BIOLOGY:How a Transgender Woman Could Get Pregnant

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-transgender-woman-could-get-pregnant/

Scientific American/By Dina Fine Maron

"When Mats Brännström first dreamed of performing uterus transplants, he envisioned helping women who were born without the organ or had to have hysterectomies. He wanted to give them a chance at birthing their own children, especially in countries like his native Sweden where surrogacy is illegal.
He auditioned the procedure in female rodents. Then he moved on to sheep and baboons. Two years ago, in a medical first, he managed to help a human womb–transplant patient deliver her own baby boy. In other patients, four more babies followed.
But his monumental feats have had an unintended effect: igniting hopes among some transwomen (those whose birth certificates read "male" but who identify as female) that they might one day carry their own children.
Cecile Unger, a specialist in female pelvic medicine at Cleveland Clinic, says several of the roughly 40 male-to-female transgender patients she saw in the past year have asked her about uterine transplants. One patient, she says, asked if she should wait to have her sex reassignment surgery until she could have a uterine transplant at the same time. (Unger's advice was no.) Marci Bowers, a gynecological surgeon in northern California at Mills–Peninsula Medical Center, says that a handful of her male-to-female patients—"fewer than 5 percent"— ask about transplants. Boston Medical Center endocrinologist Joshua Safer says he, too, has fielded such requests among a small number of his transgender patients. With each patient, the subsequent conversations were an exercise in tamping down expectations.
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I think it's nice that they try to be kind of encouraging with this, but it is just so fake. The woman essentially has a uterus in there that is completely isolated from everything but her blood supply. Then they cut the kids out of you when it's time for childbirth, and when you're done having kids, the uterus itself. That's because you have to wreck your immune system and force it not to attack the organ with drugs. Thank goodness uterine transplants are going to be short lived.

Recently a group of scientists from Northwestern University removed the ovaries of a lab mouse and used her stem cells and a 3D printer to make new ones. Once implanted, they produced eggs, hormones, and the mouse was able to give birth to healthy pups as well as nurse.

http://www.popsci.com/mice-give-birth-to-pups-thanks-to-3d-printed-ovaries

Transgender people may have to wait for some genetic therapy advances in order to be compatible, but with the rise in chromallocytes and CRISPR editing technologies it will not be but a decade or 2.

I have children, conceived the good old fashioned way. I did not carry their foetuses for 9 months. Nor did I experience childbirth which, based purely on my observations as the other partner, is both agonizing and terrifying. And for all these things I am grateful. I resent the way Scientific American tries to shoehorn a largely hypothetical fertility treatment into a transgender context; the implication being my experience is somehow incomplete without pregnancy. Poppycock!