The loss of my fertility

I'm due to start taking testosterone next month.

I've been attending a Gender Identity Clinic for the past couple of months and things have been progressing very well there. They have no doubts that I'm suffering from Gender Dysphoria and would benefit from further treatment, so they've made me various appointments to see various people so that I can start hormone therapy and get booked in for some surgeries. Hurrah!

However, that does bring up the rather pertinent question of what, if anything, I wish to do with my remaining fertility before I start taking testosterone (which could permanently fry my ovaries) or have 'bottom' surgery (which would include a total hysterectomy).

I already have two children: two lovely daughters who are a joy and a delight in my life. In this I am more fortunate than many transsexuals, particularly some male-to-female transsexuals who yearn to be able to carry & give birth to their own children. One of the advantages of being born female-bodied is the ability to carry children, and I am grateful that I have had that opportunity. But my joy is tinged with an immense sadness: I was denied the opportunity to parent them properly and in a way, I was made to feel like a surrogate, or perhaps like someone who has lost custody of their children for some reason.

My tale of woe begins back in the mid-1990s, when I first met Hubby. We got together and things were pretty rosy for a while, and he soon proposed marriage. I was head-over-heels in love with him; he seemed such a kind, genuine, decent guy. We'd talked extensively about our plans for the future: we both wanted to travel, we both wanted to marry & buy a house together; we both wanted children. We even discussed the number of children: I told him that it had been my life-long dream to have three kids, the first two in my twenties and the third in my thirties. He was perfectly happy with all that, and on that basis we got married.

Whilst we had planned to have children some day, we hadn't planned to have them immediately. Our plan had been to first get married, then buy a house, then have our first kid a year or two after that when our finances had recovered. But fate had other plans. To our shock, I wound up pregnant a month after we were married, due to contraceptive failure.

So all of a sudden we had to rush our plans forward. We needed to buy a house pronto as the rented house we were living in didn't have enough bedrooms for our expanding family. We then had complications regarding the pregnancy – it turned out that I was carrying identical twins but one hadn't formed properly and was threatening the life of the healthy twin, so I spent a lot of time with consultants and ultrasound scanners and travelling to specialist hospitals for expert opinions, so all-in-all it was a very stressful year. Luckily the healthy twin was born just fine... but the stress of getting married, buying a house and having our first child all within the space of 10 months put a massive strain on us.

Then Hubby put extreme, immense, severe pressure on me to return to work a mere 3 months after the baby was born. This was because that would be the date when my higher-rate Maternity Pay would run out and I'd go onto a much lower rate. He pushed me so, so hard to go back to work when I was nowhere near ready to go back (and when my baby needed me) simply because he didn't want to take on the responsibility of bringing in the extra money we'd need to make up the shortfall whilst I was on maternity leave. 

The day I returned to work – and handed my beautiful baby over to my mother-in-law – was almost like handing her over for adoption. I was utterly devastated at the thought of handing over my child to someone else at such a tender age. It was far too soon, for both of us. Mother-In-Law would look after my daughter during the day whilst I worked long, 8-hour days slaving over a hot computer... and then I'd return home, exhausted, to spend about 2 hours with my daughter before collapsing into bed. The only time when I'd get a substantial period of time with my daughter would be on weekends. So really, it felt like I was part of a divorced couple handing over my child to my former spouse for the majority of the time, but then getting visitation rights on weekends. It made me feel very alienated; it almost felt like my daughter was my Mother-In-Law's child and I was 'borrowing' her for the weekend.

It was heartbreaking, but I did it because we were going to have another two children, right? Surely I'd be able to spend a year off work with at least one of them? Well, as it turns out... Hubby decided he'd found the circumstances surrounding our first child so stressful that he didn't want any more children.

After much convincing (i.e. I said I'd have to leave him if he went back on his promises) he reluctantly agreed to have the second child. Very, very reluctantly. He let me know in no uncertain terms throughout the pregnancy and the first two years of our second daughter's life that he hadn't wanted her at all. She's a lovely child and he eventually warmed to her as a person, but he kept constantly reminding me that she was the child I had wanted, not the child he had wanted. Again, he put immense pressure on me to go back to work when she was 3 months old, and again I had to hand her over to my Mother-In-Law. This was even more painful than the first time, but I let it happen because there was still one child to go, right? There's no way in hell I'd allow the same thing to happen again!

The cracks in our marriage continued to widen over the subsequent years. This went on until 2010, by which stage I was nearly 40 years old. My biological clock was ticking very loudly now: it's widely agreed that pregnancy after the age of 40 is Not A Good Idea, and anyway, we'd agreed to have Baby No. 3 whilst I was in my 30s. So in 2010 we had yet another discussion about the various problems in our marriage and Hubby once again refused to work on any of our issues. I realised that he had broken every single one of the promises we'd made to each other and the plans we'd come up with before getting married. We were never going to get anywhere... so I decided to divorce him. But whilst I was planning that, tragedy struck: Hubby suffered a stroke that left him brain-damaged and unable to fend for himself.

What could I do?

I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances: I stood by his side and supported him through his illness. As angry as I was at him, and as much as I needed to move on for my own wellbeing, I do love him and he is my kids' father, so I stayed primarily so that my kids could keep their father.

He slowly recovered - no thanks to the NHS, which has been hugely dismissive of him from day one - and this year he has finally started to claw back some sense of normalcy. He's not 100% like he used to be before, but he was about 40% immediately after his illness and has worked his way back to 80%, so that's pretty good going. But despite my best efforts, the cracks in our marriage are still there. In fact, they're worse than before, because he's had some damage to his frontal lobe and as such he's completely unable to empathise with other people, so he's become quite heartless and cruel.

I deserve happiness in my life, and I'm not getting it with him; I haven't for a long time. So now that he's able to live independently again, I came out to him and decided to transition. We had major dramas around this subject, and the bottom line is that because he identifies as straight, he won't be able to stay with me through my transition so we'll have to split up. So now I'm back to planning a divorce, dividing up the assets, and figuring out how we are going to co-parent our kids. Just like in 2010. But with one crucial difference.

One crucial, awful difference.

Over the past six months my periods have become erratic and I've been getting hot flushes in the afternoons. At the same time, the Gender Clinic asked me to consider whether I wanted to do anything about preserving my remaining fertility before I go on testosterone next month. So I consulted with my GP... and she has essentially told me that my chances of having another biological child are almost zero. At my age my eggs are pretty much scrambled, and the symptoms I've been experiencing over the past few months suggest that I've probably started the menopause. There is a possibility that some eggs might be harvested, but that procedure costs £2,000... which is exactly £2,000 more than I have available at the moment. Plus unfertilised eggs have a very short lifespan; they'll only be viable for less than 4 years, at which time they'll be thrown away. The best way to preserve them is to fertilise them, but Hubby will definitely not volunteer for that job and there's no way I can attract a new partner in a very short space of time and before I start testosterone, nor can I attract one whilst appearing female! So I'm up the creek without a paddle.

I feel so angry with Hubby that he went back on our agreement to have three kids. I feel so angry at myself for allowing him to dictate my fertility. I feel so angry at the universe/fate/sheer bad luck that he fell ill three years ago, right at the time I was planning to leave him. This may make me sound horrible, but I deeply, deeply regret staying to help care for him during his illness.

Because doing so has cost me my chance to fully enjoy being a parent. And his unwillingness to pull his weight made it impossible for me to enjoy it whilst I had the opportunity.