Okay, so this idea that HRT makes transitioning people permanently sterile gets thrown around a lot.
Except I can’t find any definitive literature or even anecdotes on it? Everything seems conflicting, with evidence being higher on the side of fertility being possible provided one goes off of hormone treatments.
Like, I have seen quite a few trans people state it as fact, yet our health care providers told us that barring any other complications or surgeries, fertility could be restored by stopping spiro even years after hormone therapy started. And our health care providers are one of the top centers for this kind of care in the region. They are one of the few centers that don’t gatekeep for transitioning, so I don’t see them as having any motive to tell us anything other than what we need to know to make an informed decision. Hell, the head of the center warned us that we shouldn’t treat my spouse’s transition as a sure fire method of birth control unless surgery had been performed.
Plus there are several high profile examples of trans men going off T after years of treatment and being able to both conceive and carry successful pregnancies (not to mention a whole slew of guys that I have met who have done the same,) as well as a few trans women I have heard of who impregnated their partners during HRT. I mean, yeah, many structures can atrophy over time, but that time is much longer than the usual time frame of six months that everyone thinks is the magic threshold, and depends on other health factors. Even the HBSC list infertility as a reversible side effect of hormone treatments. Infertility doesn’t become permanent until certain vital structures are removed.
So I guess my question is why we think this is a hard and fast rule? My suspicion is that certain members of the medical establishment have decided that its better to treat this as the truth so they don’t have to deal with departing from the narrative of the tragic, familyless, infertile transsexual, but that may be a little cynical. My spouse definitely thinks its doctors who encourage this idea so that the process is stream lined and invisible, along with the desire to maintain certain categorical definitions of man and woman, along the lines of keeping to a particular idea of transness (ie: a man shouldn’t want to give birth, a woman shouldn’t want to impregnate someone.)
I think the “6 months on HRT makes you permanently sterile!” is a lie. I know of many exceptions to that, and I think its really unlikely that I’m just encountering all of the exceptions to the rule. I think its a lie that the community as a whole is encouraged to believe for the sake of cis people who don’t want to see any more challenges to “biology” than trans people already represent. I also think that without more definitive research, any medical professional that asserts that 6 months on HRT will definitively make you sterile without any qualifications whatsoever is being unethical and practicing piss poor informed consent. Especially if they go on to recommend surgeries that will make fertility irreversible.
It wouldn’t be the first time, especially with regards to gender/sex variance.