Petitioning Parliament to ban males from attempting to breastfeed infants

You’re missing the point yet again that those are “protocols” designed for biological women, who already have breast tissue and the baseline levels of female hormones. They aren’t used in the U.K.; and domperidone is banned in the US, and you won’t find much evidence base for them anyway, even in biological women. They’re completely unevidenced in men, who don’t have fully developed milk tissue to start with, even after being on high doses of oestrogen! They’d also need other hormones like prolactin and progesterone. Synthetic hormones aren’t even the same as naturally produced hormones either, even the supposedly new “bioidentical” ones - do a bit of research on how synthetic hormones are produced and their chemical makeup, and then see whether you want them in your newborn in whatever quantities!

Men have no business stimulating their own bodily secretions to feed to infants. It is totally perverse and abusive.

It doesn’t matter whether it is ‘safe’ or not. The only person who should be suckling the baby is its mother.

Anyone else sticking their nipple in the babies mouth is a wrong un. They are doing it for themselves.

If the baby had an adult’s comprehension of the world and an adult’s capacity to consent, it would tell anyone other than it’s mother to fuck off.

I looked up the protocol and apparently you take hormones for breast growth which you stop taking before the baby is born, so the hormones part wouldn't be a concern. I don't know whether a trans woman would stop hormones completely before starting to breastfeed or not, maybe they do, do you know this? The other thing is domperidone which has been studied to an extent and women are prescribed it sometimes for breastfeeding, I know women who have. I've heard a rumour that trans women have to take double the amount, do you know the truth of that part? And the other thing is herbs like fenugreek which women take to help with their supply sometimes as well. I don't know why it's inconceivable that milk from someone who took those things could possibly be found to be safe?

Also, in practice, women take drugs that haven't been conclusively proven to be safe during breastfeeding all the time. I breastfed for several years and I can think of 3 occasions where I needed a medication that isn't recommended for use in breastfeeding, because it hasn't been studied, and the doctor prescribed it anyway because it's probably fine. There aren't that many medications that are proven to be harmful in breastfeeding really, most of them haven't been studied but women just take them anyway. This is a source of frustration to me and many other women but mainly because of the barriers to getting medications that are fine to take. So I don't think the likelihood of milk that is produced using drugs being totally safe is "vanishingly low", no.

The NSPCC is useless. Would they give the same answer if a man decided to feed his baby semen?

The mother and baby are intimately connected like no other human relationship. The baby grows inside the mother’s womb , it travels down and out of her vagina, the baby roots for the mother’s nipples to feed from, when the baby feeds, the mother’s womb will contract after the birth.

A man has no business trying to ape any of this, he is surplus to requirements and has nothing to offer. It’s just the way it is. Tough fellas, if you feel envious or shut out.

The baby comes out of the vagina. The vagina is a woman’s sex organ.

Men are not entitled to touch babies with their sex organs just because the baby comes out of the woman’s sex organ.

Men are not entitled to try to suckle babies just because the mother suckles the baby (like the final phase of gestation).

Men who want to intimately insert themselves between the mother and baby need to seek psychological help and if they follow through on that want, they need to be punished for abusing children.

Please please could someone who is on Twitter tweet this to the NSPCC?

An adult using children to validate their feelings is an act of abuse.
If you cant recognise that because you find the context confusing, I suggest you take a refresher course in safeguarding.

Good grief. By definition, if male bodies are not capable of lactating without huge doses of synthetic hormones and off-label drugs, then the likelihood of the milk being just lovely and exactly as produced by a female body which needs none of those things is pretty vanishingly low, isn’t it? Logically, there is no way of transwomen lactating OTHER than with high dose hormone and drug regimens. So treating the question as if it can be separated from this is intellectually and logically absolutely daft. It’s the intellectual equivalent of “if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bus”.

I’ll sign.

Or yeah, this

I didn't know they had, so no that isn't my objection. My objection is their being in thrall to an ideology which removes or lessens safeguarding for children, whilst being a children's safeguarding charity. I wouldn't term that feeling 'dislike', more horror and disgust that they are so credulous that they will throw away safeguarding of children, their actual purpose, to prop up adult fetishes and worse.

