True, but I don’t think the book was written for a professional audience, so I wouldn’t have expected a highly technical explanation.
And I’m inclined to give it more credene than many other sources, because it’s one of few I’ve seen in this subject area (including on this board) that isn’t heavily weighed down by wishful thinking.
WhyNot: There’s no evidence in what I’ve read that indicates that there’s any risk of harm to the miniscule amount of hormones that might make it into the breast milk. The pre-treatment state of my body’s hormone levels doesn’t effect this in the least.
No, but that’s not an issue as I’m still legally male, so where we live anyway, it’s not a same-sex marriage.
I’m covered on my own insurance, she on hers.
Therapy and counseling were covered under mental health services, and medical doctor’s visits under medical services, and hormones and other medications under the prescription medicine plan. Cosmetic procedures such as electrolysis and laser hair removal, no, and these can get very expensive for some. The SRS is partially covered, but many surgeons don’t work directly with insurance companies and require full payment upfront. You then have to get reimpbursed by the insurance company.
Our lawyer did make sure to probate-proof our will against challenges due to my changing sex, yes.
I’m still legally male, and still listed that way on my DL, but changing my name was a simple matter of going down to the DMV, showing them my papers, and having a new photo taken.
I am unconvinced because I’ve read contrary statements from other persons whose credentials are comparable to Dr. Kirk’s. Quite simply put, experts disagree here.
I suspect that Dr. Kirk is doing the usual game of managing expectations that doctors who work with transsexual patients do. What they usually tell you to expect is the 10th percentile result; that way, they won’t let you down all that often.
Kaitlyn: [[The purpose of my nursing would be to help me bond with the baby and it with me, to share with it the emotioanal intimacy that breastfeeding provides.]]
You do not have to breastfeed to bond perfectly well as a parent with your child. Although I certainly think breast milk is best for babies, I think certain breastfeeding advocates have exaggerated the importance of this and have, as a consequence, made many parents feel guilty and fearful if they are unable to provide this for their babies.
When I was a health educator in Jamaica, a big part of my job was working with pregnant women and I always pushed the importance of breastfeeding (healthier, cheaper, emotional bonding, etc.). I laid a big trip on the corner grocery shop folks for selling breast formula, like it was poison. Then we adopted our baby and I sheepishly had to go back to that shop to buy formula. The neat thing was that my husband could share the feeding task. When I had another (home-made, this time) baby, I breastfed her for two years and my husband felt a little less connected to her because she’d cry for me to feed her and she never got accustomed to a bottle.
If your partner can produce breastmilk and store it, then you can bottle-feed it to the baby and s/he will get the health benefits of mother’s milk. Because you’re on hormones too, I think it’s just not worth making such a big deal about. Bonding is about a lot of things besides breastfeeding.
Kaitlyn, wouldn’t you have to go on prolactin if you wanted to breastfeed? I’d have assumed that would interfere with your estrogen therapy, since estrogen levels drop in women who are naturally producing prolactin. However, since most of your estrogen must be coming from pills anyway, perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference. I’m just kind of curious about how the hormonal cocktail would have to be balanced.
Geesh, I’m such an endocrinology geek…
JillGat: Thank you for the information and support. I’m aware that in certain circles the pendulum has swung way back the other way since the “only primitives and savages breastfeed” days of the 40’s and 50’s. Is this the way it was in the 70’s? I know that there are zealots out there that still hold similar views.
I agree that my breastfeeding wouldn’t be necessary to develop a strong parental bond with a child. Fathers do it all the time–it’s the commitment to spending time with the child and using that time to develop a positive nurturing environment that matters. I know that there are plenty of other ways for me to bond with my baby–bathing, carrying the baby in a sling, etc. Mrs. Six is young and healthy and should have no trouble producing enough milk for our child when we have one. If I can’t produce milk, I have no doubt that I’ll still be able to bond with him/her and develop a close nurturing relationship. I know all that, and just being a mommy is going to be enough even if I never get to breastfeed.
But.
I can’t get pregnant, carry a child, and give birth. I did my part of the conception some three years ago. Breastfeeding is the only physical aspect of being a mother that is available to me, and I want to take advantage of that if it is possible to do so and safe for the baby.
If I think there is any risk of harm to the baby, I won’t even attempt breastfeeding. My endocrinologist assures me that there isn’t–I’ll have less estrogen in my body than a natal woman has in hers, and thus the hormones passed on to the baby through my breast milk might actually be less than what Mrs. Six will, especially after she resumes ovulation.
