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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Transgender woman is first to be able to breastfeed her baby [newscientist.com]

A 30-year-old transgender woman [newscientist.com] has become the first officially recorded to breastfeed her baby [newscientist.com]. 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 [bmc.org] 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 [nih.gov] 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 [mountsinai.org] and Zil Goldstein [mountsinai.org] 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 [soylentnews.org]

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