An 18-year-old San Francisco-area transgender teen may be the first to have had eggs harvested prior to transition. Having decided last year to go from Nicole to Cole Carman, the teen decided to harvest his eggs first so it would be easier to have his own biological children down the road. "I've always known I wanted to have kids of my own, so ... it was a no-brainer," he tells Yahoo Parenting. Typically these procedures are performed when trans males are in their 30s, already transitioned, and decide to halt their testosterone so that they can be biologically related to their kids, says Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, who performed the successful procedure on Carman. But post-transition is far more challenging: "After years of testosterone therapy, their ovaries would shut down and would not reawaken to create any viable eggs, or the eggs would be low quality."
Carman's parents, who adopted their only child when he was just 5 weeks old and know how hard it can be to conceive, funded the procedure themselves, paying $13,000 to have the eggs harvested in May. "I didn't really hesitate at all simply because Cole has always been mature in his thinking and I knew this was something that was really important to him," his mother tells People. Carman has reportedly been thinking about his gender, as well as what it means to be trans, since he was 12, and Eyvazzadeh says she wanted to help "from the minute" they met. "I could tell that he was mature, he knew exactly what he wanted and this was self-directed," she says. "It's not something you do on a whim." (Caitlyn Jenner is shocking some of her trans friends with her politics.)
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