NewDelhi: In a first, a 30-year-old transgender woman has been able to breastfeed her baby.
According to the Daily Mail, the woman was able to breastfeed without undergoing gender reassignment surgeries like breast augmentation or a vaginoplasty. She hasn’t even given birth to the child.
These procedures can alter an individual’s hormone levels and have an impact on the ability to breastfeed.
When her pregnant partner decided against breastfeeding their baby, she sought help from the doctors at Mt Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, who gave her a dose of hormone replacement therapy obtained from Canada for a little over three months before the child’s birth.
In time, she began to produce enough milk and after her baby’s birth, she was able to breastfeed for six weeks and continued doing so for six months while incorporating other foods.
Doctor Tamar Reisman, MD, who treated the woman said this is a huge breakthrough in medicine for transgender people. “We are happy that the patient shared her experience with us, and we are happy to help our patients build happy, healthy, transgender families,” Dr Reisman told the Daily Mail.
Her case, published in the journal Transgender Health, shows evidence that DIY hormone therapy can enable transgender women to have such experiences like pregnancy and childbirth.
“We believe that this is the first formal report in the medical literature of induced lactation in a transgender woman,” researchers of her case are quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.
Bureau Report
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