Trans Fertility takes center stage at the World Fertility Awards!

Earlier this month, something incredibly significant happened in the world (and we do mean WORLD) of reproductive health: at the World Fertility Awards in New York City, transgender fertility work was named, recognized, and placed on a global stage alongside major advances in assisted reproductive technology, access, and patient advocacy.

Not as a niche issue or an add-on, but as part of the future of fertility.

We couldn’t be more excited.

The World Fertility Awards, produced by pregnantish, exist to recognize people and projects expanding access, awareness, innovation, and equity in family building around the world. This year’s honorees included clinicians, researchers, advocates, and leaders working across continents to address infertility, access gaps, and outdated narratives about who gets to build a family.

And trans fertility was part of that conversation.

For decades, transgender and nonbinary people have been navigating fertility care from the margins, often encountering misinformation, outright denial of care, or clinical guidance that was never designed with our bodies and lives in mind. Many of us were told we had to choose between transition and the possibility of ever having biological children. Others were never offered fertility counseling at all.

And yet, trans people have always been building families.

What’s changed is not the desire or the legitimacy of trans family-building, but the willingness of institutions to finally pay attention.

The World Fertility Awards explicitly center equity and inclusion as one of their three core pillars, alongside Access and Innovation. In that framing, trans fertility isn’t a “special interest.” It’s a necessary part of addressing who fertility care has historically excluded and who it must include moving forward.

That global context matters too. Fertility stigma, access barriers, and cultural taboos exist everywhere, but they don’t look the same in Nigeria as they do in India, Brazil, or the United States. Trans and gender-diverse people are navigating all of that… layered onto already complex systems. Recognition at an international event signals that trans fertility is not just a U.S.-based conversation or a passing trend. It’s part of a broader, worldwide reckoning with how reproductive care has failed many people—and how it can do better.

For Trans Fertility Co, this moment is less about an award and more about momentum.

It reflects years of work by trans patients sharing their stories, clinicians willing to question outdated protocols, researchers pushing for better data, and advocates insisting that informed consent, bodily autonomy, and reproductive choice apply to everyone.

It also raises the bar! Visibility without follow-through doesn’t help patients. Recognition without systemic change doesn’t reduce harm. The real work continues in exam rooms, intake forms, insurance policies, medical education, and the everyday conversations providers have—or avoid—with trans patients.

Because moments like this tell us something important: trans fertility is no longer invisible to the broader fertility field. We’re not going back into the shadows.

Trans people deserve accurate information about our reproductive options. We deserve providers who are curious rather than fearful, informed rather than assumptive. We deserve fertility care that adapts to us… not the other way around.

Seeing trans fertility named on a global stage is one small but meaningful signal that the field is beginning to catch up to that truth, and that’s worth marking.

We are so grateful to pregnantish for featuring trans fertility front and center at this year’s awards, and we are equally grateful to the selection committee for taking this risk and elevating our work. We can’t wait to see what comes next from this partnership!