Thomas Beatie, who has had partial sex change surgery, posed for this extraordinary photograph to announce that he is an expectant father.

Mr Beatie, who has a wife, Nancy, is legally classified a man after having surgery to remove his breasts and testosterone treatment.

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Thomas Beatie was born a woman but is now married to one. This image, published in an American magazine, allegedly shows his pregnant tummy and breast removal scars

He was apparently able to conceive because he did not have reconstructive surgery to the lower half of his body, choosing to keep the female reproductive organs he was born with.

He is said to be expecting a daughter.

News of the pregnancy caused a sensation in the U.S. yesterday after Mr Beatie detailed his struggle to become a pregnant husband in a magazine aimed at lesbian, gay and transgender readers.

"How does it feel to be a pregnant man? Incredible," he wrote in The Advocate.

"Despite the fact that my belly is growing with a new life inside me, I am stable and confident being the man that I am.

Arnold Schwarzanegger played a fertility scientist who fell pregnant in the 1994 film Junior

"To Nancy, I am her husband carrying our child," he added, explaining that his wife is unable to conceive because of a hysterectomy 20 years ago.

"I will be my daughter's father and Nancy will be her mother. We will be a family."

Mr Beatie, who said the baby was due on July 3, said doctors, friends and family have all opposed his plans to start a family.

He claimed to have artificially inseminated himself at home with sperm sent from a sperm bank.

He said his first attempt resulted in an ectopic pregnancy with triplets.

They had to be aborted, he said, and he lost his right fallopian tube.

"When my brother found out about my loss, he said, 'It's a good thing that happened. Who knows what kind of monsters they would have been'," Mr Beatie wrote.

While medical experts accept the pregnancy is possible, some neighbours and sceptics claimed the story could be a sham.

"Quite frankly, I think it's a hoax," said Ron Schlieper, who lives close to the Beaties in Bend, Oregon.

"I saw him a few days ago and he didn't look like that."

Another resident, Josh Love, added: "I couldn't say that he looks pregnant. I can stick my stomach out and almost make it look like that. I think it's kind of bizarre. I don't know if I believe it or not."

Cynics also pointed to the possibility the story could be a publicity stunt for the T-shirt printing company run by the Beaties, called Define Normal.

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Birth control poster from 1970 urging men to take a responsible attitude towards contraception

Before his sex change, Mr Beatie was known as Tracy LaGondino and lived in Hawaii, where she campaigned for the right of gay couples to adopt children.

Friends in Hawaii said she had a partner, Nancy Roberts, and decided on a sex change because the island's laws did not allow same-sex marriage.

Although neither Mr Beatie nor his wife, whose ages are not known, were available for comment yesterday, The Advocate magazine insisted the pregnancy had been confirmed by his doctor.

A stunning image of a pregnant man was used in Britain in the famous Saatchi & Saatchi contraception advertising campaign in the 1970s.

A portrait of a doleful man with a baby bump was captioned: "Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?"

And in the 1994 Hollywood movie Junior, Arnold Schwarzenegger, now Governor of California, played a man six months pregnant with a baby girl.

While there are not believed to be any previous recorded cases of such a pregnancy, experts said it was perfectly possible.

"A transgender man can be pregnant because he has the same organs as a woman," said Dr Lisa Masterson, an obstetrician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Beverly Hills.

She added: "It really is important that he doesn't take any testosterone early on in the pregnancy and later on. That can cause male-type characteristics in the female baby."

Usually, men who started out as women use testosterone to look more masculine.

But many choose not to have radical-reconstructive surgery because it can be expensive and offer imperfect results.

Margaret Someville, of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law in Montreal, Canada, said: "It's a very touchy thing, this deconstruction of our biological reality.

"Where I would do a reversal on this is to say, 'You've artificially made yourself a man. You're not a man, you're a woman and you're having a baby and you're actually having your own baby'."

Mr Beatie accepted he was heading into uncharted waters.

"Our situation sparks legal, political and social unknowns," he wrote.

But he added: "Wanting to have a biological child is neither a male nor female desire, but a human desire."

He claimed he had been with his wife for ten years but only decided to start trying for a baby after moving from Hawaii to Oregon two years ago.

Denise Lester, of Oury Clark solicitors, specialists in family law, said such a case was an "unprecedented legal and ethical issue in the UK".

She said Mr Beatie would be legally classed as both the mother and father of his child in Britain, regardless of whether he and his wife chose to adopt traditional gender roles.