Two medical researchers have announced that their work in medically induced lactation has had an incredible impact: one of their patients, a transgender woman, was able to breastfeed her baby, serving as the child’s exclusive food source for six weeks and supplementing with formula afterward.
The case is especially significant because the patient was taking HRT at the time and had not undergone any type of gender confirmation surgery. A carefully-developed combination of medication and breast pump use made it so the woman was able to produce enough breast milk to sustain her baby.
While trans women have experimented for years with methods to induce lactation, usually using drugs like domperidone on a DIY basis, Reisman and Goldstein’s case report, published in Transgender Health, is the first time medical professionals have worked toward the same goal and published their results in a medical journal.
To Madeleine Bair, an undergraduate at UCLA and a trans woman, that’s not surprising.
“Medical issues that affect trans people are often understudied or ignored completely,” she tells Romper. “Mt. Sinai is doing a lot of interesting work, as is Dr. (William) Powers out of Michigan.“
“But I find that studies like this are the exception to the rule. So, most trans health care ends up being crowdsourced from other trans people,” she says. “We educate each other so we can empower each other to take back our own medical agency.”
This is huge news with amazing implications for queer and transgender families everywhere. Truly, science rules.
A transgender woman exclusively breastfed her baby, thanks to induced lactation
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