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from the (breast)-milk-does-a-body-good dept.
Transgender woman is first to be able to breastfeed her baby
A 30-year-old transgender woman has become the first officially recorded to breastfeed her baby. An experimental three-and-a-half-month treatment regimen, which included hormones, a nausea drug and breast stimulation, enabled the woman to produce 227 grams of milk a day.
"This is a very big deal," says Joshua Safer of Boston Medical Center, who was not involved with the treatment. "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."
The transgender woman had been receiving feminising hormonal treatments for several years before she started the lactation treatment. These included spironolactone, which is thought to block the effects of testosterone, and progesterone and a type of oestrogen. This regimen enabled her to develop breasts that looked fully grown, according to a medical scale that assesses breast development based on appearance. She had not had any breast augmentation surgery.
When her partner was five-and-a-half-months pregnant, the woman sought medical treatment from Tamar Reisman and Zil Goldstein at Mount Sinai's Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City. Her partner had no interest in breastfeeding, she explained, so she would like to take on that role instead.
The milk produced was supplemented by formula because a baby typically needs 500 grams of milk per day at 5 days old.
Related: President of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine Says Transgender Women Could Give Birth
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Saturday February 17 2018, @08:37PM (1 child)
OK.
""This is a very big deal,""
Nope. That's less than half a pint a day, not enough to keep an infant alive, barely enough to help out as a milkmaid. If the milk was clean, that is, don't want to feed the baby milk from someone on drugs of course... oops.
"These included spironolactone, which is thought to block the effects of testosterone, and progesterone and a type of oestrogen. This regimen enabled her to develop breasts that looked fully grown, according to a medical scale that assesses breast development based on appearance. She had not had any breast augmentation surgery."
The unspoken assumption here is that protruding breasts are needed for lactation, which is just sheer ignorance. The engineering connection runs the other way around - it's lactation that causes breasts to swell not vice versa. Human breasts, unusually, do swell at puberty but this has no direct connection to lactation, and is not necessary for it. Virtually all other animals that produce milk only swell a bit while lactating and typically shrink back afterwards as well. Bosomy women do not produce more milk, and it's actually perfectly normal for men to produce small amounts of milk under the old manual stimulation regime as well.
So, no, it's not a big deal, it's not particularly new, and it still might be an interesting article if it were better written, but it's not.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday February 18 2018, @12:50AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves