We all deserve better from healthcare providers who sell false promise to some, while shutting down options for others
You can’t have missed the conversations about the rise of freezing eggs for non-medical or “social” reasons in recent years, which forms part of an explosion in the use of fertility treatments, all with the promise of giving more options to prospective parents. The starting point is often the question of whether someone, almost always a wealthy, straight, white woman, should freeze her eggs as insurance against her “biological clock”, career development and/or the risk of not finding a partner in time with whom to start a family.
Having noticed the trend, I began to see that the same detail was missing from piece after piece: the statistical likelihood of these frozen eggs leading to live births. With notable exceptions, the focus is on affordability and the social factors that are causing so many more people to opt for this treatment, rather than discussion of what happens when someone actually uses the eggs to try to conceive. Frozen eggs are being marketed and spoken about as “fertility nest eggs” – even as more and more evidence about low success rates have emerged.
By now, you might have glanced at my byline photo and wondered: wait, why does baldy care about this?
In 2013, I attended my third or fourth gender identity clinic appointment in London, the gap between appointments being roughly six months and the initial wait over a year. The consultant was giving me a risk/benefit analysis of starting testosterone (T) injections. The question of fertility came up. Had I looked into fertility preservation in the form of egg freezing? Shit, I thought, was I meant to?
“No…?” I offered.
“Well,” came the gist of his reply, “you can ask your GP if they’ll cover the cost but they probably won’t. It’s terribly expensive and my understanding is it rarely works.” At the time, I had no understanding of what it was exactly that rarely worked. In the ensuing weeks of waiting for my T prescription, I did ask my GP.
I was already at peace with infertility in exchange for any kind of future living as my true self. Transitioning would, I thought, mean losing the ability to conceive. The consent form for starting T made the apparent trade-off clear but I signed it without hesitation, having contemplated what this would mean for years. Plus, the tone of the consultant’s advice seemed clear: If you’re really a man, you won’t care much about having kids. In fact, you probably just want to whip that womb out asap, eh?