Earlier this year, the medical journal Transgender Health published a case study that grabbed headlines everywhere from the New York Times to the Guardian, documenting how a New York transgender woman was able to use a regimen of drugs to induce lactation and become her child’s only source of nutrition for six weeks. It was hailed as the “first formal report in the medical literature of induced lactation in a transgender woman,” as authors Zil Goldstein and Dr. Tamar Reisman told the Times.

Yet this was no news to many within the transfeminine community, where it has been widely understood that trans women can breastfeed for years. In online forums and on social media, trans women have long shared anecdotal accounts of methods used and success achieved in lactating and feeding their children. As far back as 2010, Dr. Christine McGinn, a trans surgeon who specializes in gender reassignment surgery, appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show in a sensationalized segment that revealed she had both fathered her children and was the sole parent to breastfed them. What’s more surprising is that it took this long for a medical journal to document the process.

One commonly-used method for non-gestational cisgender and transgender women to induce lactation is called the Newman Goldfarb protocol. It relies on the anti-nausea drug domperidone, which is banned by the FDA due to heart health risks (but widely used in Europe and Canada). Dr. Molly Moravek, a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of Michigan, praised the fact that more people are now talking about how trans women can breastfeed in the same way as cisgender women — but worries that people will “miss the part where the very last thing they say in the study is that we still need to do more research to figure out the right doses of these medications.” And indeed, induced lactation in trans women is still highly experimental.

Nobody should take drugs or undergo medical procedures without the supervision of a doctor, and nothing in this article should be construed as medical advice. Below, them. spoke with three trans women about why and how one might induce lactation in order to hear their experiences, and uncover the highly individualized reasons they did so.

Kaia, 30, Toronto, ON

My wife and I have a really nice basis for comparison, because we went from two boobs to four boobs when I transitioned. There’s a lot more sleep this time around, and a lot more ability for my wife to be able to go out and know that you’re not going to have a baby freakout. I remember back when we had our first child, five years ago, she had to go somewhere for an hour, and the baby’s sitting there screaming, and we hadn’t pumped milk before that. We were first-time parents, we were 24, didn’t know what we were doing, and I was just freaking out. I texted her and said “I don’t know what to do, I can’t feed the baby, what do I do?” We just wound up having a baby scream for a half hour, and she came back and felt really horrible.

Stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore. We’ve had two people to get a baby to sleep, two people to feed it, and I don’t know if this is in any way correlated, but we’ve never had a baby grow this fast before. They gained back their birth weight in a week, and they’re gaining an average of 1.1 ounces a day, and have maintained that consistently.

Brettany, 56, Texas