Today on Twitter

DC1 couldn’t breastfeed. I expressed milk and bottle-fed him my expressed breastmilk, instead of using formula, until he’d got a good start on weaning. I wouldn’t have called that breastfeeding. I suppose it would fall under a “human milk feeding” umbrella, although that’s a term I’ve not come across before.

If you are able to use your womb to grow the baby, you should be able to face the reality of which bit of your anatomy feeds it once it's born.

This is what I've never understood. If your dysphoria can tolerate having periods, getting pregnant, growing a baby in your womb and pushing it out through your vagina, why is the word breastfeeding a bridge too far?

Yes, but if it refers to trans men (as in biological female) what's wrong with including them as well?
Because NOBODY is a 'chestfeeder'. It's not your chest that nourishes the baby, it's your breasts. If you are able to use your womb to grow the baby, you should be able to face the reality of which bit of your anatomy feeds it once it's born.

After all, the press and the courts have come out with mind-benders like 'her penis' in the recent past, haven't they? So why not 'his breasts'?

People need to deal with bloody reality, even if they do think it's a nasty meanie.

Re the Femcare/PCOS one - I thought the screenshot in this OP was bad enough but there's an even more egregious example mentioned in another thread.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4061147-Menstruators-who-take-the-contraceptive-pill

Well, let's face it, it's fucking hard to give a baby human milk without breasts being involved in some way, isn't it?

Yes, but if it refers to trans men (as in biological female) what's wrong with including them as well?
Yes, we know they're breasts, but if it makes them more included to say chest feeding, not seeing a problem personally.
As I said, if they had just not bothered to say breastfeeding as well I would see the point, and that would be but it's right there too - breastfeeding is mentioned.

Or rather than neologism I should say it's a term usually used in medical research papers and within a limited medical care context for preterm or unwell newborns. This group is addressing parents and not medial professionals, which is why I believe it is superfluous to requirements.

@Quaagars

Missing what's wrong with that first one? Is it because they include chest feeding? They also say breastfeeding, that hasn't been left out - so they say they support everyone to feed, that's a good thing, surely? Could understand more if they hadn't mentioned breast feeding too but they have

A female who identifies as trans who has had a mastectomy and therefore presents with a chest that resembles that of a man, cannot breastfeed. A female who identifies as trans who still has breasts, is feeding her baby with her breasts, not her chest. Because the chest is the entire frontal upper body, hence we say chest infection. Men are born with a small amount of breast tissue, which is why they can get breast cancer, we don't say chest cancer.

You need fully developed breast tissue with milk ducts to be able to nurse a baby, and anyone who can do so is breastfeeding.

Accurate language is important, vital even in medicine. And with millions of women breastfeeding every day and just a few score (if that) of females who identify as trans breastfeeding, demanding or expecting the language change to accommodate a fraction of a percent of these mothers is preposterous overreach.

We do not proclaim that humans have 11 fingers or toes even though polydactyly is more frequently occurring than babies being nursed by a mother who identifies as trans. Why aren't companies falling over themselves to proclaim that we have 11 fingers as if that was just a standard variation?

As for human milk feeding, if you read up on the cruel exploitation of birth mothers within surrogacy arrangements in countries where that practice is booming, you would never use that word.

Women who either all or some of the time express for their babies are still breastfeeding, even if they put their expressed milk in a bottle. It's still not formula feeding and almost always done where the mother absolutely wants to breastfeed, but it is not an option for all feeds.

And where women donate their breastmilk, usually for babies where formula is not an option, the baby is fed donated breastmilk. We've never called it "human milk feeding".

So that horrendous word is a neologism no one needs.

*is

My rage is having an impact on my spelling.

Is it because they include chest feeding?
Well, let's face it, it's fucking hard to give a baby human milk without breasts being involved in some way, isn't it?

I am so tired of language being contorted, and women and womanhood being erased.

The term is breastfeeding. Coz human milk in made in breasts.
Get the fuck over it.

I always think of the film Carrie when I hear the term menstruators.

Tempting to post a photo of Sissy Spacek drenched head to foot in blood & "MENSTRUATORS!!! 😱" every time it's posted on Twitter. It's so freaking othering.

The bleeder is ironically correct though, it's definitely the way young girls are experiencing trans "treatment" that should be questioned.

She’s sounds like a lovely bleeder.

More twitter. Jamil again.

(Leaving aside that 'chestfeeding' is odd - 'breast' applies to both sexes and is different to chest. Clear if you remember males can get breast cancer.)

Missing what's wrong with that first one?
Is it because they include chest feeding?
They also say breastfeeding, that hasn't been left out - so they say they support everyone to feed, that's a good thing, surely?
Could understand more if they hadn't mentioned breast feeding too but they have

I agree.

Nothing seems to be enough until language has been utterly twisted, until women have been erased as a sex class and been forced to completely capitulate. I don't think people would even believe me half the time about the sort of text being used because it seems so ridiculous to the average person.

Some of these sorts of messages will surely include serious health advice and to make them more difficult for women unsure of the biologicial terms used, or where English isn't the first language or where there may be learning difficulties goes beyond annoying to being outright dangerous. To obscure that when you should be as accessible as possible is disgusting. But hey - maybe women just need to 'be kind' and its a small price to pay eh?

The Plain English Campaign was fantastic.

It needs reviving.

Fucking ridiculous

Years and years ago i worked in a bank when the plain English campaign really got going

We had to go through all our literature and letters etc and make them as easy to understand as humanly possible

What the hell happened?

Its like when you have to do a 1000 word essay and you fill it with as many words as you can cos you can’t think of anything to actually say!

I did think that, Errol, but I’d already posted then, but I suspect you’re correct.

Have a think about "human milk feeding families" and what that means. It means milk extraction from human females to be provided to others for their use.

Bizarre. Humans are not the only species who menstruate, so one could easily presume they're talking about apes and monkeys, elephant shrews or bats.

And they're reducing their target audience to the one in four of us who are menstruating at any one time. Definitely not talking to post-menopausal women, are they?

Also, I just find throwaway did you knows without source or detail bloody annoying. Because while, yes, the median age for girls to get their period is about 12 and a half now, that median has actually been fairly stable for decades now. The reason for this earlier onset lies in better health, better access to food and better nutrition which together mean that today's girls reach the weight necessary for menarche to set in much sooner.

But what can you expect from a group that dehumanises women and girls like this. Each and every single company that buys into this language also buys into the destruction of women and girls as a distinctive biological and political class. That is the end result of this practice.

It's okay to accept that women and girls exist. It's alright to use our name when talking about biological functions only the female-bodied can experience. It's a dire state of affairs when organisations dedicated to these exclusively female experiences take the extreme outliers as the norm. One in 34,000 adult women have sex dysphoria. Up to one in 100 has gender dysphoria, which may or may not include rejecting her female body and/or it's functions. So 99% of us must lose our name for this small number of women, who could, after all, be easily included by additional words.

There was an article I read a while back that bemoaned the fact that only 5% of articles about menstruation focused on the experiences of women and girls who identify as trans. (I'm sure that percentage is much higher now.) It hadn't occurred to the writer that this was an at least five-fold overrepresentation of this group. Made me wonder what percentage would be deemed sufficient. I guess the answer is quite clear now...

I've just checked, in general menopause doesn't end PCOS. Is that comment re depression really only in relation to the subgroup of women with PCOS who do menstruate?
All this avoidance of 'woman' is bad but that one gets worse the more I think about it.