Induced lactation lets transwoman feed baby

Achieved sufficient volume of breast milk to be child’s sole source of nourishment

When a transgender woman told doctors at a hospital in New York that she wanted to breastfeed her pregnant partner’s baby, they put her on a regimen of drugs that included an anti-nausea medication licensed in Britain and Canada but banned in the United States.

Within a month, according to the journal Transgender Health, the woman, 30, was producing droplets of milk. Within three months — two weeks before the baby’s due date — she had increased her production to eight ounces of milk a day.

In the end, the study showed, “she was able to achieve sufficient breast milk volume to be the sole source of nourishment for her child for six weeks,” according to the journal.

Dr. Tamar Reisman and Zil Goldstein, a nurse practitioner, of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York, say the case illustrates that, in some circumstances, modest but functional lactation can be induced in transgender women who did not give birth or undergo surgery.

“We believe that this is the first formal report in the medical literature of induced lactation in a transgender woman,” said the study’s authors, Reisman and Goldstein, a transgender activist and program director at the centre. They were not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Some hailed the case study, published in January, as a “breakthrough” for transgender families; others called it “dangerous” and “disturbing.” But if confirmed in wider studies, the regimen could represent a next major stage in transgender parenthood. Transgender men like Thomas Beatie, Trystan Reese and Kaci Sullivan have made headlines by giving birth. But breastfeeding for transgender women had not been officially documented.

Breast milk is considered the best form of nutrition for infants. Breastfed babies have healthier immune systems, score higher on IQ tests and may be less prone to obesity than other babies. Advocacy campaigns have noted that the practice facilitates mother-child bonding, and saves families from spending money on infant formula.

The World Health Organization, in setting new international benchmarks for children’s growth, has said that breastfeeding is the biological norm.

But in the case published in Transgender Health, it is not known whether breast milk from this kind of induced lactation is equivalent to milk produced after giving birth by women who are not transgender.

Dr. Joshua D. Safer, medical director of transgender medicine and sur- gery at Boston Medical Center, called the study “a very big deal” and said he expected it to become very popular among transgender women.

“It’s out there on internet forums, but there’s a lot on the internet that’s true or untrue to varying degrees,” he said in an interview with the weekly magazine New Scientist. “It’s a very big deal to have this recorded in a reliable document.”

The transgender woman in the experiment — neither she, her partner nor their hometowns were identified — approached the doctors for hormonal medications in 2011 as part of transgender treatment. She had been receiving it for several years before she began breastfeeding, according to the study. She had not had gender-reassignment surgery nor breast augmentation.

She took on the responsibility of breastfeeding because her partner, who was five months pregnant when they approached the doctors, did not want to.