber and Jen, from a previous marriage, but Mr Beatie told the show that his father and brothers had found it hard to come to terms with.

Last month, it was revealed that Mr Beatie, who was pictured topless with a swollen belly in The Advocate, had previously posed for a gay magazine as a woman.

Mr Beatie posed as a muscular woman before his sex change with his bikini-clad girlfriend, Nancy, in 2000. A second picture showed the couple in a wedding-style photograph taken in Honolulu in 2002.

Mr Beatie was born female and called Tracy Lagondino before undergoing gender reassignment surgery. He is now legally male and married to a woman.

He was able to get pregnant because he kept his female organs when he switched genders and decided to carry a baby for his wife because she had a hysterectomy several years ago.

The couple have been together for 10 years and married for five.

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