And plenty of organisations have been well established and respected, and chucked that all away in service of the TQ+ - Stonewall being an obvious example.

But again, I think you already know that.

Why do you keep putting the word transphobia in quote marks as if I said it?

The safety and quality of what babies are ingesting is really important yes. Is that the motive for wanting to ban trans women breastfeeding though? There is some reason you and other previous posters want it banned other than that. There seems to be a lot of desire to never get it proven that it's fit for consumption.

Why is the attitude not "how interesting that trans women might be capable of lactating safe an nutritious milk. Someone should study this and find out and I wish them luck"? It seems more like if they showed it was safe and nutritious then you still wouldn't be okay with it.

Men trying to breastfeed is ridiculous.

Trying to make it a criminal offence, thinking you can police this is actually even more ridiculous.

Oh, which sounds more likely as a reason to distrust NSPCC?

— pulled out of an MN live chat
— defended graphic public wank photos of one of their employees in rubber fetish wear with his cock out for all to see, indulging in sexual kink while at work at a child protection charity

Which of those could be more objectionable? Hmm, hard to decide!

Get a f*-ing grip, you’re so deep in justifying men’s sexual perversions that your brains have fallen out.

@flaffydaffy You must be very young or astonishingly wedded to gender ideology if you honestly think that making sure that babies aren’t harmed is some kind of justification for transphobia.

In any other context the threshold for what newborn babies and breastfeeding mothers are ingesting is extremely high indeed, to the point where women are discouraged from taking medication that’s got fifty years of safety evidence, “just in case”. But you think that objecting to completely unevidenced drug induced unnatural lactation which relies on high levels of artificial hormones and off-label antiemetics or antipsychotics, with no evidence at all whether they are passed to the baby, is merely a front for “transphobia”?

You really need to take a bit of a look at your mindset, and examine how far you are clinging to the tenets of an extreme ideology against common sense, reason and logic. It is not either normal or healthy to subscribe to an extreme set of ideas to the point where you blithely dismiss potential serious harms to newborns because this doesn’t fit with your ideology. Or to accuse others of “transphobia” for asking for the evidence base of normal medical science to be applied here. You come across as someone so blinded to the normal considerations of life that you’re lacking any kind of rationality or perspective here.

Or maybe you just dislike them because they pulled out of a MN live chat?

NSPCC are very well established and respected.

Update- source
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20230705141205/twitter.com/SurrogConcern/status/1676241607400497152" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20230705141205/twitter.com/SurrogConcern/status/1676241607400497152

https://twitter.com/SurrogConcern/status/1676241607400497152

“Beneficial to the infant” is the standard. But research answering that question could not be carried out ethically. So as a pp suggested, the research should investigate whether male nipple secretions have the same composition as real breast milk. With the precise meaning of “the same composition as real breast milk” agreed in advance before they start any analysis.

Exactly. Man chest milk would be pumped and then analysed to compare to mothers breast milk. You can’t ethically feed an infant and then track how healthy or poorly it becomes. You can give adults hormones and then pump body fluids from them if they consent and volunteer to participate in a clinical trial. I don’t think there would be many TW volunteers willing to suffer the side effects and risks of lactation induction just for science though. So the research will have tons of barriers to even get off to a start (mwah hah hah) which would be too bad, so sad because it’s not ethical to feed infants something is isn’t even proven to be safe much less beneficial.

It’s the fastest route to achieve and maintain the stated aim of the OP.

For the record I don’t think this fetish is limited to males so to me that’s a nonissue. I don’t agree a sexual fetish for nipple play equals being a child sex abuser either. I think it’s a bit more complex than that.

I genuinely wouldn’t want anything fed to an infant without proof it is safe & beneficial, and most people can get behind that aim.

Id be dead by the time this came up for debate anyway, so it would be up to later generations what to do. They can lift moratorium or kick the can down the road.

But the choice is done for my generation and anyone having babies the next few decades or so- a moratorium will be in place de facto banning it until or if it ever gets proven to be safe and beneficial.

