It’s the kind of interview that doesn’t come around every day.

Thomas Beatie, who is perhaps better known as “the pregnant man,” appeared on Larry King Live on Monday with his wife, Nancy, to promote his book, “Labor of Love: The Story of One Man’s Extraordinary Pregnancy.” Beatie gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Susan, in July and is now expecting again.

Of course, this raises all kinds of questions. But the most obvious for me is one that King didn’t ask: How is it possible for Beatie – who was born female but now appears male due to chest reconstruction and hormone therapy – to maintain a male identity in his own mind while pregnant? Really, there isn’t anything more exclusively female than the ability to bear children, and I have trouble understanding how he can embrace being pregnant even while rejecting other feminine characteristics he was born with.

For me, this would create a major identity crisis, which is why I’m curious to know how it hasn’t created one for him. It’s certainly created confusion for other people, including those who handled his daughter’s birth certificate. “I filled it out as me father,” Beatie told King, “Nancy mother, and they changed it last minute, and they put her as father and me as mother. And then they changed it again and put us as parents. That's fine and dandy, but we don't have a domestic partnership. We're not a same-sex marriage. We're legal man and wife.”

Sounds simple enough – until that definition comes to include a man who does what men just can’t do.