As we are well aware, some of us are unfortunate enough to be assigned the wrong gender at birth. Luckily, there are plenty of modern medical alternatives available to help an individual switch his/her physical gender. Among them include Hormonal Therapies which have been proven to be quite effective to an extent.
Such treatments are better suited to be administered at a young age, if possible before the onset of puberty. This is to prevent the body from developing the natural mature properties of an adult body (which is incidentally, much harder to reverse compared with a child's body).
Some of the hormones available halts the effect of puberty while other, more specific ones target the menstrual cycle in girls or the testicles in guys.
Which leads us to the million dollar question. What happens if you wanna have tons and tons of babies in the future but want to carry out the hormonal treatment now?
Well, you can. For peeps in the UK, the NHS offers the service of freezing the reproductive cells of transgenders for future use.
Females who were born in male bodies were found to have their sperm frozen before carrying out the procedure which terminates their reproductive organs.
Males who were assigned a female body at birth were undergoing a similar treatment at NHS clinics, with teenagers freezing their eggs before they begin taking male hormones.
The price of freezing sperm hovers around £400 while the cost of freezing eggs is about £4,000.
The anual storage costs no less than £300.
Now the hormonal procedure has a tremendous impact as it is one that lasts a lifetime. Which means there's no turning back.
I'd encourage transgenders to save their reproductive cells since adult transgenders are usually infertile. So, if you're planning on having children in the future, at least you have the opportunity to do so. Of course, this doesn't necessarily apply to transgenders who do not carry out hormonal treatments cause their bodies are perfectly capable of producing offspring.
Think about it. It's better to have more options than less. So, unless it affects you negatively in some way, try considering freezing your sperm/egg/both(I don't judge). Ciao
