Implant ovaries, Fallopian tube and uterus for transgender woman

[A]

Well, I know it's not as simple as we put it, but the thing is, I believe all of these obstacles to be possible to overcome. Rejection is not an issue. And if we make ovaries that have the right genetic material, these, if "plugged" correctly, along with the uterus, that "should" behave like it was there at birth, all of these should react favorably to pregnancy. I do realize ovaries/testicles are certainly the hardest organs to make, but I'm sure they will eventually be able to do it.

[Cruelladeville]

It still staggers me that few get that the next 20 years are going to be nothing like the previous 20....

We could be going back to the future literally..... watch, listen and learn....

http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/crash-course-one-year-anniversary

Hit Part 6: Our Current Predicaments (8:43) for the summary...kids....

So the future of medicine might in fact be more herb garden, than robotic medic stem cell regeneration gleaming stainless steel fantastic...

To hedge yer bets start making plans accordingly !

PS: We are already (way-over) population over shoot..... want a baby?

Adopt one!

[Sadie]

Until you could create a genetically compatible tissue, basically engineered/cloned from your own DNA you would have to fight the problem of rejection.

Anyone who receives any type of organ transplant spends the rest of their life taking immunosuppression drugs to keep from rejecting the transplanted material, now try to add the difficulty of growing a baby in an immunosuppressed system and then trying to regulate all of the hormonal fluctuations that are necessary to take place during a pregnancy, well I don't see this really being viable any time soon, for MTFs.

[tori319]

It still staggers me that few get that the next 20 years are going to be nothing like the previous 20....

We could be going back to the future literally..... watch, listen and learn....

http://www.chrismartenson.com/page/crash-course-one-year-anniversary

Hit Part 6: Our Current Predicaments (8:43) for the summary...kids....

So the future of medicine might in fact be more herb garden, than robotic medic stem cell regeneration gleaming stainless steel fantastic...

To hedge yer bets start making plans accordingly !

PS: We are already (way-over) population over shoot..... want a baby?

Adopt one!

Adoption is a long and expensive process.

[sarahla]

I am by no means a doctor, but in this case DNA differences have nothing to do with the body fighting off the baby.   A woman who gets pregnant would also fight off the fetus, and sometimes if the separation is not perfect I have heard of such problems.  The uterus and placenta are more than just a baby storage facility for the lack of a better phrase.  They also separate out the new life from the mother.  Fluids get exchanged through the placenta and evidence of a foreign body is hidden in this way.

If a transsexual woman would get a full transplant, which the body would accept and not reject, then the transsexual woman would be able to carry a baby to term.

I was researching public bones / pelvises and the differences between males and females.  Here is an article, which matches the illustrations that I saw on wikipedia.

http://etransgender.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=407

Basically, men and women are the same by and large with women wider and men's a bit thicker.  Pre-puberty (< 13 or so), the bones are separated but fuse during puberty.

Pregnancy:  I was reading another website (referred to by wikipedia as the source of its information (#32 on the footnotes) and even women have some problems.  The pubic bone / pelvis in women is meant to support the baby, hence being a bit wider (and fused).  The opening of the pelvis has to be large enough for the baby to pass through during child birth.  The site said that some small women with short pelvises have problems with large babies, but usually there is no problem.

From what I read, I do not see where a transsexual women who received all the plumbing would have problem carrying a baby to term.

The topic is all theoretical.

Oh, the article said that pre-puberty the skeletal structure in males and females are identical and only differentiate during puberty (wider hips, etc.)

[A]

This is surprising. I have always found young boys had proportionally wider shoulders than young girls, even before the age of 10. I think there IS a difference.

[pixiegirl]

This has got me thinking lots.. I'll have to start a couple of threads of my own for the thoughts though

But first... to answer the original question: No, nowhere near it for Transpeople. They are working on uterine transplants for GG's though, and ovarian ones are pretty common at this stage (I think one type of it is considered an outpatient procedure and the least invasive type of transplant surgery). Give it 20-30 years maybe... for more on this point I'm going to start a new thread though.

I hope I'm not overstepping myself here but I really want to say a few things about some of the other stuff in the replies so far:

@Sadie: I don't see how the immunosupressant regimen for a donor set of girl plumbing ( ) would be a problem even today if the procedure was possible. Pregnancy of an organ recipient has a few extra risks and is recommended less the more severe the surgery, but it happens all the time. The first successful post transplant pregnancy was in 1963 afaik. Just involves a lot of extra medical montoring during and after the pregnancy to watch for problems. After nearly 50 years of practice I think they have this bit down.

