Over the last several months, I’ve spent evenings watching my fiancée, Lara, inject herself with smaller and smaller doses of estrogen. I’ve watched her stand in front of a mirror, singeing each hair out of her face with a secondhand electrolysis machine.

The return of her testosterone hasn’t resulted in just the resurgence of facial hair; her pants now fit differently, too. My own skin has been plagued by acne since I got off the pill six months ago, and my default states are angry, hungry or sleeping. Such are the perils of trying to have a child the way Lara and I are trying, without in vitro fertilization, or cryogenically frozen sperm. The way fertile cisgender people do: They simply couple up, and boom — a child is born.

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For many young trans people, the question of having babies is likely the last thing on their minds. Who could blame them? Like all young people, they’re figuring out their future, and matters of diapers and breast-feeding seem abstract and far off. But unlike all young people, young trans people are often making choices that have long-term consequences for their fertility. Which is part of how I, a 32-year-old cisgender lesbian, and Lara, my 33-year-old trans fiancée, came to be in the situation we’re in today: trying to conceive a child, even though Lara transitioned nearly four years ago.

I didn’t even realize I wanted biological kids until my mid-20s. Before then, I’d vaguely imagined that children would simply come to me, à la Auntie Mame, or Diane Keaton in “Baby Boom”: I’d inherit them from a long-lost relative and simply slot them into my independent, modern life. Little did I know then that in just a few years, I’d be staying up late to read studies in which scientists combined the eggs of two female rats to make a child, hoping for 50 more years on the planet so that I’d be around when they began testing on humans.