A transgender woman has become the first in the world to breastfeed her baby without giving birth or having gender reassignment surgery.
The unidentified 30-year-old “hoped to take on the role of being the primary food source for her infant,” after her pregnant partner said she didn’t want to breastfeed, according to the case study published in the journal, Transgender Health.
The couple worked with Dr. Tamar Reisman and Zil Goldstein, a nurse practitioner, at the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in NYC.
Reisman and Goldstein developed a regimen which included 10 milligrams of domperidone three times a day. Domperidone has been illegal in the US since 2004 when the US Food and Drug Administration issued a health warning on the drug. The dosages were reportedly obtained from Canada.
In addition to the domperidone, the patient took micronized progesterone and estradiol, while also using a breast pump for five minutes on each breast three times a day.
The treatment, which allowed the patient to develop breasts that appeared fully grown, lasted for three and a half months. After the child was born, the patient could produce 227 grams of milk a day and sufficiently breastfed for six weeks.
The baby’s pediatrician said it was healthy and developing normally, according to the case study.
“This is a very big deal,” Joshua Safer, of Boston Medical Center who was not involved with the treatment, told New Scientist. “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.”
Reisman and Goldstein acknowledged that more research is needed in order to develop a program that doesn’t require the import of domperidone.

source: nypost.com