Another breastfeeding one

[MisssCackle]

Couldn’t see a thread on this.
In the latest of Breastfeeding batshittery..‘Breastfeeding and Lactation Support UK’ have today posted this.

I am so angered by it. The UK breastfeeding rates are amongst some of the lowest globally. We should be empowering women, not erasing them. Encouraging them to leave if they disagree?? They should be ashamed.

Most parents are proud and chuffed to be called mum and dad!

Sorry if you didnt feel that way

I hope so @TaupeMember or there's genuinely a midwife out there analogising someone using the word "mum" in a breastfeeding group to racist slurs...🙄😂

Genuine, unfortunately. Depressing that this is the future of midwifery.

They're not though and that's my point. This is helping women.
It's not to help men.

So I'm not mad at it becuase it's trying to help confused women. I don't want a baby to miss out on being breastfed their tailor-made lactation just because their mother is being silly and thinks she's a bloke. 💁

Yes.

I can.

No, we don't. We can call ourselves women. But when addressing the group, to include women who pretend to be men, we address other people too.

I know it's fucking stupid. But I think babies being fed properly is a priority here.

Given that posts can take hours or days to be approved on a moderated site (which is appropriate and important for safeguarding), I'd think this was appropriate in a situation like mastitis that would need an urgent response so that sounds completely reasonable to me that a poster would go directly to inbox to get a faster response from a trained admin...

It's a bit condescending isn't? The transmen haven't asked that other group members must not have post using the phrase mothers, mums etc to refer to the group.

There's disadvantages to those who naturally use these terms and want to feel some shared motherhood ("how do other mums find...") as well as starting to erase these terms in general discourse. And time spend deleting posts and messaging.

It's not an in person group it's a large FB group, of which a few may have gender dysphoria who may or may not see some general posts. Along with many having all sorts of other conditions who ignore terms they dislike. Blind coping with "seeing."

You are on a site called Mumsnet. Do you think this should be renamed?

Should noone encourage men to get tested for prostate cancer because that excludes those who consider themselves women?

Oh sugar, that might come next! I saw the post from the employee around insurance.. and that applies to the in person group and organisation as a whole.

Yes I disagree with the changing of language. I was just pointing out that this is to help women and not men.

The whole thing is absolute nonsense.

I missed whatever it was that got deleted. Hope everyone is ok.

I was thinking about this today.

Language is what helps us find our tribe. We find ‘people like us’ in lots of ways, including by familiar language.

‘Hey Mammas!’ would irritate people like @Merrymouse and me, but appeal to others. Those people would respond, Merrymouse and I would scroll on by.

Someone might they’ve been blessed by God with their perfect little bundle, but struggle with… Some would scroll past with a shudder, others would offer prayers for things to get easier.

In controlling what language people use, you are stopping people making connections and finding friends.

But then you have to assume that the group of people who will be upset because somebody says 'hey mamas' is larger that the group of people who naturally say 'hey mamas', but are going to feel excluded by a breast feeding group that regards their natural way of speaking as offensive.

I suspect the second group is much larger.

So there are a lot of new mothers who know that everyone who’s given birth and is breastfeeding is female.

And there’s a tiny number who believe that some new mothers might actually not be female or mothers, but might be male or in some unexplained way unsexed. An even smaller number of whom may try to insist on everyone else pretending to believe this too.

And you choose the tiny, controlling group with the daft belief?

I suppose the logic is that if the accepting-femaleness group never hears or uses the term "Hey mamas", it won't hurt them. Whereas the wishing-they-were-male group (even though it's a tiny number) would be deeply wounded by the idea that they're being called "mamas". So according to this organisation, it's not really the numbers that are most important, but the degree of harm done to one group versus another. Of course we'd tell them that nobody's obliged to cater to anyone else's delusions! And then they'd kick us out.

Not only exclude women but they seem to have excluded grammar as well.

That's a good way of putting it, thank you.