Lamia: No. The method that would be used to induce lactation would be to increase my estrogen level for several months leading up to the baby’s birth, then to abruptly lower it at about the time the baby was to be born, thus fooling my body into thinking that I was pregnant and just gave birth. This, along with regular stimulation of my nipples and visualization therapy, would be what we would do to attempt to induce lactation. Once lactation begins, my body should be able to produce enogh prolactin on it’s own to maintain my milk as long as I maintain a regular nursing schedule.
Keep in mind that I’m paraphrasing and simplifying a conversation that I had with my endocrinoligist several months ago, so if there are any glaring errors, they’re the product of my faulty memory.
It’s still a while off. We want to wait until after my final SRS and subsequent recovery. We’re probably looking at about this time next year to start trying to get Mrs. Six pregnant, which means that it’ll be close to two years if we’re successful the first time. By that time, I’ll be on a lower dosage of estrogen than I am now.
My situation is very similar to that of an adoptive mother post hysterectomy who is on HRT and wants to breastfeed. This report discusses the benefits and possible risks of hormone therapy on a breastfed infant. The bottom line is that there’s no reliable evidence as of yet that hormone therapy has any negative effects on breast milk or a breastfed baby, and a comparison of the levels of hormones passed through to the milk from women taking oral contraceptives would seem to indicate that the level of estrogen that would get into the milk would be negligible.
Add to this that the baby would be getting the majority of it’s nutrition from Mrs. Six, and I don’t see much risk to our child from my milk.
cough sputter
Puns worthy of Airplane.
Kaitlyn: [[I can’t get pregnant, carry a child, and give birth. I did my part of the conception some three years ago. Breastfeeding is the only physical aspect of being a mother that is available to me, and I want to take advantage of that if it is possible to do so and safe for the baby.]]
You’re dealing with complex feelings that I know many women have, who can’t get pregnant/give birth/breastfeed and I realize that I don’t understand these feelings. So I don’t mean to minimize them or make myself sound superior.
But here’s my story: My husband and I decided to adopt before we even tried to conceive. Neither of us had that “physical aspect” of parenthood with our first child, and yet we are as bonded to him as we are of the child we later conceived, and I birthed and breastfed. I don’t think of my kids any differently.
There are plenty of physical aspects involved in caring for babies… and some of them are downright icky! You know you’ve bonded when you can pick your kid’s nose without thinking about it but other babies’ snotty noses still make you want to gag. Oh, oh, this is even better. Soon after we brought our baby home in Jamaica, he had a cold with a lot of nasal congestion. Those little bulb syringes that are designed for sucking mucus out didn’t work on his beautiful big African nostrils, so my husband went to a neighbor to ask what we could do to help him. He came home and said, “Well, I found out how they do it here.” Then he bent over the baby, sealed his mouth over his nose, and sucked the snot of him.
That’s when I knew they had bonded. (Not long after that, I was throwing him up in the air and he vomited in my mouth.)
JillGat: Thank you for your story. I know that what you say is true, that just being a caring parent who is there for my child to share the good times and bad will be enough. I know that. But sometimes knowing that something is true doesn’t really affect how you feel.
I know that riding a roller coaster is statistically much, much, safer that crossing the street at a busy intersection. But it certainly feels exactly the opposite.
I very much appreciate your input, and I don’t mean to belittle all of those aspects of being a parent that you describe, especially because if I feel this way, it must be so much worse for those infertile women who were born with a female body and grew up believing that they’d be able to have children. I never had to deal with having that expectation taken from me. I don’t think I can understand how a natal woman who can’t conceive must feel.
Despite how I’ve described my emotional problems in my first thread, this is something that I have a realistic handle on. It’ll be wonderful if I can breastfeed, if only for a little while, but I’ll still be happy as a clam even if I can’t breastfeed our baby, so long as he/she is healthy, happy, and ours to nurture and raise.
I can imagine this might raise a few eyebrows if you’re pulled over or something, and the officer actually notices that on your DL. “Hmm, you don’t look like a man…”
Oh, and if anyone is still reading this, one more update.
Two weeks in, things are going pretty smoothly.
If you encounter Mr. P at any random time during the day, he will most likely be talking about school policy and law. It’s his porn.
A sixth grader who has me by a good three or four inches and easily 50 pounds called me a “little sissy” while I was on front-of-school pickup duty. He seemed surprised when I laughed and agreed with him. I considered writing him up, but it wouldn’t really be fair to punish him when he was just telling the truth, would it?
The other teachers are talking to me in the teachers lounge now, and were surprised to find out that I can actually talk about things not related to my sexuality, and that my sexuality doesn’t automatically make me different from others when it comes to all issues.
For example, we were talking about children (not students, children at home) and the subject of Mrs. Six and I having them came up. One other teacher assumed that we would obviously prefer a girl, and the whole group seemed surprised to learn that the sex didn’t really matter so long as the child was healthy, that we were just like the majority of couples contemplating having children.
