Every so often, social media and the mainstream press get fired up with accounts of trans identified men breastfeeding. Here are a few
The Guardian: Transgender woman able to breastfeed in first documented case
The Queer Issues: The First Time Breast Feeding My Daughter
In these cases, we’re told the subjects have taken steps to produce breastmilk. It appears they use a protocol originally designed for adoptive mothers.
Here’s five good reasons why health and maternity services should not support it.
1. A partner, or anyone, attempting to share, complement or substitute the mother’s breastfeeding while it’s still in the vital establishment phase, needs to step back.
The breastfeeding relationship between a mother and her baby is a continuation of the physical, emotional and neurological links forged during pregnancy.
Pregnancy prepares the breasts for breastfeeding, and milk production happens as a direct result of pregnancy, birth and the delivery of the placenta. A baby enabled to breastfeed from the very start, frequently and effectively, starts up the mother’s milk supply – and as long as the baby feeds, milk continues for as long as it’s needed. The early days and weeks are important, in calibrating a reliable supply longer-term.
Anything, or anyone, interfering with this is undermining breastfeeding. The baby should be doing all his or her feeding and comforting at the mother’s breast, or else there’s a high chance the mother’s own milk production will falter and fail. Result: no breastfeeding at all.
No midwives or breastfeeding supporters should work to make this more likely. Instead, anyone else in the baby’s life can be encouraged to look at all the other, many ways to build up a loving relationship with the baby as time goes on.
2. Attempting to make milk in a male body to nourish an infant just doesn’t work.
The handful of case histories doing the rounds on the internet, and occasionally being reported in the science literature, simply don’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Anyone who knows how breastmilk is produced – and that should include midwives as breastfeeding is a core part of caring for a pregnant and postnatal woman – should immediately spot the holes in any account and the lack of supporting information on the growth and health of the baby.
One detailed medical takedown can be read here.
It’s just not possible for a male body to make the upwards of half a litre of milk every day needed by a week old baby, or 50 mls every two to three hours, let alone the litre plus required by an older one. No case study has ever given the necessary details showing the regular weight gain and healthy development of an infant fed by milk from a male. It’s an experiment – midwives and other health care professionals should not accept experimentation on babies.
3. And what is the man producing anyway?
It’s not correct to say as some do that the only possible secretion from the male breast is ‘sludge’ or ‘pus’ or ‘a cocktail of hormones’….though hormones are one of the ‘ingredients’ needed in the ‘recipes’ designed to induce milk. Frequent – several times a day for weeks, even months – application of a breastpump is part of this protocol.
So what happens? Men have glandular tissue in their breasts (a lining that can make and release substances into the body). They have ducts in the breasts and nipples externally. Milk in women is made from the blood, and it is likely that some sort of milk simulacrum is produced by men. There is no evidence that it would be only the hormone cocktail or indeed pus or sludge.
When the milk of men lactating as part of a disorder has been analysed, it shows as having a similar calorific value, level of protein and level of fat as mother’s milk. A few case studies of ‘induced’ milk in male breasts show the same.
However, there is no colostrum (the highly-concentrated, valuable fluid mothers make in their breasts in the last weeks of pregnancy and for a few days after the birth until the milk ‘comes in’). All breastmilk is unique to a particular mother and infant dyad, tailored for that baby at that age and at that time. It’s responsive in quality – the anti-immune properties change, the fat ratio change. It’s responsive in volume. It even changes according to the sex of the baby. A mother of a pre-term baby produces milk that’s right for that baby’s different needs.
Any milk from a male breast is going to be a poor substitute in quality and in quantity for the mother’s own. Anyone supporting a new mother and her baby should be honest about sharing this information with her.
4. Some men have a fetish about breastfeeding and lactation (milk making) . They are sexually excited by the experience, either as observers or active participants.
For example, there’s a genre of pornography that shows trans identified men producing milk, using pumps or otherwise hand expressing to remove milk. They do this to either indulge their own sexual fantasy, or to be a performer enacting someone else’s (or both).
To use a baby as a prop in acting out a sexual fantasy is never, ever acceptable. There is self-reported evidence that some trans-identified men find the idea, and the actuality, of breastfeeding to be sexually exciting, and sexualised photographs of men purporting to feed infants exist. We worry that this urge lies behind the attempts of some would-be breastfeeding men…why would anyone wish to facilitate this?
5. Babies don’t exist to validate their parents, and should not be expected to fulfil that role.
We may read the accounts of males who want to breastfeed in order to feel ‘like a woman’ or to ‘feel motherly’ (see links above) or to experience the ‘joy’ of breastfeeding.
It’s the baby as prop in an adult, performative fantasy, with the baby’s well-being regarded as less important than the adult’s wish to see himself as a breastfeeder.
The primary relationship needed emotionally and physiologically by a newborn is the one made with his or her mother. Today more than before, we have the science to understand how the neurological and emotional development of human beings begins in a mother’s arms, at her breast – continuing the links begun in utero.
Partners of either sex have the important job of supporting this, of enabling it to happen, and being patient that their own bond with the baby will emerge and develop, strongly and closely, as time goes on.
But faffing on trying to get a doomed-to-failure breastfeeding regime off the ground puts that mother-baby dyad into a shadow.
And how can we be sure the mother is content to share her breastfeeding? Or have it taken over? Is she aware the baby may have been co-opted into playing a role, fulfilling some else’s needs or desires?
Midwives and other carers may have observed how some men may try to take charge of parenting, including the feeding/comforting of babies. They may pressure the mother to relinquish her wish to breastfeed or to ‘share’ the feeding. It takes sensitivity and patience to support a mother in what she wants to do. Letting someone else muscle in? Not right, not fair and not healthy…emotionally or physically.
We say ‘no’.
Heather Welford
May 2023
With Woman 
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