This is what we call breakthroughs! We came across reports that suggested that a 30-year-old transgender woman has been able to breastfeed and this will be the first case of induced lactation to ever be recorded! Doctors said the case shows “modest but functional lactation can be induced in transgender women”. This was published in the journal, Transgender Health.
Tamar Reisman of Mount Sinai hospital in New York, one of the doctors who reported the case, said, "Transgender medicine if becoming part of mainstream medicine We’re getting more evidence-based data, we’re getting more standardized care, we’re getting more reproductive options.” The transgender woman went to doctors when her partner was five months pregnant. She said her partner did not want to breastfeed the couple’s child, so she hoped to take on the responsibility. Reisman and Zil Goldstein wrote that the woman was being treated for insomnia and anxiety, but otherwise appeared to be a “pleasant, well-nourished, well-developed woman."
The patient had taken hormone therapy for six years but had not had gender reassignment or breast augmentation before she approached doctors. Reisman and Goldstein used a framework known to induce lactation in cisgender women who had not experienced a pregnancy to promote the patient’s lactation. The patient took a gradually increasing regimen of the female hormones progesterone and estradiol, stimulated her chest with a breast milk pump, and took domperidone, a nausea medication known to increase milk production.
“There have been self-reported cases online of transgender woman trying DIY regiments to induce breastfeeding, but this is the first case of induced functional lactation in the academic literature,” Reisman said. There are also cases of transgender men carrying pregnancies and breastfeeding, she added. “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,” Safer said.
