La Leche League FB page

Didn't men have breastplates on their armour?

They did. Nipples on same were considered superfluous. From comparing older with more recent usages, I suspect a chest/breast distinction developed to allow men to separate themselves from any hint of womanliness in the context of their sexualisation of women's mammary wossnames.

Everyone had a breast until the word became too sexualised, then men did their usual distancing act. Same old, same old.

Personally I hate chestfeeding because calling it breastfeeding helped me to desexualise my own and stop being bothered by them so much.

😂

Body feeding sounds a bit Jeffrey Dahmer to me 😨

Just had a scroll through. I notice that usually their posts get about 10-15 comments, and this one got 780. Looking through it’s all the usual, TRAs who’ve popped up out of nowhere, and the sort of woke middle class white women who always seem to jump on this sort of thing as though they have the god-given right to speak for everyone.

I think much effort has been made to capture organisations and services which specifically relate to women and girls and this is a prime example.

I wonder how many breastfeeding counsellors, childbirth educators, brown owls, guiders, midwives, health visitors at the grass roots level are fully signed up to this.

I wonder how would any breastfeeding counsellor actually feel faced with the reality of what must currently be purely theoretical.

Are these groups actually bringing about their own dissolution?

How much of what LLL has actually stood for over the years would be wiped out by queer theory? Why were all these organisations so quick to adopt this position?

As I asked on a different thread are men’s health organisations and services under the same pressure? Are urologists changing all the language on urology wards to be less offensive/more inclusive?

I suspect those managing social media channels tend to be more on the untrained and right-on side.

I watched this play out on FB. The LLL line seems to be that you should use the words that the person you’re dealing with prefers - which is obviously right.

But in terms of that stayed up and what was deleted:

• personal attacks stayed up (by those arguing for body feeding etc)
• trolling (as in, I’m trolling this post because you’re all transphobes who won’t listen) stayed up
• calling someone cis despite them saying they found it offensive stayed up (and was repeated, with emphasis)
• posts asking about the risks of medication (to the baby) to induce lactation in people born male were taken down
• posts asking about maintaining single sex spaces were taken down
• other posts went before I could see them, I don’t know what they said but they were accused of faux innocent questions

So while the LLL policy says one thing (I’ve checked out their web page, it’s balanced and carefully worded), their moderation of the comments on the post says another.

This is really sad. Breastfeeding support was missing for quite a swathe of a generation whose own mothers weren't able to give advice from experience. Why wouldn't La Leche just centre breast feeding? Without all that noise. What part of someone's 'chest' would the baby latch onto?

Why are these people f*cking with important things like this?

Words have specific meanings, imagine!? Who could have anticipated confusion or resistance arising from fucking with the way almost all the people talk about themselves?

The chest is the cavity in the thorax in which the heart and lungs reside.

‘Body feeding’ sounds like cannibalism.

LaLaLeche League have fallen far from their ‘Woman;y Art of Breastfeeding’ years.

I have had a chest infection.
I have had a breast infection.
They were very, very different sorts of pain!
In different places.

Hang on a minute.

I thought the nice inclusive thing to do was to refer to people by their organs so transmen didn't feel sad.

So vagina-person, uterus-haver, people with a cervix, etc.

So why is 'breastfeeding' bad and triggering, but vulva-owner is requested?

It's starting to seem like what's "acceptable" and "inclusive" is anything that women don't like, and vice versa.

I get that there are some people who despite getting pregnant, giving birth and breastfeeding a baby have decided that the words woman, breast, female, whether doesn’t refer to them/upsets them/makes them feel unsafe etc.

This should be treated sensitively by relevant associations, professionals etc - but it doesn’t mean that the rest of the world have to pussy foot around and pretend they don’t use words ‘just in case’ someone gets upset (with perfectly good words that have been used for centuries). You don’t get to dictate what most of the population say/think because you have decided that it’s not for you. Besides, giving birth would be way more ‘triggering’ than being called ‘Miss’ surely?

It’s like ‘winterval’ (shhhhhh don’t offend the Muslims) where 99.99% of the non Christian people I know think it’s an absolute nonsense and out a tree up anyway.

Here’s how to complain for anyone who follows that page www.laleche.org.uk/comments-compliments-complaints/

Worth pointing out how them going down that path will go

An ex-colleague was BIG into La Leche. She did fundraising and volunteered and the majority of her friends seemed to come from the group. They were all super, super conservative. There is no way any of them would be remotely interested in promoting 'chest-feeding'.

How long until "the womanly art of breastfeeding" gets recalled for ritual burning? As others have pointed out, both men and women have breasts. They look different and have different purposes, but even if a biological man managed to lactate via some horrible medical interventions he would still in fact be breastfeeding. Its so unbelievably stupid. The levels of ignorance around basic medical science are so overwhelmingly obvious in TRA groups, but I'd expect LLL to know a bit better!

There were far more GC comments the first night. What a surprise...they've all been deleted.

Their page name and more recent posts still have the word breastfeeding in them. As long as they don’t start referring to chestfeeding etc and avoiding using the term mother when addressing the collective then recognising that some people don’t want terms like breastfeeding and mother, is ok

I wonder how many transmen have got pregnant, continued the pregnancy, given birth, and chosen to breastfeed their baby, using all their female organs they clearly aren't dysphoric about, but would be genuinely psychologically harmed by the use of the term "breastfeeding".

I predict something close to zero.

Do they realise that changing the name of a thing doesn't actually change the thing?

chestfeed isn’t a thing.

To be fair, they have said 'breastfeed or chestfeed'. I agree that 'chestfeeding' (or 'bodyfeeding' as suggested on the FB thread!) is a bit of a silly term, but at least they haven't just erased the term 'breastfeeding' just yet.

Why have they deleted so many comments though?

I now ignore organisations who do this, I won’t donate or fundraise. They have taken their eyes off the ball (ie what they are there to do) and are wasting time, energy and money or the gymnastics involved to be ‘inclusive’.

Sheesh! There are so many women on that LLL FB thread whose brains appear to have dropped out. So welcoming to an ideology that is actually erasing the rights of women. They are so pleased to be 'accepting' of an ideology that is not in their own interests. Women who post to defend the word "woman" are called "angry" and told they need to educate themselves.

It looks like the LLL and most of it's FB members are fully captured.

4 Posts down:
www.facebook.com/breastfeedinglllgb

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Their cover photo still states "mother to mother support for breast-feeding". I'm surprised they haven't taken that down yet. Not inclusive enough 🤔