We've been here before, we'll be here again

A small spiel of fiery rage about the latest gender critical propaganda that has hit me right in the deepest and softest part of me: my fleshy, leaky chest.

Content warning for discussion of some fairly gross transphobia, it will not be directly quoted or linked.

I’m giving a lecture on Monday: about chestfeeding and lactation for the LGBTQIA+ community. Most of it centres around induced lactation, co-feeding, and the considerations of people who have had gender affirmative medical care and wish to feed their baby from their body. Meanwhile, some of the big names in gender critical views around birth are popping off about how transgender women shouldn’t be supported to induce lactation. They’re making stretches of bigoted statements claiming that milk from a transgender woman, or any woman who has not birthed the baby herself, would be worse for a baby’s health than formula. This is how it goes huh? This is how it goes.

We’ve been here before: wasn’t I just the other day talking about how accessing to human milk has always been one of privilege? Of class (affording wet nurses, or the time and money to not work and feed your child from your body) race (not being enslaved to be a wet nurse and let your own child starve, not being so poor you have to return to work days after birth to afford to put a roof over your child’s head) and now, apparently, of gender. It was less than 100 years ago that pākehā doctors were telling wāhine Māori that their breastmilk was inferior, and bad for their babies, and pushing them to formula feed with legislation (The Native Health Act, 1909) that barred them from the traditional practice of Whangai-ū (wet nursing). It was less than 100 years ago that Nestle swooped in to West Africa and told women in Ghana that their breastmilk and local food was making their babies sick, and gave them free formula samples with which they had no clean water to prepare (a move that would later see Nestle accused of murder, which they responded to by suing for libel). How are we here again? How are we doing this again? How on earth can we be letting this discourse, this discourse that says that if you are not a cisgender white woman who birthed her own baby that your milk is bad for your child.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

It’s worse than their usual spouting, this one hits me deep in the gut. I fed a child. I fed a child for 11 months from my body, I woke 4 hourly - through the night too and placed flange over nipple and drew my love and my nutrients out of myself and I placed it in perfectly labelled bags and I passed those bags off to my friend and she fed that milk to her child month after month after month. He grew, slowly at first on a mix of my milk and donor colostrum and then rounder and rounder, his soft chubby folds the sweetest song in my heart, his little sausage like fingers that clambered at my chest because he knew, he knew, he knew where his milk came from. We laughed and we joked that he smelt it on me, the way his head would fervently wave from side to side when I got close and his hands would stretch out and his mouth would gape open. We joked but also we knew that of course he did. Just like that soft infant belly would swell and bloat and push itself into his māmā, his lifeblood, his very first home. So too would his cheeks swell and eyes widen and he’d push his face into my chest when I held him. He knew. He knew what I did for him, and oh I loved doing it. And now, these hateful people are trying to put the message out in this world that what I did was selfish, that I denied a child nutrition, and he would have been better off with formula than my unnatural, tainted, hormone induced garbage milk. Good lord, the mum-shaming has come for me too, and I don’t even have children.

It’s not based in evidence, this rubbish they’re spreading, I know it’s not true. There’s plenty of research out there about adoptive parents that induce lactation and breastfeed their adoptive children (Cheales-Siebenaler, 1999; Robertson, 2016). There’s research out there about mothers and grandmothers who relactate and feed their grandchildren in times of war and famine (Kelly, 1995; Hewlett & Winn, 2014), and lesbian mothers who co-feed their children (Juntereal, 2019). These children grow, they thrive, they are loved. There is no possible biological process through which the breastmilk from a transgender woman could be so vastly different in formulation and nutrition that it could harm a child or leave them malnourished due to milk composition alone (milk volume is obviously individual to every person and baby, the same with cisgender birthing parents) (Oberhelman et al 2022; Ferri et al, 2020). . There’s no possible mechanism through which androgen blockers nor hormone replacement therapy (neither testosterone nor estrogen) could have enough bioavailability in breastmilk to harm a child (Drugs and Lactation Database, 2017-2021). None. It’s baseless and yet they’re throwing around diagrams of breasts and explaining female puberty as if they know what they’re talking about when they don’t. This is worse than misinformation, it’s disinformation. They are spreading propaganda with a clear intention: take away our rights, our right to have children when and how we choose, our right to feed our children when and how we choose. Disinformation makes a mockery of the concept of informed consent, by making the water so murky you cannot see through it. When they finish condemning us for inducing lactation, they’ll condemn us for using formula: they’ll keep on their argument, that only cisgender women should have babies. Not transmen, not two dads, and fuck, probably not even lesbians right? Because heaven forbid lesbians want to co-feed and heaven forbid that child doesn’t know where their sperm came from and heaven forbid we dare to dream of a world that is free from the constraints of cisnormativity, how fucking dare we? Who are we to have the same right to full and whole lives, with marriage, children, and the opportunity to feed those children how we choose?

