The realm of possibility
How one day I decided to feed a baby, and maybe a glimmer of hope, for others who want to too
Content warning for this newsletter: discussion of gender dysphoria, historical violences against queer folk, and eugenics.
Note: I use the terms body feeding, lactation, and breastfeeding interchangeably in this piece, because those are the words I have used to describe my own personal feeding experience over the last couple of years. Some people use the word chest feeding, others use the word nursing, there is no single or correct way to label how you fed your baby from your body.
I’ve talked before on here about the relationship I have with my chest: this weird alien part of me that before I ever knew the words “gender dysphoria," I knew I despised. That post is paywalled, as I got into the nitty gritty about how I really feel about this odd part of myself: as nonbinary, as transgender, as a person with a uterus who wants to have a baby one day, as a midwife, as a sexual being, as human.
I argued in my tiny book in a poem I titled “more options than these,” on Pg. 52 that you can have a body and want to change it, that your body can be Platonist: mortal in its form and immortal in its truth telling. I posed that your body can move between the Platonist notions of “mythos” and “logos,” - that is, carry stories and make sense of those stories, and carry those stories onward in new form, with your body engendered anew.
I’ve spent over a decade searching for womanhood within myself. Turned over rocks, returned to my motherland, stood on the shores of a lake close to my hometown and sifted through the sand, looked for her in the lines of my mother’s face, and in the arms of men who talked about stock markets, and how fast they could solve a rubix cube. I spent hundreds of dollars on a beauty therapist (convinced myself that maybe my womanhood might be found in the shiny smooth skin of a waxed vulva, or a bare arsehole). I searched and I searched and I never found her.
Many people assumed that breastfeeding a child was my latest search, a desperate bid for my as-yet-undiscovered womanhood. It was, and it wasn’t. I already understood that womanhood was the land I grew up in, but not the land I was born in. I already knew, though could not articulate fully that womanhood had never been my home, and most likely, never would be. As I settled into a soft space of being able to traverse between and across and beyond binary ideas of what it means to have a chest that leaks sticky sweet milk it felt like coming home. Feeding a baby from my body was an act of deep humanity, and love, but never of gender.
How it began
I knew about induced lactation because I’m a midwife, was openly queer, and was engaged with postgraduate study about queer reproductive health and midwifery. Still, it existed in hypotheticals. I have been saying since the age of 16 “I can’t wait until I’m finished having children so that I can just cut off my boobs and be done with them.” At 16 I did not know that this was an unusual feeling, I assumed that as my peers complained about uncomfortable bras and the like that they too were hoping for a day where they could remove their breasts.
I first tabled the idea of inducing lactation for my friend, Ellie, who had had a double mastectomy in her twenties as part of her breast cancer treatment, and was now pregnant, as a joke. My exact words to her as she lamented about how bloody hard this (this being, the desire to feed her baby human milk, while having no means to produce it herself) all seemed, was “well my tits aren’t doing anything useful perhaps we could put them to good use?” We laughed about how silly it was - us both with breasts that were equally useless and her growing a baby that would be sorely disappointed in our useless breasts and their lack of milk.
We came back to this conversation over and over again as the weeks went by, and it became less of a joke and more of a hypothetical wish we both had. I decided I’d try: I’d try this unorthodox thing. After all: why not? I have made many questionable decisions in my life - like the time I decided to study politics and it was entirely terrible and the only good thing I got out of it was familiarity with the term bourgeoisie. One time I decided to run a marathon without training for it, another time I decided to try do the dirty dancing lift with a man in his 60’s who was clearly inebriated and I may or may have not knocked him unconscious. In comparison to some of the very questionable decisions I have made in my life, this one seemed quite harmless. Strange, yes, but one of love, not destruction - and that has to count for something.
But I still didn’t know how feasible it was. Sure I’d read the journal articles, I’d read the case studies, but I was still firmly convinced that my body wouldn’t be able to. I reached out to my friend and lactation extraordinaire Dr Johnston with my questions - can I? Can we? How? Is this possible?
Yes.
She armed me with the information I needed, the protocols, the research, and the name of the IBCLC local to me who knew the protocols well. It all happened quite fast from there, because actually inducing lactation is pretty straightforward. It’s just two medications that have been around for a really long time: hormonal birth control to grow your breast tissue and trick your body into thinking it’s pregnant, and domperidone. Domperidone is an anti nausea medication that happens to also increase prolactin (your milk making hormone), so it’s used off-label for increasing milk supply in postpartum people pretty often. Both of these medications have been around since the 1950’s, using them to induce lactation isn’t particularly radical or experimental, it’s just a bit of clever understanding about pharmacodynamics. When I sat down in my therapist’s office a few weeks later and told her my breasts hurt and were bigger and marvelled at how cool it was she beamed: Never. In 5 years of being my therapist had she heard me say a single nice thing about my body.
Those first few drops
I was still convinced it would not work. When I stopped the birth control and began hand expressing I ran from my bedroom down the stairs and into the kitchen to show my flatmates that I had milk. First one drop, then ten, then more than I could count. I spent the next 8 weeks basically with no shirt on, pumping 7 times a day - including at 3am when prolactin levels are known to be higher. My life became a hazy, milk infused blur. I discovered that that smell I had associated with newborn babies from work was actually the smell of human milk - warm and sweet and soft. About 2 months into pumping around the clock, my milk supply plateaued, and about 4 months in I dropped the 3 am pump in favour of uninterrupted sleep.
