Jake Graf has announced he and his wife Hannah have welcomed a baby girl via surrogate.
The trans couple revealed their daughter was born at 5.30am on Tuesday morning, but are yet to reveal her name.
“We couldn’t be happier nor more grateful,” Jake wrote in his tweet, alongside a photo of him cradling their newborn with Hannah on a sofa.
The couple announced they were expecting their first child together in December 2019. They explained they used Jake’s eggs, which were frozen before his gender-affirmation surgery at 36.
Jake said he had been on testosterone for six years, but didn’t want to miss out on having kids, so stopped taking it for six months and went to a fertility clinic.
“They said they had no statistics to show how successful it was likely to be,” he told the Mail at the time. “They’d never done anything like it before. But they agreed to try to harvest some eggs.”
The couple found their surrogate through the National Fertility Society. “It’s a little bit like dating,” said Hannah.
“You need to have shared values and the same outlook. I think our surrogate – who is a very warm, practical person with children of her own – got the sense that we were a happy couple who love each other; that we’ll be good parents.”
The couple married two years ago in March 2018. Speaking to HuffPost UK before the big day, they said they’d hoped the wedding would be a significant moment for trans visibility and show the world that “you can be trans and happy”.
“Growing up, I never thought I would be happy,” Winterbourne told HuffPost UK in the lead up to the wedding. “But when I met Jake, things changed.”
They tied the knot in an intimate ceremony in Chelsea Town Hall, London. The ceremony was small with fewer than 20 guests each, as they said they were saving to start a family.
Congrats to the new family!