Doctors report first case of transgender woman breastfeeding

In the first ever documented case of its kind, a 30-year-old transgender woman has been able to breastfeed her child. This new case makes doctors optimistic that “modest but functional lactation can be induced in transgender women.”

The patient approached doctors while her partner was five months pregnant, wishing to take on the responsibility of breastfeeding when her partner said she could not. She had undergone hormone therapy for six years but had yet to undergo gender reassignment or breast augmentation.

Doctors used a similar method of inducing lactation that they would on a cisgender woman who had not been pregnant. The patient also took a gradually increasing regimen of hormones, progesterone, estradiol, domperidone, and stimulated her chest with a breast milk pump.

One of the doctors on the case, Tamar Reisman, has said the results show a huge leap forward for transgender medical care: “Transgender medicine is becoming part of mainstream medicine. We’re getting more evidence-based data, we’re getting more standardized care, we’re getting more reproductive options.”

Reisman has also said that it may be possible in the future to induce lactation without domperidone, a controversial and dangerous drug. She said a regimen of optimised hormones combined with chest stimulation will naturally increase the milk-producing hormone prolactin.

“There have been self-reported cases online of a transgender woman trying DIY regiments to induce breastfeeding, but this is the first case of induced functional lactation in the academic literature,” she said.

Dr Joshua Safer, an endocrinologist at Boston Medical Center, noted that the procedure will gradually become more commonplace: “Many transgender women are looking to have as many of the experiences of non-transgender women as they can, so I can see this will be extremely popular.”

Tim Gibson - myGwork

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