This was the time I began to understand my gender identity in a fuller depth, and how far removed from womanhood that identity was. While it seems nonsensical that I could do something so deeply gendered, and be affirmed in my genderlessness, that is indeed what happened. For the first time in my life I could see this part of my body as valid and worthy of being a part of me. It’s purpose made it tolerable. As I said in another newsletter: I know that bodies should be worthy because they exist: not because they are useful. I know that bodies should be loved because they live: not because they’re able to be utilised or sexualised. I know this.
My longstanding dysphoria about my chest was only truly abated while pumping, while physically watching the milk spill out. My brain did strange things in this time: became obsessed with numbers, completely obsessed to the point I wouldn’t let myself go to sleep until I had pumped exactly the same number of mls as the day before, or more. I had to put socks over the pump bottles and give Ellie ballpark guesses of mls in each bag of milk to abate the obsession. I gathered a collection of baby socks to keep the number on the bottles hidden. When I hung out my washing it looked like I was doing washing for a whole family: breast pads and feeding bras, baby socks and flannels, and mens boxer shorts. I adored that my single being could garner so much laundry diversity.
As the dysphoria built up between each pumping session, and washed over me anew, I again turned to my friend Dr Johnston and asked a question of possibility: is it possible I could use a binder, while still feeding?
Yes
She gave me safety netting information, explained in depth how to bind safely while protecting my supply and avoiding mastitis, affirmed me in my navigation of how to redefine what counts as gendered, and what doesn’t. I began binding for short durations, and still pumping regularly in between. I found a perfect and beautiful balance here for a time. My chest was mine, so deeply mine: flattened against my body into a masculine shape, and pouring milk from it for a baby I loved. My body had never been less gendered and more my own. It belonged to me and the whole world.
How it ended
I wanted to keep body feeding forever. But my body had other ideas. Rip roaring mastitis that meant I could no longer use my binder, that kept coming back after endless rounds of antibiotics, and a new foe: dysphoric milk ejection reflex, often abbreviated to D-MER. When I wasn’t pumping I couldn’t stand my chest, its weight or its existence, and when I was pumping my oxytocin was being scrambled by my brain and I wanted to cry.
A long chat with my GP, a sad final hand off of milk to Ellie, and after 11 months, over 1000 hours of pumping, and 170 litres of milk, I began to wean. I grieved in this time: as my chest, once magical and beyond gender or reason became mere mortal once more. My breasts returned to (in my view) pointless objects by which to incorrectly gender me. But the mastitis had stopped, the DMER had abated, and I could wear my binder safely once more.
I learnt so much, and grew so much, and loved so much. The end of my feeding journey didn’t mean the end of my forever changed knowledge of who I was and how fucking hard feeding a baby is.
My decision to induce lactation was one of love: love for my friend and love for her baby. It was one of trust: trust in my body and trust in my gender identity: a knowledge that the ability of my milk ducts to fill and empty and fill again was an affirmation of my consciousness: nothing more, and nothing less. For me, lactation was the first time my body got to be truly genderless. I became a food source, a life source, a spring trickling everfresh waters. My body became less gendered as it grew into a tool with which I could say to my friends: I love you, let me feed your baby. A tool with which I could say to myself: I love you, let me feed you so you can make more milk. My breast’s purpose beyond being a means to gender me, affirmed my transness, not my womanhood.
And most of all, I learnt that however you want to feed your baby: by bottle, by cup, at your chest, by donor milk, by supplemental nursing system, by inducing lactation, by co-feeding with your co-parent or partner or friend, it is not beyond the realm of possibility.
All I needed, to start this process, was one person who said yes, this is possible. All I needed to continue feeding, amongst the dysphoria was one person who said here’s how you do it safely. All I needed to end my journey on my terms was one person to say it’s ok to stop now.
I hope everybody who has fed a baby has that one person, and I hope that by sharing narratives of how gender diverse people feed their babies beyond gendered tropes and binary expectations that I too, can be that person.
It’s possible: to queer this earth and her orbit around the sun, to dare to dream of a life beyond gender roles and gender essentialism and binaries is brave. To dare to love and be and grow and feed our families in ways that were so long denied to us is a treasure - a call to all those who went before us, who were targeted by eugenics, who were lost in the AIDS crisis, who were forcibly sterilised or denied the right to adoption: we’re still here.
Breastfeeding belongs to many women, but not to all women, and not only to women. Breastfeeding belongs to all of us and none of us, to our ancestors and our children and grandchildren.
Breastfeeding belongs to me, and to you, to the earth and the animals and the babes that feed from our milk. Breastfeeding can be a deeply gendered experience for some, and a completely ungendered experience for others. Lactation is yours, your body is yours, your ability to feed a baby from your body is no measure of your humanity nor your womanhood.
xxx
Lou
If you want to read more about my experience with lactation, you can become a paid subscriber and read my other posts. This also allows you to support the work I do advocating for transgender parents in pregnancy, birth, and postpartum - this work is often unpaid.
If you want to understand why any narratives that transgender people shouldn’t or cannot feed their own babies is misinformation, you can read a newsletter I wrote about that here.
If you want more information on the protocols used to induce lactation you can find them here.