A transwoman feeding their new born baby with their own milk..

[Soubriquet]

A website has said they have lost many followers with supporting this.

I just don’t understand why this is being promoted. If men in general were able to breastfeed children, why is this not being encouraged among married couples? Im sure plenty of men would be willing to step up and share breastfeeding with their partner.

It can’t be healthy for a baby to be fed this way, as surely the transwoman would be taking multiple type of hormones in order to remain transitioned?

Link

This thread needs another Berns break....

"you're so open minded your brains fell out"

Wtaf to some of the claims here! Ev.I.den.ce. Jfc.

Stop ignoring the infant's needs and rights. Stop centring the male's.

But warrior I think the word evidence has been redefined as well.

Or some people believe there is an awfully low bar set and that evidence now simply means ‘random people with no expertise posting their unsupported opinion on the internet’.

I'm sure at one point we were being told that providing/requesting evidence was another example of our 'biological essentialism'. I also remember a long rant from a poster about the rise of anti intellectualism and how evidence to back up an argument was so old fashioned and behind the times.

Quite Helle.

Clearly how WPATH operates Wait

I do remember that one being rolled out.

Didn’t we all laugh? I mean… anti-intellectualism got thrown around yet how many posters end up posting that scientific American blog post like some kind of badge of intellectualism because some academics resort to using it to prop up their pseudo scientific theories.

And how many posters post videos and blog posts from contrapoints and montgomery like they are experts.

Please, for the love of God, stop using Adoptive Mother’s inducing lactation as a ‘gotcha’. In the UK, it simply does not happen. That’s because inducing lactation for an adoptive infant would not be done in the best interests of the child, it would be for the best interests of the adoptive adult - it just does not happen in the UK. If it happens in other countries, then I would seriously question their intentions and think of adoption as a commodity for the adoptive parents rather than the child.

I’d not even heard the term “ Terf” until 2021.
But if a Terf is a woman who thinks men cannot nourish a baby with his chest secretion , Then I’m happy to be one.
Poor babies have no say.
A little baby has a rooting reflex, and it’s grim that instead of nourishment via the mother’s milk or formula, it is offered tainted secretions makes me despair.

I was advised NOT to breastfeed DD because of medication I was taking. So it does happen. I think it was the steroids I've been on for many years. There have been other meds but I'm pretty sure that's what it was

Done!

The fact that men are inducing lactation to "breastfeed" poor unsuspecting infants is vile.
The fact that some women are going out of their way to support this practice is worse.
HOW have we gotten to the point where this is considered, in ANY circle, one iota of "normal"?
DOCTORS helping MEN to induce lactation to "feed" a baby?
This world gets more twisted every day.

This.

and my contempt knows no bounds for those who defend it

Until tonight I didn't know what the terms 'cis' and 'terf' actually meant. So I got Googling.

Turns out that after reading this thread, and several like it, I'm actually quite confident and not ashamed to say I am both.

I think there are some people in the world who still believe the majority will go along with what this extremely small minority’s wishes. I don’t believe even the majority of transitioned males think this is appropriate.

Yet we have seen some posters attempt to justify it on this thread. We have seen some posters will allow any infant to be used to assuage a male’s need because:

-it’s only a few
-cow’s milk might be used instead so isn’t this a better option?
-it is the decision of both parents (so it is none of anyone business and those parents must be right)
-it is only a few and besides women do it too (artificial hormones while breastfeeding)
-some males with significant medical conditions can produce a nipple discharge so it is possible.
-a tribe in Africa allow their infants to use their nipples as a dummy (historical observation … if they have dummies and sterilising equipment will they still?)
-it is transphobic to not support this.
-the male must have such bad dysphoria that they feel compelled to do this so society should allow this to make these males feel better.
-it is only a few so it can’t hurt anyone (those babies will be fine…and it is only a few, and it is their parent’s decision, it is medically possible, and what about the milk from other female mammals….)
-it is only a few….

Oh, and you are all in an echo chamber (implying everyone else in the world must agree with this).

The fact some posters are so determined to support this that they will report posts where posters have used common use words reflecting people of the male sex and those posters feel vindicated in doing so says a great deal about them.

The fact that new visitors to the board have popped up to say they had little exposure to the general discussion around where the rights of females came into conflict with males (inferred because the lack of knowledge about the term t*erf) doesn’t fit with some people’s preferred alternative view of the world where it is they who are the majority, and that males should definitely feed infants from their breasts if they want to.

But readers can see with their own eyes the constant twisting and deflection and distraction on this thread. Even two posters deploying emotionally manipulative tactics of saying that MN is ‘obviously not for them’ because people disagreed with them or pointed out the false comparators or false information they used. (Did you know there is a complete board on this forum called flouncer’s corner? It is like, I don’t know… we haven’t seen posters like that before. )

Like sports, it is threads like this that show the boundaries to people’s acceptance.

