Adventures in Transgender Fertility

Over the last several months, I’ve spent evenings watching my fiancée, Lara, inject herself with smaller and smaller doses of estrogen. I’ve watched her stand in front of a mirror, singeing each hair out of her face with a secondhand electrolysis machine.

The return of her testosterone hasn’t resulted in just the resurgence of facial hair; her pants now fit differently, too. My own skin has been plagued by acne since I got off the pill six months ago, and my default states are angry, hungry or sleeping. Such are the perils of trying to have a child the way Lara and I are trying, without in vitro fertilization, or cryogenically frozen sperm. The way fertile cisgender people do: They simply couple up, and boom — a child is born.

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For many young trans people, the question of having babies is likely the last thing on their minds. Who could blame them? Like all young people, they’re figuring out their future, and matters of diapers and breast-feeding seem abstract and far off. But unlike all young people, young trans people are often making choices that have long-term consequences for their fertility. Which is part of how I, a 32-year-old cisgender lesbian, and Lara, my 33-year-old trans fiancée, came to be in the situation we’re in today: trying to conceive a child, even though Lara transitioned nearly four years ago.

I didn’t even realize I wanted biological kids until my mid-20s. Before then, I’d vaguely imagined that children would simply come to me, à la Auntie Mame, or Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom”: I’d inherit them from a long-lost relative and simply slot them into my independent, modern life. Little did I know then that in just a few years, I’d be staying up late to read studies in which scientists combined the eggs of two female rats to make a child, hoping for 50 more years on the planet so that I’d be around when they began testing on humans.

Then I met Lara. On our first date, she made my heart swell with her kindness and her adventurousness. We bonded over a mutual enthusiasm for chocolate pecan pie. Over lukewarm pimento cheese at a diner, she showed me a picture of herself from a year beforehand, before she’d begun transitioning. We shared a lingering first kiss in the parking lot, and on the drive home, while the Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love” played on the radio, I had a realization: If things worked out, I could have a biological child with the woman I love, as long as I had eggs and she had the other half of the ingredients. And she did — sort of. But it hasn’t been straightforward.

In a recent study, a majority of trans teenagers who received fertility counseling declined to take steps to preserve their own fertility before transitioning. Their reasons included cost, discomfort with fertility preservation measures — that is, freezing sperm or eggs — and not wanting to delay hormone therapy. Instead, 45.2 percent of the subjects said they preferred to adopt, and 21.9 percent stated they didn’t want to have children.

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