@elsa: I'm sorry, but can you clarify what you've been saying please, not much of it is making sense to me. Yes, pregnancy is quite complex when you get to the details, but:
dna structure has nothing to do with pregnancy, once past the point that male dna causes you not to develop ovaries and a uterus, naturally produce female hormones and have wide hips ie: what hrt and this transplant would get around.
The rest of the physiological points you've made about torso size, or the spine simply aren't relevant.
As far as biochemical and hormone environments in the body goes, if ovaries were transplanted too and functioning they'd regulate a correct body response to pregnancy... if not, well, a lot of treatments for infertility involve artificially doing that for the body in the same way as HRT - the ability to do this is with a little tweaking is possible today, has been for decades now.

I guess what I'm saying is that every reason you've stated about why this is going to be impossible seems counterable to me. Now I'm not saying it's do-able yet, or that there wouldn't need to be a lot of changes and development to hormone regimes, or even that something so far unseen won't make it impossible/too dangerous/etc... but I've yet to see anything that would definitively rule it out as you seem to think.

Uhh, this turned into a long post. Hi everyone, by the way.

[sarahla]

Pixidust:  You stated my original point that it is definitely possible, just needs a bit of time.  I think that a vaginal birth is also possible, although I am not sure the penial inversion would be suitable for a vaginal birth.  Doctors would have to transplant / grow a vagina as well.  That would have the additional benefit of the vaginal mucosa and the g-spot, if all the plumbing would be transplanted.  Doctors would have to measure to make sure that the child could fit through the pelvis, but otherwise, why not?

my own comment:  IMHO, one does not need a baby to feel like a woman, although a vagina does help.  Having a baby should never be about feeling like a woman.  Having a baby is about brining a life into this world, loving it, and being a mother, in this case to a genetic child that you bear and raise.  Personally, unless I get old, I would love that experience, although I would not be crazy for the stretch marks and stretching of the vagina, although Kagel exercises are supposed to help there.

I would like my own set of ovaries, real vaginal mucosa glands, and a real vagina.  I would love a female larynx too, as long as we are doing a wish list.

There is one more point on a off topic.  Medical science cannot even transplant or grow hair from stem cells to help people with male pattern baldness.  I keep hearing about growing hair in a petri dish and then transplanting it, but so far absolutely nothing.  That would come years before anything like what we are talking about here with ovaries and the like being grown and transplanted.

[Cruelladeville]

The interesting aspect of stem cell regeneration... of organs, currently is...

You need a dying/living person to donate the base organ to create a cellular framework....

This is then cleaned down to the base level and then is bombarded with the recipient's stem cell cultures..

The organ is then grown/fed to flesh style in an incubator....

Then when its functioning finally transplanted...can't see that bringing up any ethical or moral issues in an uber-Christian nation such as the USA....lol Using another woman's baby-making parts to create the first TG woman's child...

The National Enquirer headline, well you can guess can't you!

Most complex thing they've done this with so far? A mouse's heart, which did start spontaneously beating!

[rejennyrated]

It's way to late for me now, but I find it rather odd that so many people on hear seem not to want the whole female experience.

Yes Periods are undoubtedly sometime messy and uncomfortable but they are part of the authentic experience of being a woman for the majority of women. I would like to have been fertile, and to do so it would have been well worth any discomfort or inconvenience.

I suspect that gene manipulation and the ability to grow cloned fully genetically compatible organs from our own tissue may one day be possible and when it does then a true biological sex change will at last be properly possible. Unfortunately however this may not take place for another 50 or more years, because, as Cruella rightly observes, the human race has a few other considerably more pressing problems to solve first.

[Telzey]

I believe there are a lot of physical differences between Genetic and MtF woman, but I don't think that the differences are so difficult that they would negate the procedure were it available. And that gives me for one hope, that someday I would be able to have my own children. That is one fulfillment that we are denied currently through a cruelty of fate so the idea that it is a possibility really excites me.

[Danacee]

it is most likely doctors will perfect a method of entropic pregnancy and make eggs from steam cells. There are verifiable cases of normal women giving birth to perfectly healthy babies through embryos that literally fell out of the fallopian tubes into the abdominal cavity. With actual placement methods developed to keep the placenta from rooting anywhere too dangerous its actually plausible stuff in the next 10-15 years. Gametes are among the least ambitious things to be made from scratch with stem cells.

Also, a healthy placenta makes more than enough hormones to carry a pregnancy itself after the first month. Uterus transplants, reproductive organs made entirely with stem cells is far flung science fiction next to the entropic method.

