newspaper said “The New York Times“A new medical procedure is able to give transgender women the chance to recover their sperm.
Using the new procedure, called Extended Sperm Search and Micro Freezing (ESSM), a urologist specializing in sexual and reproductive health, Michael Werner, was able to find and freeze more than 200 viable sperm from a transgender woman, which the American newspaper called: Chiara.
Claire, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her family’s privacy, wanted to create a family with her partner, where they wanted – if possible – to use her own sperm and her partner’s egg.
Claire had been on estrogen therapy for 18 years and the chances of doctors finding viable sperm in her were slim.
At the same time, Claire had to undergo sex confirmation surgery, a vaginoplasty. This procedure will remove the penis and testicles and create a functional vagina, permanently stopping the production of sperm in her body.
Transgender women take drugs to combat their body’s production of testosterone and increase estrogen, which reduces sperm production and often stops it altogether.
But the extensive search for sperm, and careful freezing, made it possible to recover those sperm, and that’s what happened in Claire’s case.
Sperm production requires constant testosterone production in the testes – 40 million total sperm per ejaculate are considered normal.
With ESSM, doctors can find and freeze small amounts of semen from semen without side effects, and finding such samples is difficult in people who have undergone extensive hormone therapy.
Previously, patients with low sperm counts, or who thought they had no sperm, underwent surgery in which sperm was taken through a needle inserted into the testicle. This process is painful and can damage the testicles.
“I was doing this for complete peace of mind so I could be sure I had tried everything,” Claire said of the new procedure.
“When I got a call saying it wasn’t just sperm, there was too much, it was great,” she added.
Prior to the procedure, Claire went to a fertility clinic in Boston on the advice of her doctor to see if the bank could recover and store the sperm prior to surgery.
The clinic was unable to find sperm in the ejaculate even though it had stopped taking its hormones 10 months ago.
Claire, who lives in Massachusetts, is one of approximately 1.6 million people in the United States who identify as transgender.
For transgender women who want to undergo genital surgery, this new procedure, discovered in Israel, could be an option to preserve sperm.
In 2017, Ari Berkowitz, an obstetrician-gynecologist and fertility expert at Assuta Hospital in Israel, began using extensive sperm research and micro-freezing as a treatment for men with low sperm counts.
The semen sample is broken down into tiny droplets and scanned using a high-powered microscope for several hours. Any sperm found individually is placed into a specialized device called “SpermVD”, where it is cryopreserved.
