Mick Hartley

The row over male milk for babies rumbles on. Mary Wakefield:

Over the weekend a letter came to light written recently by a Dr Rachael James in her role as medical director of Sussex NHS Foundation Trust. In this letter, Dr James insisted that the milk a man can sometimes induce is just as good for babies as their biological mother’s breast milk. They’re both ‘human milk’, says Dr James, and therefore ‘ideal food for infants’. She includes in her letter, by way of proof, a link to the WHO page on the subject of breastfeeding.

Dr James is engaging here in a truly ballsy bit of subterfuge. Yes, the WHO says that breast milk is best, but it’s referring only to ordinary breast milk produced by actual women. It makes no mention of man milk. But Dr James knows that. She’s a senior consultant in the NHS and there’s not a chance she doesn’t also know that the milk produced by a baby’s biological mother is by far its best bet. Unlike man milk, a mother’s milk at first contains colostrum, which has all the antibodies, antioxidants and nutrients a newborn needs and it changes magically, in response to the needs of a child. No man has ever produced colostrum, hard as he pumps, nor anything like enough milk to feed a baby.

But Dr James’s really unforgivable omission is not to mention that domperidone, the drug used to induce lactation, might well be unsafe for a child. Domperidone has not been licensed for use in America because of concerns that it causes heart problems. Trans activists can insist till they’re blue in the hair that the small amounts of domperidone in chest milk are unlikely to harm a baby, but they just don’t know. Dr James hasn’t a scooby doo whether the milk she advocates is safe for babies. So what in God’s name does she mean when she calls it ‘ideal’?

In all studies cited, much is made of the ‘affirmation’ a trans woman (man) feels when he’s allowed to breastfeed. It helps with his dysphoria, we’re told. There must be some official NHS document that shows how to weigh the brief satisfaction of a trans woman against the possibility of lifelong harm to an infant. I’d love to see it….

On Monday night, the BBC chose to discuss the man-milk affair with a young woman called Kate Luxion, an unqualified ‘trainee lactation consultant’ and a researcher at UCL. With a composed and serious expression, Luxion insisted that not only was man milk safe, but ‘studies’ had actually found that a trans woman’s milk contained more nutrients than the milk of a baby’s mother. The presenter nodded happily along. Nod, nod, smile, smile. Yep, sounded right to her.

The BBC didn’t think it necessary to quiz the trainee consultant, to examine the study she cited or to ask how it could possibly be true that trans milk is actually suddenly more nutritious than the milk from a biological mother. Neither the babies nor the truth matter any more.

For more detail see Milli Hill's thorough debunking. The expert so credulously interviewed by the BBC, Kate Luxion, is a "non-binary/genderqueer postgraduate researcher studying at University College London with a focus on LGBTQ+ reproductive health and parenting", and not a qualified expert on lactation. No, the one study cited did not show that trans milk is actually more nutritious than mother's milk, but it's clearly the ideological line the Beeb is happy to run with. Yay, trans women – men – are better than women, even at producing baby milk.