Petitioning Parliament to ban males from attempting to breastfeed infants

[zibzibara]

I am considering starting a petition on the https://petition.parliament.uk to ask the government to make a criminal offence for any male attempting to breastfeed an infant from his own nipples.

I've never started a petition before and am wondering if anyone has any tips on how to write this so it doesn't get rejected and encourages people to sign? Would love to hear any advice anyone here can offer!

I'm also concerned about my personal info being revealed on the petition website, does anyone know if there's a way of withholding identity when the petition gets published?

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”.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

I've been on the contraceptive pill while breastfeeding, you can take synthetic hormones when breastfeeding. Domperidone is banned in the US but not in the UK so different in different countries. I don't know by what mechanism drugs that are safe in women's breast milk wouldn't be safe in trans women's breast milk, if anything there would be less getting through to the baby if supply is lower. Your argument is that the chance of trans women's breast milk being safe is vanishingly low. You've made your mind up that that is the case even though you have no evidence. Do you know what dosage of various hormones trans women take, what dosage they take before beginning breastfeeding and what dosage they take once breastfeeding has started? What dosage of other drugs are involved and when? Do you have specific reason to think there is a problem with those specific dosages at those times?
Again I'm not saying they are absolutely definitely safe, I'm just saying that they could be safe and I don't know where your certainty is coming from.

I know. Such a derail. If it were possible to medically cause a person to lactate out of their ear, it wouldn’t be a reason to do it or feed it to an infant.

There is no purpose to men lactating apart from to satisfy a man’s unhealthy and perverse urges.

I told my DC that a man was pictured pretending to breastfeed, trying to get a baby to suck his nipple. My DC was genuinely horrified and said “If [the baby] they find out, they’ll run away from home”.

Yes indeed.

Poor child.

Yet again - those are at hormone levels for biological women! Who already produce oestrogen and other female sex hormones, and have milk lobules! And they at least have a chance of producing enough milk to feed a baby.

Domperidone is banned in the US for causing heart arrhythmias, alongside a long list of other side effects; and in the U.K. it’s now rarely prescribed even for biological women. Other galactagogues include antipsychotics with really nasty side effects. Is that worth it just for a tiny amount? All so the transwoman gets an experience? The baby needs formula or a biological woman’s milk anyway on top! Why would any genuine parent take the risk for so little benefit to the baby? Many women don’t feed, so suggesting that it’s a must-have “womanly” experience sounds a little bit biological-essentialist, no?

It seems like you honestly are so blinkered by trans ideology that you honestly want to prioritise the “experiences” of adult men over the safety of babies. How is that defensible? Show us the evidence first that such a thing is safe and effective, and then we’ll look again.

Not just the safety of babies, what about the inviolability of babies too?

Just because babies are small and helpless doesn’t mean they are fair game to be violated by pervy men.

You don't actually know then? What levels of hormones trans women take and when, what other drugs they need to take to induce breastfeeding and when. You're just imagining that it must be terrible. And the other things you said further convince me that it's not actually to do with the safety of the milk and more because you just don't like the idea of it. Every poster other than you is saying it's because it's perverted. If that's the reason you object to trans women breastfeeding then make the petition about that, it's more honest.

I’d be absolutely fine with the petition being about protecting babies from abuse by men with breastfeeding fetishes.

The unknown harms of the drugs could be added as a second point.

“you just don't like the idea of it”

Bit of an understatement. We’re talking about CHILD ABUSE here.

Damn right I don’t like the idea of men taking a cocktail of untested drugs which could harm a newborn, just so they can pretend to be having a womanly experience? Are you mad?

Let’s try it another way: did you hand round your newborn to your childless female friends so that they could try out having a baby suck their nipples? Why not? Would you be just fine with that if they asked?

What about a sister? If your sister wanted to “experience” breastfeeding, would you let her start some lactation “protocols” and happily hand over your newborn? Grandma? The woman down the street who’s sad about being infertile? Any reason why not?

None of those people are my child's parent? Nobody induces lactation so they can have a go at feeding a baby that isn't theirs. It's ridiculous even as a hypothetical.

If my partner was a trans woman then I would have a proper discussion with her about whether her inducing lactation was right for us or not and I would consider it with an open mind. I wouldn't consider it perverted because if I thought my partner was perverted I wouldn't be with them. And I would research the medication protocol in depth with her and we may or may not decide it sounded like a good thing to do.

If your partner was a TW, then maybe let her give birth? Fair's fair.

It’s ridiculous. No baby needs a man to breastfeed it. Any woman who gives birth to a baby has one job - to keep that baby close by and safe, and a part of that is keeping it away from pervy doods who want it to suck theirs nipples and worse.

Any mother who hands that innocent baby over to a perv is culpable.

Since there’s zero use of this “medication protocol” in the U.K., and only a couple of unsubstantiated case studies on transwomen lactating with no follow-up, would you be wanting to see any studies on its effect on babies before you decided if it was a good thing to do?

Would the fact that you can’t get any clinician to prescribe said drug regimen (because it’s completely untested and they don’t want to be sued for injury to a newborn) be any factor in your decision, or would you just go ahead and obtain some black market drugs if you and your partner felt like it? NICE guidelines suggest that in the U.K. a clinician shouldn’t really prescribe domperidone off-label for this purpose in women without consultation with endocrinology — so would you be happy to go ahead with it with no medical supervision if your partner wanted it? If not, why not?

Would there be any place for a big evidence-based study into the composition and likely effects of the drugs on the milk be part of your decision-making? Or would you be happy to go ahead with no evidence on this whatsoever?

Indeed,let's not dress this up as anything other than the perverted shite it is.

I would consider all these things in depth yes. My point is that I would have an open mind about it. I wouldn't just decide it's bad before doing all that research, like you've done.

Anyway it's hard to believe any of this is your concern when two other posters have used the word "pervy" or "perversion" since my last post where I pointed out that all the other posters are saying this, and you're arguing with me and not them.

Well, something can have a poor evidence base and also be perverted, you know!

other posters have used the word "pervy" or "perversion"

Perverted/pervy = nipple clamps, cross dressing, chemically induced lactation in males, excessive interest in breastfeeding, etc.

Coercing others into a perversion = abuse.

Coercing a child into a perversion = child abuse.

Being perverted is a lesser issue than being an abuser.