Mick Hartley

Helen Joyce in the Times interviews Marian Tompson, the American founder of La Leche Laegue, the breastfeeding support network for women, about her resignation over the League's "inclusivity" policy:

LLL International now says it supports everyone who wants to breastfeed, “chestfeed” or “human milk feed”, regardless of sex or “gender identity”. It explains how males can breastfeed by taking milk-stimulating drugs sometimes used by adoptive mothers although it says it takes no stand on the inducing of male lactation.

It has all brought Tompson to the end of her tether. On November 6 she resigned from the board of LLL International, saying it had become a “travesty” of her original intent. “When women decide to breastfeed it’s because they want to do the best for their baby and know that’s breastfeeding,” she says. “Instead of simply providing support to mothers — which has always been free, by the way — leaders are now expected to indulge the fantasies of adult males. This is not natural or normal. Nor are our leaders, who are all nursing mothers themselves, prepared to handle it.”

There’s no scientific evidence to suggest that male lactation is good for babies. Mother’s milk has remarkable properties, including the ability to adapt to a baby’s changing nutritional needs and state of health, and to pass on antibodies that protect against infection.

When Milli Hill, a breastfeeding expert and author of The Positive Birth Book, looked into the handful of studies cited by supporters of male lactation, she found that all but one related to women — female people — who had not given birth and had taken drugs to stimulate milk production. The one that related to a male person was a poor-quality case report of a single individual….

How has an ideology that denies the differences between male and female affected an organisation founded to promote something only females can do, I ask Tompson. By stealth, she replies. She alleges that there was never any survey of leaders to find out what they wanted, just a radical change of policy disguised by gradual shifts in language. LLL International has indicated that its policy on respecting how people self-identify dates back to 2004.

Now LLLGB, the UK charity under the LLL umbrella, is in the thick of the battle. Until recently a majority of its trustees had been fighting to remain true to the organisation’s founding mission. They came under fire from a minority of local leaders who support male lactation, and from LLL International, which accused them of challenging LLL policy publicly in a disparaging manner. In May it suspended them as leaders, which meant they could no longer hold meetings. They allege this left the women they had been working with unsupported and put their positions on the charity’s board in doubt.

At the beginning of this month one of their number, Miriam Main, resigned. In her resignation note she spoke of “bullying, lies and cruelty of recent times”. And on November 16 the other trustees allied with her were removed by a vote of UK-based leaders.

What makes this not just a tragedy but a scandal is that UK law is clear that no male person is a “mother”. Even a gender recognition certificate, the paperwork that changes a person’s recorded sex for certain administrative purposes, doesn’t change a person’s legal status from being a father to a mother, or vice versa. Since LLLGB was set up to support “mothers”, its trustees were simply doing their job when they refused to support male lactation.

The women I spoke to for this article expressed grief and betrayal at seeing the organisation they love buy into an ideology that denies biological reality and harms mothers and babies. But they also see hope among the wreckage. Breastfeeding rarely makes the headlines, and though this row has been surreal and painful it gives an opportunity to tell the world about its importance and unites them in their determination to recreate what was destroyed.

Of all the victories of the gender cult, this has to be one of the most astonishing. How on earth have the women who run La Leche League become so transfixed by the need to indulge men in their sexualised breastfeeding fantasies?