Communication on new building - room available for 'chest feeding'

@DadJoke

men dismissing women’s concerns as “moral panic” is peak misogyny

you’re not a woman, you’ve never experienced breastfeeding or pregnancy. Stay in your lane and stop telling us how we should feel

Extraordinary isn't it? Oh to have the confidence of a thoroughly average male.

This faux inclusivity only serves to patronise, divide and alienate.

Absolutely. You could nail that over the door of nearly all this rubbish.

A man dismissing women's legitimate objections as 'moral panic' is indicative of a man who doesn't give a shit about women's rights. It signals complete and utter disrespect.

As a non binary trans person I do object to a cis Dad coming on here and lecturing me about how I feel.

Chest-feeding is meaningless and inaccurate. The room is for people who feed with their breasts. They can call their breasts boobs, t**s, boobies - whatever they want but the room is simply for women who breastfeed.

What if someone’s triggered by the word ‘feeding’? Let’s change that too. How about something less connected to EDs? Ooh, I know ‘breathing’ - that’s a nice, neutral word. Let’s call it the Chest Breathing room 🙄

I also think it’s hugely patronising to trans men. They negotiate a world full of nursing bras, breast milk, nipple creams, etc etc, and cope. This faux inclusivity only serves to patronise, divide and alienate.

No, the sign doesn't erase women of itself.

It's the whole bloody redefining of women's words which is deliberately attempting to erase the fact of what women really are and hence impairs women's fundamental rights.

Women are adult human females. Transmen are 'masculine' adult human females.

Except that's not what's happening here. You might have missed it, but "breast" is front and center in the email. If it said "chest feeding" alone, you;'d have a point.

The amount of moral panic surrounding an innocuous email which includes trans men is quite eye-opening.

It is not “moral panic” to object to a sign legitimatising something that does not exist. There is no such thing a chest feeding. No human has ever fed from another human’s chest. Things that aren’t true shouldn’t be on non-joke signs.

As a non binary person I find the sign offensive. I do not refer to the fatty deposits on my upper torso and find the word 'chest' triggering. Why are my needs not met? Why am I not included?

Your bafflement can be addressed. You are not a trans man, but you can easily discover trans men's views on this by either reading about it, or asking one of your trans men friends. To help you out:

https://academic.oup.com/lawfam/article/34/3/225/6040670

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0266613823000232

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7513446/

And, to be clear, you are not being "erased", trans men are being included in this innocuous sign. This is a straightforward moral panic.

if they start messing around using mealy words who’s to stop someone with a lactation fetish going it to the room? Adults want one to ‘chest feed’?

come on, we’ve seen how empowered creepy (mostly) men get off my pushing boundaries (remember the NSPCC rubber man doing unmentionables in the loos and filming it - because they backed his behaviour up and let him get away with it - too scared to say ‘no’).

If they changed it to the one stop breast and chest clinic it really would indicate an entirely different set of cancers.

It's not called the one stop chest clinic when you've a lump that needs investigating.

Men and women get referred as men can get breast cancer too.

Anatomically speaking your chest is an entirely different area of the body which includes ribs and lungs, heart and spine.

If it’s workplace provision then in reality it’s likely to get more use by women expressing their breastmilk. The room will need to be lockable and have hand washing facilities.

what’s the point in this – presumably if you don’t have any breasts you’ll be using a bottle?

@MimiGC the room is most often used for breastfeeding mums to express milk.

Indeed. It must be bra-phobia that’s triggering the dysphoria…

The word “chestfeeding” on the door of the mother and baby room = not triggering, perfectly acceptable. No problem with taking my engorged breast and leaking nipple out of my breastfeeding bra and latching my baby on, or attaching a breast pump to my nipple and watching my breast milk squirt into the bottle, in this room. No siree. All perfectly fine.

The word “breastfeeding” on the door of the mother and baby room = triggering! unacceptable! exclusionary! I can’t even walk through the door of this room, I’m so victimised by the alphabet!

So, apparently, the letters ch make a word perfectly tolerable. But the letters br and a make the same word intolerable. Bra-phobia, clearly.

I have studied and worked at universities for decades and never once seen a student or staff member have their baby with them for anything other than a short visit. I very much doubt this baby feeding room will get much use at all on a regular basis and the chances of there being a mother who is trans or non binary whose baby needs feeding is pretty slim. I mean what are they doing with the baby the rest of the time? If the baby is in the university nursery, the nursery would likely be the best place to feed it.

Maybe he is literally "getting his tits out for the team".

I just can't get over the chutzpah of a bloke coming on here and proclaiming what transmen want and women must do. It's ... well, it's confidence I wish I had, frankly.

I will never not be baffled at the mental gymnastics required to say that going through pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding as a trans man (literally the most female things you can do) in no way creates gender dysphoria, but seeing the words mother, woman, and breastfeeding is unbearable and so women and femaleness must be erased from all language surrounding maternity.

Men have breasts, men can get breast cancer. There is no need for the word chest for f to m people who have had a baby as no matter how they identify they still have breasts. Absolutely disgusting that the university are pandering to a tiny tiny minority with body dismorphia

"I imagine they envisaged chest feeding was the inclusive way of referring to females identifying as TM who would find reference to their breasts triggering or offensive (though why that doesn't extend to using them to feed their children is a mystery to me..)"

Frankly I've never understood why a TiF would want to become pregnant at all, let alone carrying to term and then "chest feeding" as they prefer to call it - Surely that goes against the whole idea of wishing they weren't female?

There are plenty of children in the care system desperately in need of loving parents, desperately wanting to be adopted, why would a TiF put themselves through the (I presume) triggering, extremely debilitating gender dysphoria of pregnancy, child birth, and breast feeding if they've "always been a man" and womanhood is so abhorrent to them?
It just doesn't make any sense to me at all.

I would raise an objection that as women, you need a women only space for breastfeeding and that you feel that is your right. You would like safe female only space to feed your child. They are welcome to offer a separate space to chest feeders 🙄 Just like they offer single sex toilets!

To which the explanation would presumably be that the 'chest feeders' are indeed female but it'd be good to get the virtue signallers saying that out loud.