Complete Weirdos Are Making Uterus Transplants About Transphobia
The rare procedure was successfully performed in the U. K. for the first time. Experts say it will be 10 - 20 years before trans women could benefit.
by Evan Urquhart
Womb transplants are a very rare surgical procedure where a woman without a uterus can receives one from a donor. According to the BBC, only about 100 of these operations have been performed worldwide since the first successful transplant in 2014, and about 50 children have been carried to term. The rare procedures still make headlines, most recently when the first one was successfully carried out in the U. K. The operations are complex and risky for both the donor and the recipient, but feel miraculous for women who would otherwise have no way to concieve.
There are all sorts of interesting questions and considerations here, but one absolutely mad reaction to all this would to be upset that infertile cis women are able to carry children because one or two decades from now trans women might benefit as well. Naturally, this was reaction that Deborah Soh, proponent of the discredited theory of autogynephilia, went with in an essay for the Washington Examiner today.
Soh starts from the extremely reasonable position of complaining about how “the word ‘woman’ itself is being scrubbed and plastered over,” leading us to idly wonder whether Soh has been out tagging bridges and abandoned buildings with the word woman (and, if so, why)? She then discusses how miraculous the possibility of a womb transplant is for women who were born without a uterus (she doesn’t mention those who have lost their uterus due to cancer or other issues, but they too are candidates).
However, we swiftly find that all is not well. Soh is deeply concerned about the possibility that some day in the distant future an unknown trans woman might benefit from this as well. Oh no!
screenshot from the Washington Examiner
In a reality where Debra Soh has shown herself to be deranged and duplicitous, perhaps we should all be concerned about the implications of her writing for the Washington Examiner. Do we currently live in such a reality? It is impossible to say.
It does seem that Soh inhabits some sort of alternate reality, one very different from the reality we know. In that reality, autogynephilia (which she brings up in the very next paragraph) isn’t a discredited kook theory that wasn’t even taken seriously in the 1980s, much less today. Rather, in Soh’s reality it is a real thing which is not only real but also so important we all need to worry about a time 10 to 20 years in the future when deranged and duplicitous trans women may undergo major surgery, 9 months of pregnancy, and the lifelong commitment of parenthood, all for a cheap thrill.
Did we mention that these fears of Soh’s surround a possibility that’s 10 or 20 years into the future? An article in LGBTQ Nation (quoting inews.co.uk, which is behind a paywall) makes it clear that uterine transplants for trans women may be possible, someday, but that day is a long way out.
screenshot from LGBTQ Nation
To translate for you non-science-writers out there: When a medical expert says something is a minimum of 10 or 20 years away, it means nobody ought to hold their breath. Uterine transplants for transgender women are theoretically possible, there’s no reason they won’t someday happen, but there are major unsolved problems that should place them well over the time horizon for people to reasonably start worrying about them.
Of course the people who desperately need to fill right-wing media with transphobia aren’t reasonable. They’re people like Soh, who got a PhD in neuroscience which led to a career in podcasting and writing for outlets like the Washington Examiner and Quellette. For people like that, the existence of a distant possibility that trans women might one day be pregnant is a red-alert. For the rest of us, in this reality, it’s just a neat possibility we hope we live long enough to hear more about.