So this looks like Scot Gov has gone tits up again

She was brilliant. The only point she didn't have time to unpack was that these male secretions are the result of men ingesting a vast amount of chemicals to create them, and no one seems to be at all worried about this passing to the baby while the man has his experience, while women who breast feed are absolutely restricted constantly from taking medications that might pass to the baby. The double standards are vast.

The articles on the thread here also show, the focus of medics involved is always 'the patient' - which is the man they are supporting the gender expression of. The baby is merely a prop, a means to this treatment for the patient, and that should be raising very serious child safeguarding concerns when they are not even figuring as the other human involved and the one taking all the risks, while being used to provide a man with a desired experience for his emotional benefit.

It reminds me of the psychologists who decided to send men to use women's facilities as a means of them demonstrating their sincerity of desire for medical treatment, without once considering the women they were inflicting these men on or what it did to those women's spaces and equalities.

I agree any medical professional pioneering this abuse should be questioned and held to account.

Where are the biologists and midwifery professionals to stand up and put an end to this ridiculous notion? Anyone with an ounce of common sense will know that biological men cannot produce human milk to sustain an infant's requirements. It is complete bullshit and the 'experts' should be speaking up and condemning this practice.

Poor innocent defenceless babies being used and abused.

Wtf Scottish government. I feel sick. This is child abuse. State sanctioned child abuse.

To think of all the things I did to make sure my milk was safe, when I had a cold I didn't even take cold/flu pills! This is just...awful. Who can I write to about this? What a thing to read about nearing bedtime. Ugh.

Call me jaded but to those of us who have been in this section for several years under various names, this is not new news. It's just that it's hit mainstream media at long last thanks to the SNP.

Most midwifes can't speak up, because ... they're employed by the NHS.

A reminder of how the female breast is part of a complete feeding system and no male breast has this ability.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19f8K414tC/?mibextid=wwXIfr

In 2008, Katie Hinde stood in a California primate lab staring at hundreds of milk samples. Male babies got richer milk. Females got more volume. Science had missed half the conversation.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the California National Primate Research Center, analyzing milk from rhesus macaque mothers. For months, she'd been measuring fat content, protein levels, mineral concentrations. The data showed something she hadn't expected: monkey mothers were producing completely different milk depending on whether they'd given birth to sons or daughters.

Sons received milk with higher concentrations of fat and protein—more energy per ounce. Daughters received more milk overall, with higher calcium levels. The biological recipe wasn't universal. It was customized.

Hinde ran the numbers again. The pattern held across dozens of mother-infant pairs. This wasn't random variation. This was systematic.

She thought about what she'd been taught in graduate school. Milk was nutrition. Calories, proteins, fats. A delivery system for energy. But if milk was just fuel, why would it differ based on the baby's sex? Why would mothers unconsciously adjust the formula?

The answer shifted everything: milk wasn't passive. It was a message.
Hinde had arrived at this question through an unusual path. She'd earned her bachelor's degree in anthropology from the University of Washington, then completed her PhD at UCLA in 2008. While most lactation research focused on dairy cattle or developing infant formulas, Hinde wanted to understand what milk actually did in primate mothers and babies.

At UC Davis, she had access to the largest primate research center in the United States. She could collect milk samples at different stages of lactation, track infant development, measure maternal characteristics. She could ask questions that had never been systematically studied.
Like: why do young mothers produce milk with more stress hormones?

Hinde discovered that first-time monkey mothers produced milk with fewer calories but higher concentrations of cortisol than experienced mothers. Babies who consumed this high-cortisol milk grew faster but were more nervous and less confident. The milk wasn't just feeding the baby's body—it was programming the baby's temperament.

Or: how does milk respond when babies get sick?

Working with researchers who studied infant illness, Hinde found that when babies developed infections, their mothers' milk changed within hours. The white blood cell count in the milk increased dramatically—from around 2,000 cells per milliliter to over 5,000 during acute illness. Macrophage counts quadrupled. The levels returned to normal once the baby recovered.

The mechanism was remarkable: when a baby nurses, small amounts of the baby's saliva travel back through the nipple into the mother's breast tissue. That saliva contains information about the baby's immune status. If the baby is fighting an infection, the mother's body detects the antigens and begins producing specific antibodies, which then flow back to the baby through the milk.

It was a dialogue. The baby's body communicated its needs. The mother's body responded.
Hinde started documenting everything. She collected milk from over 250 rhesus macaque mothers across more than 700 sampling events. She measured cortisol, adiponectin, epidermal growth factor, transforming growth factors. She tracked which babies gained weight faster, which were more exploratory, which were more cautious.

She realized she was mapping a language that had been invisible.
In 2011, Hinde joined Harvard as an assistant professor. She began writing about her findings, but she also noticed something troubling: almost nobody was studying human breast milk with the same rigor applied to other biological systems. When she searched publication databases, she found twice as many studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition.

The world's first food—the substance that had nourished every human who ever lived—was scientifically neglected.
She started a blog: "Mammals Suck...Milk!" The title was deliberately provocative. Within a year, it had over a million views. Parents, clinicians, researchers started asking questions. What bioactive compounds are in human milk? How does milk from mothers of premature babies differ from milk produced for full-term infants? Can we use this knowledge to improve formulas or help babies in NICUs?
Hinde's research expanded. She studied how milk changes across the day (fat concentration peaks mid-morning). She investigated how foremilk differs from hindmilk (babies with bigger appetites who nurse longer get higher-fat milk at the end of feeding). She examined how maternal characteristics—age, parity, health status, social rank—shaped milk composition.