What if research proved that it's safe? Would you accept the findings?

You completely missed the point of the comment; my point was that trans oriented research tends to have goalposts on wheels.

So one would have to ensure that any research into this issue is conducted by ethical researchers who don’t violate basic research principles in the way that trans oriented researchers tend to - like deciding what question they were asking based on what answers they got. The hypothetical finding I made up was intended as an exaggerated simplistic example of how unethical researchers might do such a thing.

As to your question - “safe” is too low a bar, obviously. That was another of the points of the exaggerated hypothetical, that you missed.

“Beneficial to the infant” is the standard. But research answering that question could not be carried out ethically. So as a pp suggested, the research should investigate whether male nipple secretions have the same composition as real breast milk. With the precise meaning of “the same composition as real breast milk” agreed in advance before they start any analysis.

Right so...this is nothing to do with safety and composition of the milk, that concern would just be used in a petition in order to make it look respectable. And you're open about that.
Whoever makes such a petition should hope that what you just said doesn't get screenshotted on twitter!

I do agree that the fact they're captured is going to prevent their recognising the potential child abuse angle here, since they simply see "a woman feeding her baby".

However, even if they weren't blinded by that, I doubt they would question whether the NHS is correct to promote male breastfeeding, as they, like everyone else, rely on the NHS to provide evidence-based health advice and to do the necessary due diligence on the advice they provide to patients and the public.

I accept that if the NHS didn't promote male breastfeeding then the NSPCC may well still say "health organisations say it's fine" (as others might continue to say that), so it might not change NSPCC's position.

But I think it's a travesty that the reason the NSPCC or anyone else can simply shrug and say "it's fine, nothing to see here" with such conviction and without challenge is because the NHS, as the leading authority on public health, is also saying it's fine. So all other organisations can comfortably defer to the NHS's authority instead of having to actually consider their own position.

So getting to scientific proof as to whether man chest milk is equivalent to formula or mothers breast milk to even try and lift the moratorium on it would take DECADES. And there are so many ways to starve such research of funding, to debate that proof is not conclusive and ‘more research is needed’ and so on. There can also be muddying the waters by injecting bad science into the mix- creating skepticism of all research results.

Look at climate change and as to whether it even exists. They’re at 70yrs of trying to convince people it exists. And that’s an issue that is planet ending.

The man chest milk debate could rage on for over a century if we play our cards right, and by the time it’s decided generations of engrained social practice would be male parents use formula.

So my route envisions, an immediate stop to it and then keep kicking that can down the road.

The NSPCC makes it quite clear that they are relying on the NHS guidance to inform their position.

While the NHS is still promoting male breastfeeding on their website and elsewhere, then it is irrelevant whether other organisations such as the NSPCC are captured or not.

Even if, for the sake of argument, the NSPCC suspected it was potentially dangerous, they would struggle to prove that while the NHS website is saying it's not only not abusive, but actually encouraged.

I don't really agree with this. The NSPCC can and does take positions on a variety of things such as online safety where the current rules are (to all intents and purposes) endorsed by the government, as well as in areas such as the Bell JR, where they were only too happy to express a view before the evidence was heard, let alone the judgement being known.

They're choosing to ignore child abuse. That's their position on this.

The NSPCC makes it quite clear that they are relying on the NHS guidance to inform their position.

While the NHS is still promoting male breastfeeding on their website and elsewhere, then it is irrelevant whether other organisations such as the NSPCC are captured or not.

Even if, for the sake of argument, the NSPCC suspected it was potentially dangerous, they would struggle to prove that while the NHS website is saying it's not only not abusive, but actually encouraged.

This is very similar to the situation that developed with everyone (schools, therapists, etc) relying on the NHS GIDS website for how to deal with children who say they feel like they're the opposite sex.

While the NHS is condoning it, no-one else can make a plausible argument to defy the NHS position, because outside of gender identity ideology, the NHS is known to have a pretty standard policy of relying on evidence-based practice. So as with GIDS, everyone else just assumes that the NHS's advice on trans issues is also based on the same scientific standards. Until they realise it's not, like they did with the GIDS website.