Monday 9 May 2022 12:20 PM Indian surgeon plans to transplant womb into a TRANS woman and get them ... trends now
Dr Narendra Kaushik, who runs a gender reassignment clinic in New Delhi, will attempt to transplant a womb into a trans woman who was born a man
A surgeon in India will attempt to transplant a womb into a trans woman who was born a man — with the view to making them pregnant.
The risky procedure will involve taking the reproductive organs from a dead donor or a patient who has transitioned the other way and had theirs removed.
There has only been one documented case of a womb being inserted into a trans woman in the past — but she died from complications just months later.
Impregnating a trans woman would be an even bigger feat, and would require the use of IVF and a C-section, because they do not have a functioning vagina.
Dr Narendra Kaushik, who runs a gender reassignment clinic in New Delhi, has said he is 'very, very optimistic' he can make a success of the procedure.
'Every transgender woman wants to be as female as possible — and that includes being a mother,' he is quoted as saying in The Mirror.
'The way towards this is with a uterine transplant, the same as a kidney or any other transplant. This is the future. We cannot predict exactly when this will happen but it will happen very soon.'
The surgeon has not revealed the recipient or given a timetable for the surgery, but he added: 'We have our plans and we are very very optimistic about this.'
How babies are conceived in biological females who have a womb transplant. In theory, the principles should be the same for man, using the eggs of a donor. But it has never been attempted because there has yet to be a successful womb transplant to a trans woman
Dr Kaushik has said he is 'very, very optimistic' he can make a success of the procedure
Womb transplants cost around £50,000 and just one cycle of IVF treatment can cost upwards of £5,000.
Dr Kshuik's clinic, Olmec, is at the centre of a booming industry in New Dehli that is seeing the city rival Bangkok as the sex change capital of the world.
He said around a fifth of his customers are from abroad, with many flying from the UK, where the procedure is free on the NHS but subject to waiting times.
'Many of our patients tell us that their sexual partners don't even notice that they weren't born with female sex organs,' Dr Kaushik told the paper.
'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'
But while gender reassignment surgery is well-established, the science behind womb transplants involving transgender people is still murky.
There have been more than 100 successful woman-to-woman uterus transplants since 2014 — and scientists are now able to impregnate recipients.
But there are far more hurdles to scale when it comes to inserting a female's reproductive organs in a biological man.
As far as medical records show, the procedure has only been attempted once in history, when Danish trans artist Lili Elbe had the op in 1931.
The 48-year-old, one of the earliest known gender reassignment patients, had the operation in Germany with the hope of being able to have children with her fiance.
But she developed a post-surgery infection and died from cardiac arrest three months