I don’t even want to get into this pitching of morality and goodness of breastmilk and formula. Fuck that. Breastmilk is not better than formula it is different. It is used in different circumstances for different families and different babies than those who are able or choose to breastfeed. These same gender criticals call themselves feminists, they rightly so cry foul at abortion rights being taken away, but fail to see that they continue to promote rights for themselves, and their bodily autonomy, but less rights for us, and our bodily autonomy. How do they not see how they echo their oppressors? The same oppressors that pitch the right of a non sentient fetus, the mere idea of a baby as more important than the rights of a full grown woman over her body. These people pitch the rights of hypothetical children over the right of living, breathing transgender parents. They say they’re not transphobic, they say they’re just “concerned,” about child safety. But they are transphobic, it’s just that when they couldn’t see us, when we were so ostracised that we were hidden from view, they could stand us: don’t ask don’t tell right? Now that we’ve dared to say that we want and deserve everything that cisgender people have, including children, they deem that too much. Too many rights, too much freedom, too far on the sliding scale of human dignity and they will not be standing for it.

We’ve been here before. We’ll be here again. They called us pedophiles and groomers in the 70’s, they’re calling trans people the same thing now. They said we’d be unfit to be parents in the 80’s and ruled queer people out of adoption legislation, and they’re saying the same thing about transgender people now. They said our blood was tainted in the 90’s at the peak of the AIDS pandemic, and now, they’re saying our milk is tainted.

I’m angry, I’m angry and also: I’m scared. Will I give my lecture on monday and will my slides be shared amongst the gender critical midwives, who’ll laugh and jeer at me and say that I harmed the child I fed for the better part of a year? That I’m harming student midwives by teaching them that anybody, any person, can attempt to feed their baby, how they choose, in a way that is loving, dignified, and rooted in bodily autonomy.

Maybe they will. Probably they won’t, I’m just one small person, teaching a small cohort of students, how to treat birthing families with dignity and respect. In the grand scheme of things, I am irrelevant. But to the people in my care, I am not. To the people who long to feed a child from their body, who without me saying “this is possible,” might not have known that they could, I am not irrelevant. The anti-trans propaganda goes on: so too, does the work to undo it and fill the void they’re creating with nurture.

Go stoke your fire for me, place a fresh log, watch the flames grow, feel the heat and let it both fill you and soothe you.

Note: I am happy for this essay to be shared with people who want to understand the complexity of these issues, but please do not share this essay with people committed to perpetuating transphobia. Leading trans exclusionary people directly to my content jeopardises my safety. Thank you.

Referenced

No I will not be referencing the bigotry, you can find it yourself if you’re that keen.

Australian Breastfeeding Association; Rainbow Families (2021). Breastfeeding, chestfeeding and human milk feeding: Supporting LGBTQIA + Families.

Cheales-Siebenaler NJ. Induced lactation in an adoptive mother. J Hum Lact. 1999 Mar;15(1):41-3. doi: 10.1177/089033449901500111. PMID: 10578774.

Chetwynd EM, Facelli V. Lactation support for LGBTQ+ families. Journal of Human Lactation 2019;35:244–247

Drugs and Lactation Database (LactMed) [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2006-. Domperidone. [Updated 2021 Dec 20]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK501371/

Drugs and Lactation Database (LactMed) [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2006-. Estradiol. [Updated 2021 Mar 17]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK501296/

Drugs and Lactation Database (LactMed) [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2006-. Spironolactone. [Updated 2022 Jan 18]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK501101/

Drugs and Lactation Database (LactMed) [Internet]. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2006-. Testosterone. [Updated 2022 May 15]. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK501721/

Ferri, R. L., Rosen-Carole, C. B., Jackson, J., Carreno-Rijo, E., Greenberg, K. B., & Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine. (2020). ABM Clinical protocol# 33: lactation care for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, plus patients. Breastfeeding Medicine, 15(5), 284-293.

Hewlett, B. S., & Winn, S. (2014). Allomaternal nursing in humans. Current Anthropology, 55(2), 200-229.

Juntereal NA, Spatz DL. Same-sex mothers and lactation. American Journal of Maternal and Child Nursing 2019;44:164–169

Kelly M. Breastfeeding in emergencies. Dialogue Diarrhoea. 1995 Feb;(59):7. PMID: 12288581.

Oberhelman-Eaton S, Chang A, Gonzalez C, Braith A, Singh RJ, Lteif A. Initiation of Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy in a Lactating Transgender Man. J Hum Lact. 2022 May;38(2):339-343. doi: 10.1177/08903344211037646. Epub 2021 Sep 7. PMID: 34490813.

Robertson, B. (2016). Breastfeeding Without Birthing. Clinical Lactation, 7(1), 37-40.