Transgender milk is just as good for babies as normal milk?

[LadeOde]

NHS trust says transgender women’s milk just as good for babies | Evening Standard

This sounds like utter madness. How can milk made from a cocktail of drugs to stimulate milk in a male be just as good as naturally made maternal milk. Quite honestly i find the idea of man trying to breast feed revolting.

Its going to cost me a fortune in razor blades shaving my chest to give this milk to my non gendered vegan wetwipe!

What has this world become.

Never heard such rubbish in all my life.

A womans breastmilk is natural and has been since the dawn of time. You dont see a bullock letting a calf half a suck on his teets?!?!

Let's turn this on this head.

What ACTUAL evidence is there this is safe?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and does not prove safety.

This is one man. With no long term follow up. This is not a study.

Women are derided and castigated for having half a bloody paracetamol whilst breastfeeding. The NHS no longer prescribe drugs to help with lactation because formula milk is regarded as a suitable alternative with less issues and potential side effects.

But hey a man can provide magic milk with no need for a robust (and also highly unethical) study involving new born infants.

Women are also still shamed about feeding their own baby when out and about. Cover up! That's disgusting! Im trying to eat my lunch, I don't want to see that!! Blah blah blah.

Public disapproval and/or humiliation. Who does that appeal to, I wonder? How wholesome. Like a lovely episode of Little House on the Prairie, innit?

You are talking absolute shite and you know it 😂

No.

'Why can't a male develop identical breasts to a female, since breast tissue growth is sensitive to high estrogen exposure in both sexes?

This has to do with what's called the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, or HPG. This axis forms an important brain-to-gonad feedback loop at puberty that causes the masculinization or feminization of the body, depending on the gonad type you have.

Many of the effects will be permanent (so called organizational effects).

For females, the HPG axis is specifically the HPO axis (O for ovarian). At puberty, the cyclical production of estrogen from the ovaries and growth hormone from the pituitary creates a cascade of events that "transform the rudimentary mammary structure into the mammary gland."

Due to progressive elongation and branching of the ducts through puberty, thanks to the HPO axis, an extensive duct network of branches is formed. These branches will lead back to what's called the terminal duct lobular units (TDLUs), the structures that produce milk during lactation. Such structures are ultimately built thanks to the HPO axis, but they remain more dormant until pregnancy and childbirth.

For males, on the other hand, the activation of the HPT (testes) axis and the high amount of testosterone from the testes inhibits any major duct development. Males can develop extra, dense breast tissue (known as gynecomastia) through excess estrogen or other hormonal dysregulation such as cross-sex hormone use. But this is as far as the development can go. Males will not develop extensive lobules for milk production nor extensive duct branching.

The extensive and complex duct structures seen in the female breast cannot be formed in the male due to the profound impact of the two different sex-specific HPG axes across development (activation of HPT in the male and absence of the HPO). For more, see:

https://mdpi.com/1422-0067/23/7/3883

https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P'

https://twitter.com/zaelefty/status/1698588982148251770

We don’t have any reliable information on the composition or toxicity of this ‘milk’ as despite being very keen to help an increasing number of these people ‘breastfeed’ there has been little enthusiasm to actually establish if it is safe for baby.

Males don’t have breasts that are perfectly designed for lactation like women do, even after hormone treatment.

I find it horrifying that no one supporting this has a remote interest in the welfare of the baby. Some of these people have written about the sexual feelings they enjoy from having an infant suck on their nipple, whether or not ‘milk’ is involved. Why are people defending this??

FWIW there are many women living with HIV on effective medication who breastfeed their babies under guidance from their HCPs.

You bigot! 😉

I'm sure that's fine, then. The male person I saw on Twitter would be taking not just effective medication for HIV but a cocktail of other drugs to induce lactation, and possibly also oestrogen. That can't possibly be in the baby's best interests.

Not really. Formula starts off as cows milk and is treated to make it lighter and resemble human milk.
But it still comes from a female mammal - not a male one.

Yes. There was an excellent thread on Twitter/X the other day from a man saying that the safe, obvious way for a father to feed a baby when necessary is for him to give the baby either expressed breastmilk or formula from a bottle. It was illustrated with a lovely picture of a man doing just that and lots of men were commenting about what warm fuzzy memories that brought back. They were forthright (as men tend to be) about what sort of man would even consider trying to put his nipple in a baby's mouth.

They might be also taking medications for other health conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure which would be taken into account too, as they would for women.