She was 37 and had a plan made 13 years earlier.
Before starting gender-affirming hormone therapy, this transgender woman, treated at the Amsterdam gender dysphoria center, decided to cryopreserve her semen. She did not know when, but she wanted to become a mother someday. In 2020, that future arrived: her partner, a cisgender woman, conceived through intracytoplasmic sperm injection using that semen, which had been stored for more than a decade.
What came next was a medical experiment on her own body. A team gave her a hormone regimen that mimicked pregnancy — estradiol, progesterone, and domperidone as a galactagogue — to trick her body and activate milk production. One month before the birth, they reduced the doses to simulate childbirth and increased the frequency of milk expression. The milk came in, although in a small quantity. It was enough only for supplementary feeding, and two weeks after the birth they had to stop the process because of the baby’s sucking problems. The doctors concluded that the real value was not in the quantity, but in the bond that this transformed body managed to create with her child.