In 2013, she created March Mammal Madness, a science outreach event that became an annual tradition in hundreds of classrooms. In 2014, she co-authored "Building Babies." In 2016, she received the Ehrlich-Koldovsky Early Career Award from the International Society for Research in Human Milk and Lactation for making outstanding contributions to the field.

By 2017, when she delivered her TED talk, she could articulate what she'd discovered across a decade of research: breast milk is food, medicine, and signal. It builds the baby's body and fuels the baby's behavior. It carries bacteria that colonize the infant gut, hormones that influence metabolism, oligosaccharides that feed beneficial microbes, immune factors that protect against pathogens.
More than 200 varieties of oligosaccharides alone. The baby can't even digest them—they exist to nourish the right community of gut bacteria, preventing harmful pathogens from establishing.
The composition is as unique as a fingerprint. No two mothers produce identical milk. No two babies receive identical nutrition.

In 2020, Hinde appeared in the Netflix docuseries "Babies," explaining her findings to a mass audience. She'd moved to Arizona State University, where she now directs the Comparative Lactation Lab. Her research continues to reveal new dimensions of how milk shapes infant outcomes from the first hours of life through childhood.

She works on precision medicine applications—using knowledge of milk bioactives to help the most fragile infants in neonatal intensive care units. She consults on formula development, helping companies create products that better replicate the functional properties of human milk for mothers who face obstacles to breastfeeding.

The implications extend beyond individual families. Understanding milk informs public health policy, workplace lactation support, clinical recommendations. It reveals how maternal characteristics,
environmental conditions, and infant needs interact in real time through a biological messaging system that's been evolving for 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs.

Katie Hinde didn't just study milk. She revealed that the most ancient form of nourishment was also the most sophisticated. What science had treated as simple nutrition was actually a dynamic, responsive communication between two bodies—a conversation that shapes human development one feeding at a time.

Here is another artlicle about her work
https://nihrecord.nih.gov/2016/04/22/breast-milk-liquid-gold-infants-hinde-says
a study
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35352583/
And where her work has led to so far
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/09/11/breast-milks-benefits-are-not-limited-to-babies

Wow, that is unbelievable. I urge anyone to read it. And to disseminate it far and wide.

There's no earthly way any man could replicate any of that, obviously. The bottomless gulf between breastfeeding and these men getting off on a sexual fetish could not be more stark when you read what women's biology actually does.

it's quite miraculous.

As @Tallisker and others note, the issue that these men are being aided in their depravity is fucking nauseating. But also hold onto the fact that delude themselves though they might, they are simply incapable of emulating women in any way whatsoever. They don't have the capability of performing the miracle of breastfeeding, and never will. I truly believe this practice will be stamped out because too many people realise that no it's not bloody breastfeeding.

Is Nick Wallis is still intending to expose all this? Because he needs to get a bloody move on.

And yes, if anyone can send this thread on a path that ends up at JKR, it would be brilliant.

If she's fuming about Amnesty, this will send her into the stratosphere.

I am considering writing to my (Lib Dem) MSP about this. In fact, I might do the whole list. I am utterly incensed. There are a multitude of things this money could be spent on even within the LGB community - education around risky sexual behaviour, for example. Woeful Sex Ed in schools for gay and bi pupils could be improved. Not to mention all the other health areas - MiL is on her 3rd year of waiting for cataract surgery; I am on year 4 of waiting for a bone scan for osteoporosis.

Part of the problem with all this is that this is so depraved. So evidently abusing new born babies fgs and so breathtakingly a fetish that it becomes difficult to raise it.

The knowledge that there are people wedged into charities, the NHS promoting this raises the spectre (that so many women understand) of the power of the porn / fetish soaked men to push their fetishes at the expense of literally the most vulnerable in society - the new born.

It's breathtakingly awful but the "be kind to this most vulnerable group" stops so many in their tracks. The exploitation of babies for sexual thrills of some men is a challenging discussion to have in general conversation so I can see why so many just keep quiet (iyswim?)

'it's so very, very wrong it's almost horrifying for people to connect it to the NHS and the Scottish government'

Absolutely.

And yes, if you've learned about breastfeeding, which is, absolutely astounding in its complexity, and supported mothers to instigate it, which can be a complex and often difficult journey, the fact that men want to involve themselves in it to 'validate' their own identity (at best) is so utterly enraging I just don't really know where to put myself.

Abusive narc men.

I agree.

it's both those things. What the job actually is, who is designed to do it, and how it works, compared to someone trying and failing to replicate it to satisfy their own needs.

It's when you hear them determined to do it despite the disadvantage to the baby and how and why they want to do that, that you realise it's fuck all to do with bonding.

Yes. And the fact that the NHS is promoting / funding it is such a betrayal. Abandoning all those years of supporting women to breastfeed and overcme all the challenges because certain men want to take over for their own sexual purposes.

You have to keep asking - is it just the NHS thinking be kind with zero critical thinking or is it more sinister?