It led into the typical questions about how two women could provide a good role model for a boy, and how we would dress him and what kinds of toys we would give him, etc. There seemed to be a hint of an idea that because I was a boy who decided to become a girl (a huge oversimplification, and not even an accurate one), that I would want to do the same thing to a little boy.
I was seriously tempted to tell them that we fully intended to adopt a little boy, dress him in girls clothes, call him Pamela, and send him off to sleepaway camp, but they seem to be seriously lacking a sense of humor on this subject, and I doubt any of them would get the joke anyway.
Lots of us down here in Texas don’t understand sophisticated humor like that.
Haven’t been pulled over by a cop yet–I’m really careful about obeying the traffic laws for just this reason.
However, going through airport security has become a very unpleasant experience. Before my transition, I had flown maybe 60 or 70 times. I had been screened individually exactly once, and that was in Seoul when Mrs. Six and I were there visiting her parents.
Since my transition, I’ve flown round trip three times–six trips through airport security. I’ve been pulled out of line to be patted down and have my luggage searched four of those six times, and was groped twice. There’s something about seeing “male” on my driver’s license that makes the screeners think that this is ok. Mrs. Six doesn’t handle this well at all, and very nearly got us arrested the last time it happened.
If the purpose of airport screening is to decrease the amount of air travel, it’s certainly succeeded with us.
I’m not from Texas, but I don’t get it either.
And I screwed up the joke anyway. It should be, “Dress him in girl’s clothes, call him Angela, and send him to sleepaway camp.”
For those who are interested, the joke is a reference to
[spoiler]The Sleepaway Camp movies. This was a series of really awful slasher movies in the 80’s.
In Sleepaway Camp, a family with fraternal twin children of about 5, a boy and a girl, is involved in a boating accident that kills all of them except for the girl, named Angela. She is raised by her psychotic aunts, and sent away to camp one summer. She’s very shy, to the point of not speaking, which gets her picked on quite a bit. Every time someone picks on her, that person is later murdered. We never see the killer, only his hands, which are quite obviously those of a young man. It’s implied that a boy who has a crush on Angela is the killer.
At the end the killer beheads a girl who had been picking on Angela, leading to the final shot of Angela, nude, covered with blood, holding the girl’s head. We see, in a full frontal nudity shot, that Angela is in fact a boy, and learn in flashback that it was the girl who died, and the boy was adopted by his aunts. Not wanting a little boy, they dressed him in girl’s clothes, named him Angela, and raised him as a girl, thus explaining his psychotic behavior.
In the second movie, Angela is played by Pamela Sprinsteen, hence my mistake above. She was given a sex-change as part of her therapy (wonderful reasoning there guys–raising and dressing her as the wrong sex triggered psychotic behavior, so let’s fix that by actually changing her to the wrong sex). She’s now been released, and goes to camp as a camp counselor.
Here’s the plot: Angela kills everone. That’s it, the whole plot. It does seem to be unique to the genre that nobody survives and the psycho is never in any danger.
Yes, the approach taken by the psychiatrists has resulted in changing her from someone who kills only select people for revenge into someone who kills for sport. Great job guys.
The third movie is a rehash of the second, but this time with survivors and filled with racist and classist cliches. No, this time they don’t make just transsexuals look like caricatures, they take aim at blacks, hispanics, Asians, rich kids, and poor kids. And the hot young blonde chick gets it on with camp director Michael J. Pollard.
Psychoitc homocidal transsexuals I can accept. Hot blonde teenage chick getting it on with Micheal J. Pollard, no freakin way.
Part 5 is in the can and currently awaiting distribution, but it’s looking more and more like direct to video is likely.
Can you tell how much I love these movies?[/spoiler]
I see! Thank you.
I flew many times between when my name was changed and when the sex on my license was changed. In that time, I was selected for screening exactly once, and I wasn’t groped that time. The people at O’Hare and DC National (the places I fly in and out of the most) don’t seem to give a damn. I’ve had odd looks in Nashville and Tampa, but no harassment. The one time I got screened was in Reno, and that one could easily have been because my license was expired.
I almost always fly American. The one time I was screened was the one time I flew Continental. Might I ask which airline you were flying at the time?
Wow. Not to turn this into a Cafe Society thread, but what exactly are the redeeming qualities of these movies that you love so much? Is it a “so bad, their good” thing, or what?
Second time today I’ve provided this link, but you might want to check [url=“http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=irony”]this out.
Now why didn’t I think of that? I guess I don’t pay much attention to methods of inducing lactation. I’m sure the above would be preferable to taking prolactin artificially.