Personally I'd rather have my child in external man-made uterus. Even though I've been thin all my life I've suffered from periods of hormone induced stretch marks around my thighs since my teens. Could only imagine what would happen if I was pregnant, not to add my belly. Would never wear a swimsuit again.


Also, as said C-section completely negates all genetic male versus female arguments. No women who has gone through anything that would obstruct her vaginal canal would ever, ever be considered or consider vaginal birth. Besides some of us, such as myself according to my gyno have a large pelvic opening which can be ascertained by the bone structure. Many genetic women have completely male like apple frames as well with a male like pelvis, and although are watched extra carefully during birth, they usually can squeeze them out too. This is not a black and white matter.

[Christine Snider]

I've looked into this quite a bit over the past several months and found some interesting medical developments. They are currently developing a method that would allow them to use your own DNA + stem cells to literally print (cell by cell) a working bio identical uterus (and other organs) for transplantation. Also, biological males have the same DNA women but because of testosterone only certain genes are activated. Once we have gone through puberty certain aspects of our bodies will not change much or at all. However, There is also another type of synthetic hormone used in osteoperosis patients that forces reabsorption and rapid growth of bone called teriparatide. I emailed one of the leading experts in bone development and heath at harvard and she informed me that, unfortunately, it is to dangerous to be used for the purpose of causing female pattern bone growth. This is because the FDA approved it for only 2yrs use on osteoporosis patients because after prolonged use it causes osteocarcinoma (bone cancer). She told me that the reason the body reacts so negatively to Teriparatide is because it is not yet bioidentical and is only the second generation of the hormone.  So with luck and lots of research maybe we will be able to have genetically identical female reproductive organs and those feminine hips many of us desire. Hopefully within the next 20yrs... just saying....

[A]

Whoa, that is some huge thing to hope for.

Thank you so much for researching this, Christine Snider !

[Christine Snider]

You're very welcome. I really hope they can get teriparatide to a point where it won't cause bone cancer. Oh also there is a new breast augmentation procedure being reviewed for FDA approval that is supposed to mimic fat cells in the breast.

here's the link - http://www.microbreastaug.com/

[tori319]

I've looked into this quite a bit over the past several months and found some interesting medical developments. They are currently developing a method that would allow them to use your own DNA + stem cells to literally print (cell by cell) a working bio identical uterus (and other organs) for transplantation. Also, biological males have the same DNA women but because of testosterone only certain genes are activated. Once we have gone through puberty certain aspects of our bodies will not change much or at all. However, There is also another type of synthetic hormone used in osteoperosis patients that forces reabsorption and rapid growth of bone called teriparatide. I emailed one of the leading experts in bone development and heath at harvard and she informed me that, unfortunately, it is to dangerous to be used for the purpose of causing female pattern bone growth. This is because the FDA approved it for only 2yrs use on osteoporosis patients because after prolonged use it causes osteocarcinoma (bone cancer). She told me that the reason the body reacts so negatively to Teriparatide is because it is not yet bioidentical and is only the second generation of the hormone.  So with luck and lots of research maybe we will be able to have genetically identical female reproductive organs and those feminine hips many of us desire. Hopefully within the next 20yrs... just saying....

Here's hoping I'm 19 now and hope for something by the time I'm 44. Of course I'll adopt but it would be great to give life to my own children.

[VeronikaFTH]

I suppose I'm lucky in some ways. Although I wished I had transitioned earlier in life, I was married and have a daughter already. I only got to experience the pregnancy vicariously through my (ex) wife.

There are certain parts of being pregnant that I really wouldn't wish for, such as morning sickness, the horribly uncomfortable 9 month way-too-big stage, and of course the birth. I was there for the birth, and am I ever glad that it wasn't me lying there. LOL...

And let's not forget menstruation... Which natal women hate, and some even take birth control just to avoid. My sister-in-law called me a "Lucky b@&$*" because I'll never go through it...

Having said all this though... Would I be willing to go through these experiences to be a 100% functioning female? Absolutely...

[sarahla]

You phrased it well Veronika.  There is also the fact that having a kid distorts the vagina, but then of course you have your own child.

[Zebulon Virginia]

Aloha. I've been postponing breast hormones, hoping to get someone pregnant before losing my fertility. I'm 32 now, hoping someday I can become a fully functional, fertile woman... I realize I am a bit old, but who knows. Do you think it matters if I take hormones or not, in terms of getting all the plumbing installed someday?

[A]

Uh, I don't know ; only a physician (and maybe not any physician) could answer that, I think. But maybe taking hormones is better. I mean, it works with genetic females and they have those hormones.

Maybe you should think of freezing some sperm. That way, you don't have to sacrifice wellness for fertility and you can use that white thingie anytime later.