A surgeon in India is going to try to transplant a womb into a trans woman who was born a man, with the view of making them pregnant.
The risky procedure will involve taking the reproductive organs from a dead donor or a patient who has transitioned the other way and had theirs removed.
There has only been one reported case of a womb being inserted into a trans woman in the past, but she died from complications only months later.
Impregnating a trans woman would be an even greater feat and would require the use of IVF and a C-section because they don’t have a fully functioning vagina.
Dr Narendra Kaushik, who runs a gender reassignment clinic in New Delhi, has said he’s extremely optimistic he can make a success of the procedure, and he was quoted as saying in a newspaper outlet that every transgender woman wants to be as female as possible, and that included being a mother.
He said the way towards this would be with a uterine transplant, the same as a kidney or any other transplant, and that this was the future, but that they couldn’t predict precisely when it would happen but that it would happen very soon.
The surgeon hasn’t disclosed the recipient or given a timetable for the surgery, but he added that they have their plans and that they’re extremely optimistic about it.
Dr Kshuik’s clinic, Olmec, is at the hub of a thriving industry in New Delhi that’s seeing the city rival Bangkok as the sex-change capital of the world.
He said around a fifth of his clients are from abroad, with many flying from the United Kingdom, where gender reassignment surgery is free on the NHS but subject to waiting times.
Dr Kaushik told a newspaper outlet that many of their patients tell them that their sexual partners don’t even notice that they weren’t born with female sex organs and that it’s their aim is to make it so that they live as normal a life as possible as a woman because they aim for an aesthetic ideal.
However, while gender reassignment surgery is well established, the science behind womb transplants involving trans people was still vague.
There has been more than 100 successful woman to woman uterus transplants since 2014, and scientists are now able to impregnate female recipients.
Although there are some people who say that it shouldn’t be allowed and that it’s wrong on every level, and that it will not end well.
It’s an extraordinarily complex hormonal journey that a female body has to go through to make a healthy child – can it be done artificially and are humans smart enough to do it?
Anyone thinking of going through this procedure, it’s their body, their choice, but does this go against nature and will it come back to bite us on the butt? And surely there is much more important work that surgeons could or should be doing?
There are so many problems in the world and suddenly this has been made a priority!
And if you have any sort of transplant the patient will need immunosuppressant drugs to prevent rejection, what effects will these drugs have on the baby? And would it cause birth defects and other issues?
And just because they can accomplish this kind of surgery, doesn’t mean they should, and there are many biological women that are unable to conceive that are being offered this procedure, but sometimes we have to accept that we can’t have everything we want, and becoming a parent naturally is one of those things. There are plenty of children in the foster system, adopt instead.
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