Scientists Working to Help Transgender ‘Men’ Create Offspring in the Laboratory

Evelyn Telfer, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh, is leading the effort to help biological women who are living as transgender men — many of whom used hormones to bring on male characteristics — create offspring in the laboratory.

The ongoing effort was reported by Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a school grounded in science and technology — in its MIT Technology Review, using the unscientific narrative that biological sex is a choice.

The MIT Technology Review reported on the development, including saying that transgender men are “assigned female at birth:”

For the first time, scientists say they have managed to take eggs from the ovaries of transgender men and get them ready for fertilization in a process completed entirely outside the body. The achievement … suggests that viable eggs can be obtained from transgender men even after years of testosterone therapy, which can stop ovulation.

This would allow transgender men who want children to avoid having to pause gender-affirming medical care and avoid vaginal probes, women’s health clinics, and female-hormone-based treatments, all of which can be physically or emotionally distressing. Telfer discussed her findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, in a virtual presentation to the Society for Reproductive Investigation at its annual meeting, which was held in Denver, Colorado, last month.

There are a handful of options for people who choose such treatment but want the option of having biological children someday. Adults can freeze their eggs, for instance. But this typically involves stopping testosterone treatment and allowing a menstrual cycle to return, which can take months. Hormone-based drugs are used to stimulate the ovaries to release multiple mature eggs, which are then collected in a surgical procedure that involves vaginal probes. The procedure can be particularly distressing for transgender men.

“It’s very exciting, very important work … and is going to be an important advancement that will potentially help a lot of patients,” Samir Babayev, said a reproductive endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who did not take part in the research but attended the meeting where Telfer presented her work.

The MIT Technology Review article noted that this technique could also help “young people” who undergo treatment before they reach puberty so they have not menstruated or ovulated. 

Telfer and her team have already had success with eggs take from women’s ovaries but were not sure they could mature eggs from “people” who had undergone transgender treatment.

Subjects in this project included transgender men who had been taking testosterone and were undergoing surgery that included the removal of their ovaries and were asked to donate them for research.

These were compared to slivers from the ovaries of women who donated them after undergoing a cesarean section. 

The researchers were able to make a small number of eggs mature enough for sperm fertilization. But the eggs did not look the same and Telfer’s team will first try the technique on sheep before it uses human subjects.

“I would like to have our culture system be more robust before attempting fertilization,” Telfer said.

But the LGBT community is excited.

“The more options [to start a family] we have as trans people, the better,” D. Ojeda, senior national organizer at the National Center for Transgender Equality in Washington, DC, said in the article.

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