Those reading along are intelligent enough to have seen the lack of cogent thought (even that has been cheered on by some) and the lack of any evidence despite having had time to produce studies.

(note to readers: If you notice that regular posters on this forum board use language and phraseology that seems twisted like a pretzel, it is so our words and our posts remaining standing even when reported constantly. This is our choice so we can continue to post on this forum. If posters follow the talk guidelines set, good conversations can be had.)

And how proud are you?

Did you find any evidence on the benefit to the infant for males breastfeeding them after this treatment?

No?

I shall leave you to it then. Report away. Now everyone reading will assume that every deletion will be that the poster simply used man/men to describe an adult human male of any gender.

I think we need to be careful we’re not trying to have our cake and eat it here. On the one hand, there’s often a (justified) complaint that just taking oestrogen in some form doesn’t mimic the delicate balance of female hormones. But OTOH, if all a TW trying to lactate is taking is oestrogen and domperidone, then there’s not a huge amount of difference there - in terms of chemical composition of output - between that and a bf women needing assistance to stimulate supply. It’s not necessarily a “cocktail of drugs”.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is a typical narcissistic display all about the adult with the baby as a mere prop for their validation. I’m not condoning it for one second. But I do want us to have consistency in our objections to males trying to appropriate womanhood for their own ends.

Yes thank you for this comment.

There's claims being thrown around with few quantified facts: no numbers. I'm not sure that the small detail about "men of a certain tribe have been known to offer their nipple" is as huge a thing as it's being made out to be. There's v little wider detail to be found in the recycled articles on this.

Given the protocol only works in 30% of women I doubt it's common, or commonly tried.

If you've bfed before it's much easier to re lactate. But still an extreme challenge. V few babies are adopted soon enough to learn to latch; they'll have been bottle fed.

But OTOH, if all a TW trying to lactate is taking is oestrogen and domperidone, then there’s not a huge amount of difference there - in terms of chemical composition of output - between that and a bf women needing assistance to stimulate supply.

Hang on, did I miss the bit where we established that males could produce milk at all?

From your same argument you could conclude that a woman's sperm was just as good as a man's, as long as she was taking the same medication as a man with fertility problems.

I'll concede that the necessary equipment for sperm is more clearly absent from a female than the necessary equipment for milk in a male, but you seem to be taking it as read as "absolutely all the equipment for milk is present in the male and just needs the same drugs as a female to stimulate it".

The fact that a male has vestigial nipple is not evidence of a complete functional latent milk production system that's just like a woman's needing a little bit of assistance.

Just posting this image of the difference between mens and womens breast tissue again

Yet we have seen some posters attempt to justify it on this thread.

It's clearly phenomenally difficult to do properly and for any length of time. So its performative and affirmative and a few other things we aren't allowed to mention but is Gluck's specialist subject.

Ergo benefits only the male attempting.

So WHY, for the love of god WHY do women spend so much time justifying it? They need to really think about this. I'm seriously concerned about many women's boundaries within this context.

Scuse many grammar issues, didn't have my specs on and cba

Just posting this image of the difference between mens and womens breast tissue again

Right, which was my point about comparisons other female mammals - they're going to have something far closer to the image on the right than the image on the left is.

I'd swear some people have a very fuzzy concept of what drugs can do.

Yes, you can give cross-sex hormones, and they can produce very simple effects like "engorge clitoris so it looks vaguely like a small penis" or "expand breast tissue to produce rather tubular breasts" or "increase hair growth" or "thicken vocal cord".

None of those are remotely in the realm of precision we're looking for with "start producing something actually good for babies to feed on".

We can slightly bend the body's behaviour - effectively inducing a disease. But we can't make it just do something new that it fundamentally doesn't already have the capability to do.

A drug to make a male produce milk at the minute seems as far-fetched as a drug to make a male grow an extra arm.

Sure, you can make a male produce some liquid, as I'm sure you could make a male grow some extra tissue. But we need something a bit more specific than "something coming out of the nipples".

Now, maybe it is possible, and there's a complete hidden milk production factory in there, but if so, I would have expected someone to have actually demonstrated it by now. But all I'm seeing is attempted diversions.

Happy to be corrected TBH, as I said I don’t agree with males trying to breast feed for their own validation or worse. Men can get breast cancer so there are obviously some similarities in the breast tissue, but IANAB (I am not a biologist).

Exactly @NecessaryScene. That image is actually from a medical article about men with breast cancer. That's what normal healthy male breast structure looks like. A male nipple producing liquid means there is something wrong and he needs urgent medical treatment.