A surgeon in India will attempt to transplant a womb into a trans woman to help them become pregnant.
The procedure would involve taking the reproductive organs from a dead donor or a patient who had transitioned from female to male and inserting them into the trans woman.
Impregnating the woman - which has never been done before - would require IVF and a C-section as the trans woman would not have a fully functioning vagina if they were born male.
There's only been one previous case of a womb being inserted into a trans woman, however it tragically led to her death just a few months later from complications.
Dr Narendra Kaushik, who runs a gender reassignment clinic in New Delhi, is the doctor performing the surgery.
He told The Mirror: “Every transgender woman wants to be as female as possible. And that includes being a mother. The way towards this is with a uterine transplant, the same as a kidney or any other transplant.”
The doctor did not reveal an exact timeline or confirm the patient for the operation but maintained positivity around the potential procedure.
He said: "This is the future. We cannot predict exactly when this will happen but it will happen very soon.
"We have our plans and we are very very optimistic about this.”
While the transplantation of the womb does not allow the trans woman to naturally fall pregnant, it is believed that an embryo can be implanted.
With medical advancements and increased knowledge of trans procedures, the possibility of trans women having a baby is increasingly becoming feasible.
Dr Paulson, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, claimed back in 2017: “There would be additional challenges, but I don’t see any obvious problem that would preclude it. I think it would be possible."
In New Delhi, gender transition surgeries are booming, with India surpassing Thailand as the preferred destination for the surgery.
Dr Kaushik said: “Many of our patients tell us that their sexual partners don’t even notice that they weren't born with female sex organs. And that’s our aim, to make it so that they live as normal a life as possible as a woman. We aim for an aesthetic ideal."
Clinical trials for uterus transplants were carried out at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in 2019.
The trial was aimed at helping women carry out a pregnancy who may have trouble or not be able to due to being born without a uterus or vagina, or whose womb had been damaged by trauma.
Featured Image Credit: Sergiy Tryapitsyn / Alamy. Mopic / Alamy.
Topics: Science, Technology
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